What is an omnichannel contact center?
An omnichannel contact center is a strategic hub within the business that allows brands to provide customer service across multiple channels in real-time, providing a seamless customer journey.
For example, a customer journey might begin on one channel, like SMS, and seamlessly continue on another – like email, phone call, or website chat. Contact centers with an omnichannel focus should be able to track these interactions and provide a cohesive service as, when, and where the customer needs it.
But it’s also key that teams are able to analyze the journey itself. Did the customer journey break down? Were there any points of friction? Did the customer need to repeat themselves? These insights are used to drive improvements throughout the business.
See increased performance in your contact center with Qualtrics®
Digital channels for customer interaction usually include:
- SMS text messaging
- Phone calls
- Live web chat
- AI bot web chat
- Social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc.)
An omnichannel contact center is powered by software capable of handling integrations between a CRM and multiple owned and third-party channels – while also offering in-depth analytics to streamline customer service.
That means powerful insights that can tell you what’s working, what’s not, and how to fix it.
Omnichannel vs. multichannel contact centers
Customers expect to be able to get in touch with you in whatever way works for them. That might be over the phone, or it could be while waiting in line at the bank. The most important thing, though, is that these interactions need to be able to span and cross channels seamlessly.
Omnichannel contact center software makes this possible, by bridging touchpoints with unified customer history information. That means that if a customer does start an IM chat while waiting in line, they might want to be able to pick things back up over the phone later on – or using text, email, social media, etc. – without having to repeat themselves or start things from scratch.
That’s the difference between a multi-channel and true omnichannel approach – unified journeys and interactions that can cross channel barriers without frustrating customers.
What are the benefits of omnichannel contact centers?
Omnichannel contact centers help businesses deliver stronger experiences, retain customers, and build a reputation for customer experience excellence. Here’s how:
1. You can meet and exceed customer expectations every time
With interactions synced across all the channels that suit customer preferences, you can provide a seamless experience that flows from one contact center platform to the next. Customers are able to get in touch with you however they’d prefer, meaning they’re more likely to get in touch and offer you opportunities to upsell and reduce customer churn.
Harvard Business Review observed that 73% of consumers preferred completing their purchases through multiple channels. Therefore, brands need to facilitate cross-channel communication through an omnichannel cloud contact center to meet or exceed customer expectations.
2. You can offer a deeply personalized experience
Around 90% of consumers say they find personalized experiences appealing, with 80% more likely to do business with a brand if they have one. Your service agents can easily access your CRM to offer personalized customer engagement that delights time and time again.
With omnichannel analytics and AI-powered automation, you can understand customers more deeply than ever. You are able to respond in the right way throughout every interaction, ensuring higher levels of customer satisfaction.
3. You can reduce costs and increase ROI
Using omnichannel analytics means you can see where experiences are broken, and what customers need to spend more with your brand.
You’ll also be able to turn negative customer experiences that can lead to contact center outreach into opportunities for customer retention. Even moving from a two- to three-star experience can increase a customers’s likelihood to purchase again by 68% – so it’s worth investing in an omnichannel contact center to provide this type of experience.
Advanced conversational analytics can determine customer intent, sentiment and emotion
4. You can increase customer empathy and in turn, loyalty
Customers are looking for a familiar, human experience with the brands they engage with. In our Global Consumer Trends research, we found 62% of consumers said brands need to care more about them, with 60% being likely to purchase more as a result. Showing that care is easier when you empower your customer service agents to meet customer needs across all service channels.
The customer service experience can be enhanced with an omnichannel contact center, which provides CRM context, multiple channels available for contact, useful self-service options and the chance to show real empathy. Currently, 36% of consumers are unhappy with the empathy shown in their customer service interactions – stand out by offering a more human customer service experience and develop more loyal customers.
Omnichannel contact center best practices
Listen to every customer
An omnichannel contact center isn’t just about offering various service channels for customer contact – it’s also about omnichannel listening. With intelligent analytics as part of your omnichannel strategy, you can hear whatever your customers are saying, no matter the channel they choose. Better still, you can predict behavior and take action to head off negative interactions before they begin.
Understand every customer through omnichannel contact center analytics
Using features such as natural language understanding (NLU) and machine learning, you can detect emotions, sentiment and more in customer communications.
Advanced conversation analytics can identify topic & sentiment, emotion & intensity, and customer effort.
Your omnichannel cloud contact center’s software can enable you to tackle negative sentiment and frustrated emotions with exactly the right responses, on whatever channel customers are using. Empower your customer service agents with deeper customer history and other information so they can take strategic action, rather than applying a rote response.
