The Curious Case of the Customer Who Wasn’t Really Shopping Online: What M&S can teach us about the journey between digital and human

There is a phrase businesses love using.

“Our online customer.”

It sounds perfectly sensible until you think about how actual humans behave.

Imagine I need a new jacket.

I might spot one on Instagram while drinking coffee. Later, I search for it on my laptop. I check whether my size is available. I read a couple of reviews. Then I order it to collect from a store because I am going into town anyway.

When I collect it, I try it on.

It does not fit.

I ask a member of staff whether they have the next size.

They check.

They do.

I swap it and leave.

So, was I an online customer or a store customer?

Neither. I was just a customer trying to buy a jacket.

That sounds painfully obvious.

Yet plenty of customer journeys are still designed as if customers carefully choose one lane at the beginning and remain in it until the transaction is complete.

This week's mystery is:

Why do businesses still organise customer experiences around channels when customers stopped thinking that way years ago?

At the Scene

Marks & Spencer is a particularly interesting place to investigate this because its physical and digital worlds are increasingly intertwined.

Its current Click & Collect service for fashion, home and beauty is free. Customers can track orders online, collect in stores, and if they lose their confirmation email, M&S says staff can still retrieve the order using other customer details.

That last detail interests me.

Because the customer's journey hasn't failed just because they cannot produce the piece of evidence the process originally expected.

The business has another route.

That is a tiny example of something much bigger.

Customers don't experience channels.

They experience continuity.

Or the lack of it.

Think about the frustration when continuity disappears.

You explain your problem on live chat and then phone customer services, only to explain everything again.

You see something available online but the shop cannot access the same information.

You receive an email telling you to contact a branch, then the branch tells you to contact the website.

Every individual department might technically have followed its process perfectly, but the customer still had a terrible experience.

Gathering the Evidence

M&S itself has previously said that customers increasingly expect to shop with retailers however and whenever they choose, and that customers using both store and online channels spend significantly more than single-channel customers. Its 2024 reporting also said digital Click & Collect had reached 95% of stores at that point.

Its current help pages confirm that Click & Collect is again available for online fashion, home and beauty orders. I say "again" because this story contains an unusually useful piece of evidence.

During M&S's 2025 ‘cyber incident’, the company had to pause online orders, Click & Collect and in-store ordering while keeping physical stores trading. It introduced manual processes to maintain parts of the operation while systems were recovered.

That disruption inadvertently demonstrated just how interconnected the journey had become. Switch off one piece of the machinery and apparently separate experiences suddenly reveal all the connections underneath them.

Today, M&S says its near-term online investment includes search, imagery, checkout and payments, while the relaunched Sparks programme is intended to support greater personalisation and engagement.

This isn't really a story about M&S technology, though.

It's about what customers expect technology to make possible.

Solving the Mystery

Businesses tend to draw customer journeys like relay races.

Marketing passes the customer to sales.

Sales passes them to operations.

Operations passes them to service.

Online passes them to store.

The baton moves.

The customer doesn't see a relay race. They see one company.

That behaviour creates what I'd call the Continuity Gap:

The distance between what the business already knows and what the customer is forced to repeat, rediscover or redo.

The larger that gap becomes, the more fragmented the experience feels.

Imagine I've already told you my delivery hasn't arrived. If I move from chatbot to human agent and have to type my order number again, the Continuity Gap has opened.

If I've booked an appointment online but the person greeting me has no idea why I'm there, it opens again.

If your sales team promises something your onboarding team knows nothing about, it becomes a chasm.

Customers don't care which system owns the information.

They simply think “I've already told you this.”

Those five words should terrify customer experience teams.

The Customer Memory Test

There is a very simple way to investigate this. Pick one common customer journey and ask four questions.

What has the customer already told us?

Their details, preferences, problem, purchase history, circumstances or objectives.

What have we already told them?

Promises, prices, timescales, next steps and expectations.

Who needs to know this next?

Another employee, team, supplier, branch or system.

Where does the memory disappear?

That's the clue, businesses often think personalisation means knowing my name. I'd argue something much more basic comes first.

Remember what we've already talked about.

A company remembering that I called yesterday feels more personal than an email beginning “Hi Damian” while asking me for information I supplied yesterday.

The Human Bit Still Matters

There is another trap here. Joining channels together doesn't mean removing humans. Sometimes the human is exactly what makes the joined-up experience work.

Technology might tell me my order has arrived.

A colleague can notice that I look confused about where to collect it.

An app might know what I've bought before.

A good employee can understand why I'm hesitating today.

The goal isn't digital everywhere. Nor is it human everywhere.

It's allowing the customer to move between the two without feeling they've crossed an international border.

The best technology disappears into the experience.

It remembers.

It carries information forward.

It removes repetition.

Then, when judgement or reassurance is needed, a human can pick up the story without asking the customer to start again.

The Case File

The Clue

Customers increasingly move between websites, apps, stores and people during a single purchase.

The Evidence

M&S has deliberately connected store and digital experiences through services such as Click & Collect, while its own reporting recognises the value of customers shopping across channels.

The Verdict

Customers don't want an omnichannel experience. They don't even know what one is.

They want the business to remember where they are.

The Next Move

Stop reviewing your channels individually for a moment. Review the handovers between them because that is where customers most often discover your organisation chart and customers should never have to understand your organisation chart to buy from you.

Open Your Own Case

This week, choose one journey that crosses a boundary: enquiry to sale, online to offline, salesperson to delivery team, chatbot to human, or purchase to support.

Follow it from beginning to end.

Then ask:

Where does the customer have to repeat themselves?

Where does information they have already provided disappear?

Where does one part of the business contradict another?

Find one Continuity Gap and close it.

You may discover you don't need another channel. You need the ones you already have to remember each other.