Nowadays, customers don’t only use their phones to contact businesses. They also use social media, email, live chat, messaging, and more, whether it’s to solve their problems or to get relevant information about a product or service.
As a result, it’s crucial that you engage with your customers on all these channels. In doing so, you’ll be able to serve them better, increase customer satisfaction, and build a reputation for valuing your customers and their opinions.
This is where a multichannel call center comes in. With it, you can do all these things and more. With that in mind, let’s look at multichannel call centers a bit closer.
What is a Multichannel Contact Center?
A multichannel contact center is a solution that helps you communicate with your customers through various digital channels. So, apart from voice communication, these contact centers typically also offer channels like email, messaging, social media, and more.
This emphasizes that you need more than one communication channel with your customers.
What’s the Difference Between Multichannel and Omnichannel Contact Centers?
People often confuse multichannel and omnichannel contact centers. As such, many of them use these terms interchangeably, although there are distinct differences between them. Let’s look at these differences in more detail:
| Feature | Multichannel | Omnichannel |
| Multiple channels including voice, email, social media, SMS, instant messaging, and more | ✔ | ✔ |
| Data analytics | ✔ | ✔ |
| Automation | ✔ | ✔ |
| Application Integrations | ✔ | ✔ |
| Self-service functionality | ✔ | ✔ |
| Data integrations | X | ✔ |
| Switching between communication channels | X | ✔ |
| Requires different teams for different channels | ✔ | X |
| Complete customer view | X | ✔ |
Benefits of Multichannel Contact Center
Now that we’ve seen what multichannel contact centers are and how they compare to omnichannel contact centers, let’s look at some of their benefits.
Multiple Channels
This is the major benefit of multichannel contact centers. It allows you to engage with your customers, provide relevant information, and solve their problems across a range of digital channels. Simply put, with a multichannel contact center, you’ll be able to meet your customers where they are.
Improved Customer Engagement
When you’re able to engage with your customers on different channels, you’ll increase customer engagement significantly. This, in turn, increases customer satisfaction and allows you to build more trust and loyalty with your customers. As a result, you’ll improve your customer retention and be able to generate more revenue.
Better Brand Image
Being able to answer your customers’ questions and solve their problems across a variety of digital channels will show that your business cares about its customers and their opinions. This allows you to build and maintain a stronger brand image that can make your business stand out from its competition.
Faster Support
Because you’re able to engage with your customers on a variety of channels, you’ll be able to solve their problems far quicker compared to only using voice communications. For example, you can answer questions and propose solutions on live chat, reply faster to emails, and offer relevant information on social media.
More Effective Marketing
When you’re able to contact and engage with your customers on channels like email, phone, live chat, social media, and more, you’re more likely to get your products or services in front of the right audience at the appropriate time. This means your conversion rate will go up, your marketing efforts will be far more effective, and you’ll have a larger return on your marketing investment.
Analytics
With different communication channels available, you’ll be able to gather and analyze more data about your customers. As a result, you’ll have more insights into what your customers’ problems are and what they need and expect. Because of this, you’ll be able to tailor your offering based on their needs and expectations, solve their problems, and serve them better.
More Selling Opportunities
Because multichannel contact centers give you several points of contact with your customers, you’ll have more opportunities to solve their problems and offer products or services that could make their lives easier. Also, because you have insights into customer interactions, you’ll know what products or services they need. This increases the opportunities for upselling and cross-selling significantly.
Better Resource Optimization
When you use multiple channels, you’ll be able to spread the burden on agents, which, in turn, allows you to optimize your resources. And optimizing your resources doesn’t only mean that you’ll be able to serve your customers better, but you’ll also reduce your costs which, by implication, means you’ll increase your profits.
Multichannel Contact Center Best Practices
Taking into the benefits of multichannel contact centers, you’ll probably be interested in implementing one for your business. Let’s now consider some best practices if you do. Here, you’ll need to:
- Make sure that you really need a multichannel contact center. Implementing a multichannel contact center can take a lot of time, effort, and, more importantly, money. So, you should make sure you really need one before you commit. If you don’t, you could end up wasting many resources.
- Analyze data as quickly as possible. Once implemented, you should analyze your contact center data as soon as possible to ensure that it runs smoothly. This also allows you to identify and solve any issues quicker.
- Implement a self-service option. To be most effective and to deliver its benefits, you should include self-service options in your contact center implementation. This ensures better customer service and a stellar customer journey.
Multichannel Contact Center Drawbacks
We’ve already seen the benefits of multichannel contact centers earlier. There are, however, some drawbacks to these contact centers. Arguably, the main drawback is that, while they provide access to multiple digital channels, some of these channels are not integrated. As a result, agents typically cannot see the past interaction a customer has had with the contact center.
In Conclusion
When you want to engage with your customers on different digital channels from voice to email, chat, and social media, multichannel contact centers offer a solution. They allow you to do all this and, in the process, improve your customer journey, strengthen your brand, market better, and generate more revenue.
If you want the best foundation for your multichannel contact center, get in touch with ULTATEL. Our Cloud Contact Center solution gives you everything you need to keep up with the surging demand in communications across channels, while still allowing you to lower your costs and improve your scalability.
