The terms omnichannel and multichannel customer support is often confused as both approaches leverage multiple channels for communications with customers. But how these channels are utilized is where the main differences can be found. Not to mention, the key focuses are different as well. Before drawing a comparison, it is necessary to develop an individual understanding of both types of these customer support strategies.
Contact center services offer customer support through various channels. Commonly those channels are call, email, and live chat. However, social media DMs, tweets mentioning your company’s handle, and responses to your social media posts are also channels of communication with a brand. Offering suitable responses and satisfying customer queries is the goal of customer support regardless of the channel utilized.
How Does a Multichannel Contact Center Offer Customer Support?
The focus of a multichannel approach is to maximize the number of channels available for customers to use. For example, the goal could be to ensure higher visibility and add multiple contact points across different social media platforms. From a marketing perspective, a boosted presence can significantly increase the number of people in the customer journey funnel. Gaining a higher brand visibility can be another goal of a multichannel strategy.
The engagement and communications across channels are siloed. For example, if a customer care in metaverse a multichannel contact center via email, agents dealing with social media DMs or webchat are unaware of the communication. So, if a query is not resolved over email communication, the customer will have to explain the issues all over impacting their experience and overall satisfaction rate. Efficient workforce management and customer support can be quite difficult with such disconnected support operations.
How Does an Omnichannel Support Work?
Omnichannel strategy is a more customer-centric approach as compared to multichannel customer support. Instead of focusing on every platform, it is more geared towards establishing interconnectivity and streamlining the transition from one channel to the other. For example, the transition can be of a customer from your business’s social media handle to the website.
The data based on interactions with customers on separate platforms is not contained in omnichannel customer voice support. Instead, it is shared across other channels using CRM software. So, when a customer contacts support staff from a separate channel like the email, agents can easily see the earlier communication. It helps the agents by providing more suitable and personalized solutions to a customer’s query. This saves both time and effort of a customer in explaining everything again thus boosting resolution and satisfaction rates of customer support.
Omnichannel vs Multichannel Customer Support – Which Is Better?
Omni and multichannel support have clear differences and priorities as mentioned earlier. The question is which one is a better working strategy. The following are some crucial aspects to consider:
What Is More Future-Ready?
In the past, customers were accustomed to facing customer service channels that do not share the same information. But now, customers expect a business to record a response history and utilize it for a customer’s future resolutions. In an omnichannel vs multichannel contact center debate, the former takes the lead from a customer’s perspective. As more businesses are gearing towards offering a better customer experience, omnichannel support is more suited for the future as well.
What Is More Manageable?
Interconnecting your channels makes the workload also manageable for outsourced voice and non-voice BPO services. The CRM-powered dashboards can even let them track a customer from one’s comment under a Facebook post. This quality can come in handy, especially for a service-based business like an IT support company. In contrast, the performance of an outbound sales of contact center may not be affected if the information is not shared with other teams for, let’s say, a telemarketing campaign. So, the omnichannel vs multichannel comparison, in this case, may depend on the nature of the business.
Conclusion
In most aspects, multichannel customer support is a dated strategy. Its attention is on maximizing channels and not the quality of service. Omnichannel support is concerned more with quality. Knowledgeable agents equipped with a recruitment dashboard type of detailed and integrated digital tools can do wonders for your business’s support reputation.
Frequently Ask Questions
What is a multichannel contact center?
A multichannel contact center is one that allows multiple channels for communication with a business. Such channels include calls, live chat, emails, social media messages, and similar others. However, all the data related to a customer query stays within the support team of a particular channel.
Omnichannel vs Multichannel, which is better?
After thoroughly comparing both approaches and considering current trends, omnichannel customer support seems to be the way forward.