Omnichannel Customer Contact Center: Definition with Strategies

Focusing on convenience is vital for B2C companies, and streamlining the customer experience remains one of the top challenges for business leaders, as highlighted in McKinsey & Company’s 2022 report. Technology can be a big help here, especially with the rise of AI and customer service automation tools. Solutions such as an omnichannel contact center can help you keep up with customer service trends and significantly impact your business operations.

If you’re unsure how these platforms work, what they offer, and how to implement them successfully, read on – we’ll walk you through every important detail.

What is omnichannel contact center software?

An omnichannel contact center solution integrates various communication channels – like phone, email, live chat, and social media – into a cohesive cloud-based system. It enables a seamless transition between channels for customers, ensuring they receive consistent and personalized support throughout their journey. The approach also lets companies eliminate information silos.

Omnichannel vs multichannel contact center

The most significant difference between the omnichannel and multichannel contact centers is their goal: one aims to provide seamless service and integrate customer data between different channels, whereas the other – while also delivering support across multiple channels – keeps them siloed. The data isn’t integrated across channels.

This means that with a multichannel system, customer service agents who operate one channel may not always have the context for a given customer’s issue mentioned on another channel. Additionally, the support experience can be inconsistent – the quality of interactions and how issues are resolved can differ from one channel to another.

Moreover, multichannel contact centers usually require different teams/agents to operate each communication channel and transferring tickets between them isn’t always easy. In contrast, omnichannel contact center platforms are often managed by a single team that handles all queries, no matter the channel.

The table below summarizes the key differences between omnichannel and multichannel contact centers.

	Omnichannel	Multichannel
Cost	Higher upfront costs, but in some cases, you may be able to save money on unnecessary licenses and tools	Lower upfront cost
Complexity	Complex and comprehensive	Relatively simple
Customer experience	Provides a seamless, unified cross-channel experience, which can also be heavily personalized	Doesn’t provide a seamless, unified cross-channel experience and makes personalization harder
Data integration	Integrates data between systems and makes it accessible through a single platform	Doesn’t integrate data – channels are siloed and kept separate unless you create specific integrations between them
Context of interactions	Support specialists don’t lose context when switching between channels	Context is usually lost or maintained in a limited fashion
Teams	One team handles the entire customer support	Each channel has separate customer support agents/teams

Benefits of omnichannel contact center

An omnichannel customer service is the better choice for many businesses (especially medium-sized companies and enterprises). Here are the key benefits of using one.

Improved customer experience

The primary benefit of an omnichannel approach is the delivery of consistent and personalized customer support in line with your customer experience management strategy, regardless of the channel through which the customer engages with the company. This integration allows for a unified view of customer interactions, enabling service representatives to provide more informed and efficient assistance.

Faster issue resolution

By breaking down information silos that typically exist in multichannel environments, omnichannel contact centers ensure that customers do not have to repeat their issues when switching between communication modes, such as from phone to email or chat. It enhances the customer experience and improves operational efficiency by reducing the time agents spend gathering information, thereby increasing their capacity to handle more customer inquiries.

Enhanced insights and easier customer data collection

The seamless nature of an omnichannel contact center allows you to generate insights across the entire customer journey. It helps you better understand your customer preferences and needs. You can also use this knowledge to identify and analyze the pain points your consumers face to improve their experience and reduce the workload for your support team.

Increased efficiency

Customer service agents can access the conversation history and other data connected to various communication channels. They can also freely move between these channels depending on customer expectations and needs, using one unified platform instead of many different tools. All of this allows them to resolve issues more efficiently.

Better resource allocation

In some scenarios, an omnichannel contact center can allow companies to abandon other communication tools and systems they no longer need, saving money on licenses. Moreover, the unified, streamlined nature of omnichannel solutions means they work best when operated by a single team (so you don’t need dedicated customer support specialists for every communication channel), and they also allow you to provide your customers with self-service tools to lessen the workload.

Omnichannel customer service strategy: Best practices

There are some good practices you should adhere to if you want to get the best out of your omnichannel platform and optimize your customer communication strategy.

Choose omnichannel contact center support software

You have to make one important choice to get your omnichannel contact center ready – and that’s to choose the right software for you. There are many options on the market, but if you run a business focused on fast growth and cutting-edge technology, we advise you to check out our solution – Glassix.

It’s an omnichannel customer support platform aggregating communication across various business channels and apps. It provides a unified inbox, templates, a chat flow builder, and many other useful features. However, the best thing about Glassix is its powerful AI-powered customer service tools based on the well-known GPT-4 technology. It offers automatic tagging and generative AI chatbots and lets you generate auto-suggested replies and one-click conversation summaries to optimize your customer support team’s efficiency.

