If roaring bears and rolling blackouts aren't enough for dot-coms to worry about, Jupiter Media Metrix revealed more bad news Wednesday. Jupiter's latest research indicates that seven of 10 online shoppers who experience poor service online carry their grudges offline by cutting back on shopping at offending Web sites' brick-and-mortar stores.

That's a serious issue for multichannel retailers, the survey finds. Even though 67% of shoppers expect such retailers to be able to access customers' consolidated account activity across all sales and service channels, a mere 18% of them are set up to do so.

Retailers are disappointing their customers in other ways as well, the Jupiter study finds. While 83% of customers want to return goods purchased online in physical stores, and 59% want to pick up online orders in stores, only 18% of retailers have the internal systems to make that possible. And despite the fact that 55% of customers expect E-mail complaints to be resolved within six hours, only 38% of sites meet that expectation, whereas one-third take more than three days to respond.

Jupiter analyst David Daniels says that competition between online and offline operations for customers and profits leads to this unfortunate--and costly--segmenting of customer information. Just 18% of retailers have customer-relationship management systems capable of pulling together a single view of their customers across all channels. Companies such as FedEx, NCR, and Target can afford to roll out such full-blown applications, but Daniels says other retailers can take a quick and inexpensive first step by at least providing store managers with access to customer data over the Web.

The handful of E-CRM companies addressing this need, Daniels says, "have a positive outlook even in market downturn."