Poor cross-channel retail experience

Sorry if I seem to be picking on retail experiences recently - but big brands are all around us telling us how wonderful they are yet the actual customer experience tells a different story. Only today I had to use the internet on my iPhone to help a retail sales assistant who almost failed to make a sale because of the lack of consistency and synchronicity between the web-channel and the internal point-of-sale system in the retail channel.

• I went onto argos.com and reserved a couple of products for collection at my local store
• I arrive in store and queue at the till
• I give them my reservation number and they call up my reserved order on their system and I confirm those are the items I want. So far, so good.
• The sales assistant tells me the total amount and asks me for payment, at which point I make a query as the total  is £10 more than the internet had told me.
• We locate the problem product which is a pair of headphones. They were advertised on the web as a special promotion but the promotion didn't show on the in store point-of-sale system.
• The  sales assistant goes to on another terminal (presumably because she didn't want to have to close down the point-of-sale instance she was looking at) to pull up the Argos website. It fails to load. Instead there was an Internet Explorer error saying 'out of memory'
• She goes back to the POS system and checks the details again and tells me there was a promotion on the product but it ended 2 weeks ago.
• I told her that the price was current less than thirty minutes prior when I was on their website
• She goes back to the terminal where she was trying to access the internet and gets the same error
• "I'm sorry" she apologies "I'm having a problem with our systems and I can't verify the price for you."
• She calls for a manager. Given I am short of time in the time I wait for a manager to appear I manage to pull out my iPhone and launch the Argos site and show her the product at the correct price. Using the same phone, I show her the email that Argos sent to me to confirm my reserved items and corresponding offer price...
• She apologised and overrode the price on the POS system and promptly went on a break      

When your business model is built on direct sales and you are actively supporting both a retail and a digital channel it’s essential that the two are synchronised, or if you choose to make them independent make it clear to the customers and manage their expectations.