Features

AI-powered unified inbox – Use a centralized, AI-enabled inbox for multiple channels (email, social media, WhatsApp, Messages for Business, SMS).
Auto-suggested replies – Use real-time, context-based suggestions to create accurate and effective responses.
Conversational AI with GPT-4 – Respond to inquiries faster and more efficiently thanks to chatbots based on the GPT-4 engine and capable of human-like interactions. To learn more about this feature, check out our article on the best conversational AI platforms.
Human-to-bot and bot-to-human handoff – Easily transfer customer communications from bots to human agents (or vice versa) to avoid disruption, create a seamless experience and ensure exceptional customer service.
Drag-and-drop chatbot flow builder – Access an intuitive, no-code, drag-and-drop interface to build flows and deploy automated responses and interactions.
One-click chatbot deployment – Deploy chatbots for various communication channels easily – with just one click.
One-click conversation summaries – Summarize customer conversations to get insights regarding issues and use them to optimize your customer support.
Automatic conversation tagging – Automatically tag and categorize conversations to make customer interaction management easier.
Generative AI chatbots – Automate customer interactions with powerful omnichannel chatbots based on generative AI technology.
Omnichannel integration – Integrate various channels into one platform to simplify management and ensure consistency and quality in customer interactions.
Template-based automation flows – Optimize your customer support for specific scenarios thanks to automation flow templates.

Pricing

Glassix offers three plans:

Starter – $49/user/month. It’s the option for small companies.
Growth – $65/user/month (2 users minimum). This is the plan for growing businesses.
Enterprise – Custom pricing. An enterprise solution.

The prices above are with monthly billing (there’s a 20% with annual payments). Both Starter and Growth packages offer a 30-day free trial.

Personalize interactions

When you integrate all your communication channels, and every customer support agent can access all the data and history regarding a given issue or consumer, you can also go one step further – personalize interactions to make every person your team talks to feel remembered and unique. Moreover, you can route tickets submitted by specific clients to agents who successfully helped them in the past. It lets your team foster relationships with the customers, which does wonders for brand loyalty (in fact, 45% of consumers state they’re likely to try a different company if a brand fails to deliver a personalized experience - it's a statistic that clearly shows how important personalization is for managing customer satisfaction).

Maintain consistent branding and messaging

Consistent messaging, branding and tone across different communication channels are essential. You must ensure your customers get the same experience, no matter where they choose to talk to your company. Thanks to this, consumers who have already had the pleasure of interacting with your business will know they can expect similar treatment in future interactions.

Map omnichannel customer journeys

Zendesk’s latest report reveals that 70% of CX leaders are rethinking their entire customer journey. It clearly shows that 2024 is no time for complacency and resting on laurels – you need to keep moving, experimenting and evolving to stay ahead of the competition. However, to know what to change, you first need to understand what works and what doesn’t in your current setup. Map your customer journeys from start to finish, analyze touchpoints, collect the necessary data, and get to know your consumers better.

How to know if your business needs an omnichannel contact center solution?

An omnichannel customer support software is a helpful tool that can help you overcome various challenges related to customer support. Here are some examples:

Fractured communication and low channel visibility – If you provide support on too many separate channels, information might get lost in transition, agents will lack context, and customers will have to repeat themselves often to get help, leading to a bad customer experience. This approach also isn’t very efficient.
Insights and data collection – Collecting, sorting, and managing conversation data and insights on multiple unintegrated channels can be very hard and time-consuming. However, you need this information – without it, you’re effectively blind to what your consumers truly want and care about when it comes to your customer support. An omnichannel contact centre will store data from various touchpoints in one place, making it much easier to use.
Volume spikes – Sudden spikes in the volume of support queries can be stressful and challenging for your team. With an omnichannel center, you can set up multiple ways for your customers to communicate with you, including some that let your agents operate several conversations simultaneously. Moreover, since the same team can operate all of these channels, you can allocate resources swiftly to whatever channel needs them most (for example, if you get many calls, most of your agents can be relegated to handling them, while AI chatbots handle queries that don’t necessarily need human intervention).

Ready to wow your customers?

An omnichannel contact center is an essential tool for effective customer communication management. It can help you increase efficiency and offer your consumers a better experience, which is always paramount. However, if you truly want to get the most out of such an investement, you shouldn’t overlook technology trends – customer service automation and AI-powered customer service are becoming the new norm.

If you want to see what these enhancements can offer your business, we recommend you check out our Glassix customer communication management software. It’ll help you optimize and manage your processes, automate some of the tasks, and improve the overall experience consumers have with your support. Interested? Sign up right now!

FAQs

What is an omnichannel contact center?

An omnichannel contact center aggregates different communication channels in one place, allowing customers to seamlessly transition between them and making customer support more efficient and effective.

What is the difference between multichannel and omnichannel contact centers?

The main difference between multichannel and omnichannel contact center solutions is how they operate. The omnichannel contact center integrates data between channels and delivers a seamless customer support experience, whereas the multichannel contact center lets you manage several channels simultaneously but keeps them separate.

What is omnichannel customer service?

An omnichannel customer service is an approach that integrates various communication channels to create a seamless customer experience and solve issues faster and more effectively.

What is an omni channel in VoIP?

An omnichannel VoIP (voice over IP) system integrates VoIP capabilities with other communication channels.

Self-serve

Messaging channels

Business automation