At the Resulticks Connected Experience in Retail Roundtable 2025, organized by Trescon Global and attended by CXOs from top retail brands in India, one theme emerged loud and clear—the customer journey is evolving faster than the tools used to manage it. Despite massive investments in digital transformation, many brands are struggling to truly understand, engage, and retain today’s omnichannel consumer.

Here’s a breakdown of the most pressing pain points shared by retail leaders—and the strategic solutions needed to turn them into opportunities.

Unknown traffic—made up of customers a brand cannot identify for follow-up engagement or attribution—remains a major challenge for retailers. In fact, many, according to the panelists, are struggling with high customer churn rates and a lack a visibility into what is causing drop-offs among anonymous and non-loyalty shoppers.

Without the means to identify unknown shoppers in real time and at scale, it is difficult to formulate, let alone implement, engagement strategies for targeting a massive stream of potential customers, who are slipping through the cracks across so many online and offline touchpoints. So, what’s the way forward? The solution has multiple parts, but the most critical pieces are:

• Technology that can capture, identify, and contextually target unknown traffic on digital touchpoints like website and mobile app

• A robust customer data platform (CDP) that can integrate POS, store traffic, supply chain, and digital and offline engagement data

• AI-driven AI identity resolution to deliver a persistent, unified, and continuously enriched view of the individual shopper

These core capabilities pave the way for other use cases that can turn a missed opportunity into attributable conversions. Retailers can deploy data-driven audience engagement solutions to access churn predictions, identify high-risk segments with cohort analysis, and devise personalized retention programs based on real-time behavior and AI-derived audience propensities.

While retailers have historically been able to drive revenue using loyalty data, they are missing out on the chances to provide walk-in shoppers with more tailored experiences and maximize top-line growth with holistic, omnichannel engagement. In a time when the “average” shopping experience is seeing rapid digitization (with a heavy emphasis on mobile-based consumption), failing to overcome channel silos—and the data schisms they create—can spell major trouble.

Building on the 360-degree customer view and data consolidation that a CDP can enable, retailers need to adopt, or develop, scalable processes for the delivery, analysis, and optimization of omnichannel shopper engagement programs. The panelists noted the importance of making retail marketing truly “customer-centric”, accommodating their content, channel, time, and offer preferences.

Should retailers accomplish such data consolidation, they can look to expand the scope and identify ways of including partner data. Given the multiplication of digital shopping platforms and changing consumer behavior, consolidating both brand and partner data can expand the coverage of personalization, boosting conversion and retention rates.

In-Store Blind Spots: The Missing Half of the Customer Journey 
Omnichannel retail marketing doesn’t stop at the integration of digital touchpoints, nor does the usage of QR codes alone suffice. The point is to break down the online-offline boundary to automate the tracking and retargeting of customers both in-store and digitally. 

Resulticks, for instance, has advocated for “Connected Experience” as a new paradigm for customer engagement. The concept entails the combination of data integration, seamless omnichannel journey orchestration, and the strategic adoption of new-age devices such as the internet of Things in brick-and-mortar spaces. The resultant infrastructure allows retailers to not only monitor real-time shopper behavior but plan the next step in their journey proactively — hopping from digital to physical interactions with segment-of-one precision.

The Path Forward: From Fragmentation to Connected Experience 

The retail battleground is no longer just about price or product—it’s about connection. Brands that can unify their data, personalize at scale, and manage consent transparently will lead the next wave of growth.

Platforms like RESUL are already helping retail innovators leapfrog from insight to orchestration—with tools built for real-time, omnichannel, consent-driven engagement.

If you’re facing similar challenges, let’s start a conversat ion about how you can turn your data into a competitive edge.