The store is retail’s biggest competitive advantage – but it’s falling behind.

Customer service and in-store support are where omnichannel either works – or breaks down. It’s the moment a customer walks into a store and expects the same experience they had online: the same information, the same flexibility, the same level of service. When that expectation is met, physical retail becomes a real competitive advantage. When it isn’t, the store quickly feels disconnected and outdated.

Right now, most brands are still missing that mark. The data reveals a discipline in two halves. A small group of organisations have invested seriously in connecting their physical and digital service layers. The majority have not. With an average pass rate of just 31%, Customer Service & In-Store Support is the second lowest-scoring discipline in the entire Index, ahead only of AI.

The divide is stark: 121 out of 372 assessed companies score below 20% in this discipline. Just 17 companies score above 60%. The middle ground is thin. It is a story of a small group pulling ahead while most of the market stands still.

WHAT THE LEADERS ARE GETTING RIGHT

The leading brands within this discipline – Sport24, Matas, and IKEA – share one characteristic: they treat the physical store as a key competitive advantage in a connected digital experience, not as a separate channel with its own rules. That philosophy shows up across every layer of the maturity model. Staff can access customer context and order history. They can place and fulfil online orders from the shop floor. Digital services are actively promoted in-store. And fulfilment is flexible, fast, and operationally embedded – not layered on top.

Sport24 and Matas both reach 82%, combining strong in-store execution with capabilities like same-day delivery – something fewer than 7% of organisations offer. IKEA Belgium matches that score, with consistent investment in QR-enabled product information, assisted ordering, and integrated fulfilment models like click & collect and ship-from-store.

WHAT’S WORKING

55% of companies can surface omnichannel order history on a customer’s in-store profile. This is the highest-scoring capability in the discipline and a genuinely valuable one: when a staff member can see a customer’s full purchase history – online and offline – they can serve them more accurately, resolve issues faster, and identify upsell opportunities. The fact that more than half of assessed organisations have this in place is encouraging. But it also means nearly half are operating blind.

52% of companies allow staff to place an online order and ship it to the customer’s home or to another store. When a product is out of stock in-store, the ability to order it on the spot – rather than sending a customer away – is both a service feature and a commercial one. Research suggests stores are missing out on between 5% and up to 30% additional revenue by not offering this capability. For retailers already partway there, expanding this capability represents one of the clearest nearterm opportunities in the discipline.

WHAT’S NOT working

Only 9% provide digital support outside of store opening hours. Customers don’t stop having questions when the shop closes – yet fewer than one in ten offer any form of support in the evenings or at weekends, whether through an AI-assisted chatbot, async messaging or extended email coverage. The required tools are widely available and relatively easy to implement. This makes it clear that the barrier is not technology, but prioritisation – leaving a significant share of customer interactions unsupported at critical moments.

Only 5% have implemented Mobile POS. The fixed checkout is one of the last remaining structural barriers between in-store retail and the seamless experience customers expect. Mobile POS – allowing a staff member to complete a transaction anywhere on the shop floor – eliminates queues, enables hightouch service moments, and signals genuine operational investment in store experience.

57% of assessed organisations take more than four hours to respond to email enquiries. In isolation that might seem like a minor operational detail – but 77% of consumers say that valuing their time is the most important thing a company can do to provide good service (Forrester Research).

Response time is one of the most direct signals a brand sends about how much it values its customers. And unlike many of the capabilities in this discipline, improving it doesn’t require a technology investment. It’s a process decision – and increasingly, an AI one. In a market where most brands are still slow, being fast is a meaningful and accessible way to stand out.

MARKET AND CATEGORY CONTEXT

Belgium leads the six assessed markets at 37%, driven largely by IKEA Belgium’s strong performance. The Netherlands sits at 24.0% – the lowest of all assessed markets. For organisations operating there, that gap is as much an opportunity as a challenge. The baseline is low enough that relatively modest investment in in-store digital capability could yield significant competitive differentiation.

At category level, Electronics leads with a 45% average pass rate. High-consideration purchases, where customers need expert advice, flexible fulfilment and post-purchase support, appear to be driving greater omnichannel service investment in this sector. Beauty and Pharmacy at 23% and Jewellery and Watches at 21% have the most ground to cover – and arguably the most to gain. Both are characterised by considered, personal decisions where expert advice, tailored service and post-purchase support matter enormously, making it a significant service-gap. For the brands that close it, the loyalty upside is equally significant.

WHAT SHOULD YOU Do next?

The question for any senior leader with physical retail in their portfolio is straightforward: when a customer walks into one of your stores, do your staff have the tools, information, and authority to deliver the same quality of experience that customer would expect online?

For most organisations assessed in this Index, the honest answer is no. To solve this gap, start by getting these three areas in order:

Once these foundations are in place, retailers can move on to more advanced capabilities such as Mobile POS, ship-from-store and in-store customer engagement. The organisations moving into those areas now are building advantages that are genuinely difficult for competitors to replicate quickly.