In the last several weeks I have found myself using the word “empathy ” quite a lot when talking about retail. The term comes from Design Thinking – it’s the first step in a Design Thinking process.

In retail, empathy is all about understanding customer pains and relating to customers to find ways to overcome their pains or help them achieve their goals. There has been a lot of talk lately about “shopper journeys ” as a nod to recognizing a couple of things: that the decision to buy something is several connected steps (thus, a journey), and that success in retail is increasingly about focusing on the customer – on her needs – rather than on products.

I don’t think retail executives (and yes, I’m generalizing here) really understand the value of empathy – and how much the shopper journey has changed, and thus how different of a shopping process they must experience in order to achieve any kind of shopper empathy.

I have two examples. One comes from our latest benchmark report on omni-channel. In that research, we discovered that while retail executives believe that “becoming omni-channel ” is critical to their business, when it comes to Digital’s contribution to omni-channel, they consistently under-estimate and discount the influence or role that digital ultimately plays in an omni-channel experience.

When talking about this point to an audience of retailers just a couple of weeks ago, that executives in general don’t really have any clue as to what digital means to the retail business, I fielded the question, “How do you get them to understand how important digital really is or can be? “

My answer: empathy. They need to walk a mile in the shoes of a digital shopper. And they also need to walk a mile in the shoes of various members of the digital team – the online merchandiser, the digital marketer, etc.

It’s pretty easy for me to recommend this course of action, because it has recently been made obvious to me that retail executives don’t have any of this empathy. Steve Rowen and I just recently published our assessment of retailers’ digital gifting capabilities, and it was abundantly clear that retailers are not putting themselves into customers’ shoes. Or if they are, they are taking on the easy shopping journeys, and ignoring the more complex ones.

In digital gifting, retailers might have an easy, useful experience on desktop, only to fall apart on mobile. Or they may offer mobile capabilities, like storing a card in a mobile wallet, except that they don’t tell the recipient these things unless they are viewing the notification email on the mobile phone. The gaps in digital gifting experiences – in the buyer’s experience, in the recipient’s experience, in between the two experiences, and across platforms – just underscore, to me at least, how little retailers really understand or seem to care about looking at the shopping experience through the actual shopper’s eyes.

To be fair, I’ve asked retailers about whether executives are asked to participate in “shopping ” their company’s experience, and been told definitely yes. But that’s where empathy becomes crucial. It’s not enough to ask a person to just go on the site and try to buy something. If you’re going to find empathy with your shoppers’ pain, you need to start with their problems. That would be things like, “Oh drat. I forgot my nephew’s birthday. I need to send him something quick. ” Or, “My daughter needs longer shorts and pants or she’s going to run afoul of the school dress code. ” And then start each journey in three different places – on the desktop experience, in a store, and on a mobile phone.

If you care about a holistic experience – one that crosses all channels, to be truly “omni-channel ” – then you need a more holistic approach to design. And it’s just as crucial for executives, for the people who have to manage conflicting priorities, to have that empathy, that understanding, so that they can actually relate to the problems their teams are trying to solve.

Customer-facing processes are complex – consumers don’t have to follow your process. They make up their own based on their own needs. If retailers try to force that process too much, consumers will just find another retailer who isn’t so pushy. So it takes a deeper understanding, not of the process, but of the customer. And that’s where empathy is key.