There are vital customer service benefits for retailers to move from multichannel to omnichannel strategies. Here is a very good example involving Staples.

As reported by Dave Sutton for TopRight Consulting:

“When Faisal Masud joined Staples as Chief Digital Officer in 2015, his mandate was clear: follow B2B shoppers moving online and meet their demands by doubling down on digital… and make it easy! Staples has had a digital presence since 1998 — long before many other retailers — but Masud’s ambition was to take it to the next level and create a seamless omnichannel customer experience. He knew that just supporting multiple channels for customers would be insufficient. Staples would have to be sure that all channels would connect to one another.”

According to Faisal,“The goal for Staples has been to be a unified view of the customer, where we are completely agnostic to where customers shop, offline or in the stores, on their phone or on their desktop, or through any other means, and really making sure that we personalize that experience to them.” These two charts by TopRight show how Staples did it.”