Aligning all these efforts first requires companies to consider how consumers are using mobile devices to interact with the brand, and how that will differ from the online or in-store interaction.
One potential remedy is to create a face-to-virtual-face interaction with a helpful, friendly looking, online sales assistant in the hope that, seeing a human-like figure who responds in a human manner, the customer will forge a relationship with the online business.
With so much communication via email these days, it can be hard to pull the trigger and initiate a face-to-face conversation when you sense that an online interaction is becoming too heated or simply too difficult to do well online.
You want to move pure transactions to the Internet, use online communication for information sharing and routine communication, and reserve face-to-face interaction for the activities that add the most value.