Act to make every experience better
Listening and offering the ability to reach out are important traits, but taking action to address customer issues and improve the customer experience is key for exceptional customer satisfaction. We found 63% of customers told us that companies need to do a better job of listening to feedback; taking action on customer data-driven insights allows you to not only win over customers, but do better than your competitors.
| Omnichannel strategy | How? |
|---|---|
| Don’t overextend | Dig into your data to find which channels your customers actually use most often, and focus on ones you can support well. While the end goal is to be everywhere seamlessly, it’s best to focus on the channels with the highest traffic first – and to think about quality over quantity as you start scaling. |
| Unify your customer data and channels | Deploy a software platform built with omnichannel in mind – this will help you connect each channel seamlessly, and ensure that agents get a complete history of customer interactions whenever they begin an interaction. |
| Standardize your messaging | A cohesive approach to customer support is really important. Proactively work to set out messaging processes and styles that help keep your brand’s tone and information consistent across all channels. |
| Empower your agents | Agents need the right tools to be able to do their best work. That starts with training and ongoing coaching, but it also means software that can give them real-time prompts and direction during conversations, as well as automation that can allow customers to self-serve for less important queries. |
| Monitor and optimize | Keep a continuous eye on key metrics like response time and resolution rate – and see how these differ across channels to find service gaps that need more attention. |
What to look for in omnichannel contact center software
Cloud capabilities
Your omnichannel contact center will need to be cloud-based to keep your omnichannel strategy agile and free your brand of expensive legacy systems such as physical call centers. Cloud contact centers can scale as you do, making it ideal for businesses of any size.
Automation
An omnichannel contact center solution that has automation and artificial intelligence built in is vital for success. You can automate processes to allow your agents to focus on priority customer issues on their preferred communication channels. Your omnichannel cloud contact center can also reduce the cost to serve by automating manual processes such as after-call summaries to free up customer support agents’ time.
You can also automatically trigger insights to be shared with the right teams, based on automatic topic detection across every interaction. Vital trends and insights don’t have to stay hidden – they can be delivered in real time to the people who need to see them.
Workforce management capabilities
Your omnichannel contact center drives benefits for both your customers and your employees through quality management. Your techstack should allow a holistic overview of agent performance with 100% interaction scoring across multiple languages and channels, providing fairer and more accurate methods of evaluating agents and customer interactions.
With performance management built into your software, you can increase agent productivity with helpful, specific guidance delivered automatically. Amplify your contact center agents’ empathy and elevate service quality with real time agent guidance and training.
In-depth analytics
On the customer service side, with insights from analytics, you can improve first call resolution rates, lower customer waiting times, and route simpler requests to self-service channels to ensure each agent is deployed only where needed.
For your audience, you’re able to identify key moments of friction along the customer journey and deliver key intelligence to digital, product, marketing teams so you can find and fix problems before they happen. Your omnichannel contact center becomes a customer-focused hub that continually sends your team vital insights for improvement.
You’re able to make predictions about customer behavior and take action on all channels based on past customer data and feedback, and tailor your omnichannel strategy to provide excellent customer experiences every time.
The most effective omnichannel contact center software suites can soak up information from every channel and data source – including customer behavior, surveys, journey analysis, and resolution rates – and combine it into insights that drive genuine positive change.
Embedded AI capabilities
Contact center software imbued with artificial intelligence can help take the strain out of providing an omnichannel experience. And that’s for one key reason: the ability to see and make use of a huge number of data points – instantly and at scale.
True omnichannel customer support is all about data. It’s about being able to know what customers said on channel X so that they don’t need to repeat themselves on channel Y. AI tools can build out these customer histories in a way that provides real value to support agents, or that can help drive next-generation chatbots capable of digging in deep to solve people’s problems.
All of which leads us nicely onto the big question: what’s coming next for omnichannel contact center solutions?
The future of omnichannel
AI is leading the charge when it comes to tomorrow’s contact center. AI tools, powered by large language models and built with natural language processing capabilities, are able to supplement human contact center agents by doing some of the heavy lifting and automating the jobs that keep people from doing their best work.
AI contact center tools can:
- Automate post-call write ups and analysis
- Proactively monitor agent compliance and schedule coaching ops
- Provide agents with real-time prompts that help drive customer satisfaction
- Link customer data and histories between channels
- Analyze conversations at scale to highlight trends and emerging risks
At the very forefront of this is Qualtrics’ pioneering new Experience Agent technology. Drawing on Qualtrics’ decades of expertise in human sentiment and behavior, Experience Agents™ operate with an unmatched understanding of experience context. They build on the foundation of existing experience management programs, seamlessly integrating across every channel and touchpoint — from websites and apps to the call center, social media, and in-store experiences — to help close the loop with customers when it matters most.
But Experience Agents don’t just transact — they take action by closing the loop in ways that feel intuitive, natural, and human by:
- Building on the foundation of existing experience management programs, listening to both structured and unstructured data across every touchpoint in the customer journey so they can understand context and customer priorities.
- Anticipating needs before they arise, acting proactively to create personalized experiences that deepen customer connections while maintaining brand integrity.
- Learning from every interaction to tailor responses in real time, ensuring every engagement feels like a continuation of the last, not the first.
While other AI solutions focus on task execution and operational efficiency, Experience Agents redefine what’s possible in experience management by delivering proactive, empathetic, and brand-aligned interactions at scale.
Create an effective omnichannel contact center with Qualtrics
Your contact center has to take an omnichannel approach to fully engage wherever your audience is, no matter the customer service channels used. By listening to feedback, analyzing customer data and taking action across multiple channels, you’re able to significantly elevate the customer experience.
The Qualtrics XM Platform® allows you to turn omnichannel listening and analytics into ROI-driven action, no matter where it needs to take place. Your omnichannel contact center becomes an organizational goldmine of customer insights, with insights delivered to key personnel in real time to improve the customer experience.
See increased performance in your contact center with Qualtrics