What is omnichannel customer service?

Learn what it means to take an omnichannel approach to customer service, why you might want to, and how to get it right if you do.

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Omnichannel customer service is no longer a “nice to have” for modern businesses. In today’s age of digital transformation, consumers expect—or even, demand— to be able to interact with businesses on a diverse range of devices and across multiple communication channels.
What’s more, they want to do so seamlessly and with as little effort on their part as possible. Business operations have adapted to meet these new and ever-evolving customer expectations, often times by adopting omnichannel strategies in the area of customer service.

What is omnichannel customer service?

Omnichannel customer service is the provision of advice and guidance to customers seamlessly across multiple channels of communication. Any customer can seek and receive help on whichever channel or channels they desire, and can effortlessly continue customer service conversations on a new channel at a later point.

That element of effortlessness is crucial to the omnichannel customer service definition. With this approach, the channels used for customer service are integrated and work together as a holistic entity. If they’re segregated and siloed, then it’s not omnichannel customer service.

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Omnichannel vs. multichannel customer service?

Omnichannel and multichannel are two different approaches to customer engagement that are often confused. So, what are the differences when it comes to multichannel vs omnichannel customer service?
As we mentioned, omnichannel is an approach that provides an integrated experience for the customer that’s consistent and personalized across all channels and devices. It’s a user-based approach that aims to make the experience as easy as possible by allowing customers to reach out to businesses  on whichever channel or device is most convenient for them.
On the other hand, multichannel refers to an approach that utilizes various channels, but keeps each channel independent of the others. They have their own strategy and goals, often resulting in data silos.
Though both strategies focus on multiple channel customer experience, the key difference lies in the fact that a multichannel customer approach isn’t integrated.

Omnichannel customer service examples and use cases

So, now you know how to define omnichannel customer service, but what does that really mean in practice? Often, the best way to really understand a new business tactic or approach is to think about how it applies in the real world. Here are a few hypothetical examples of omnichannel customer service that you might just recognize from your day-to-day life:
  • Buy online, pickup in store (BOPIS) -  Many modern retailers offer consumers the chance to make a purchase online and then pick it up in-store. It’s an example of omnichannel customer service as it involves at least two channels—an online store or app and an in-person store—working harmoniously. The customer can make the purchase when and where it suits them and then get the product without worrying about delivery or delivery charges.
  • Financial services provision via different channels - Banks and other financial services firms now increasingly allow customers to perform some actions—like checking account balances and more—via text or chatbot. They also typically make it simple to escalate or switch an issue to a human agent when necessary, while ensuring that agent has the prior interaction at hand.

Why is omnichannel customer experience important?

In today’s digital world, customers rely on having diverse touchpoints with a brand during their customer journey. People often switch between traditional and digital channels while searching for products and expect a range of post-purchase support options that cater to their convenience.
Omnichannel customer experience is the outcome of a customer-focused approach through which a business provides a seamless, consistent, and personalized CX irrespective of the channel or device used to facilitate the interaction.
The omnichannel approach integrates customer service across:
  • Desktop and mobile devices
  • Online, in-store, and telephonic channels (including chatbots, self-service channels, virtual assistants, and customer service agents)
  • Social media platforms.
In short, omnichannel customer service is vital as it’s the only way for businesses to remain present across different channels to ensure the customer’s experience and the service they receive is cohesive and consistent.

Benefits of omnichannel customer service

Omnichannel customer service benefits for businesses that implement it well—more on that later—are varied and impactful. Successful omnichannel customer service initiatives can:

Enhance CX

Consistent and personalized support empowers the customer to engage online and offline at their convenience.

Streamline customer journeys

As well as delivering personalized support across multiple channels, an omnichannel approach provides better access to insights into customer lifecycles, making it simpler to make improvements.

Boost customer loyalty

A smooth, personalized service experience builds value and trust with customers, who will then be less likely to go elsewhere.

Strengthen brand recall

Ensuring customers receive a consistent brand experience across devices, channels, and platforms will create a more memorable impression. That strengthens brand recall and ensures customers view you in a more positive light—perhaps enough that they’ll become brand advocates.

Increase revenue

By improving customer loyalty and increasing brand awareness, you retain more customers and make future purchases more likely. As well as increasing the chances of existing customers extolling your virtues to others.

A customer support agent happily helping clients on their need.

Omnichannel customer service best practices

An omnichannel customer service strategy, then, can bring real and noticeable benefits to your business. However, it’s not an easy thing to achieve and plenty of brands take missteps when starting out. If you don’t want that to be you, then here are some best practices to follow when adopting an omnichannel approach to customer service:

Understand your customers’ preferred channels

It’s critical for businesses to understand where their customers find information, shop, communicate, and seek help. You can do this by leveraging relevant data to find out the platforms on which your customers are most active. Consider questions such as:

  • Do they have an active online presence? 
  • Which platforms do they use most often?
  • Do they go online to read reviews before making a purchase decision?

Answering these questions will help you understand which channels to engage your customers through. Armed with this information, you can build a customer interaction framework that allows you to pinpoint their wants and needs, identify customer preferences for service channels, and map their journey to ensure support is optimized and consistent.

Respond instantly with live chats

One of the biggest customer support pain points is wait time. Live chat software can combat this by providing real-time support to customers. Incorporating live chat into your omnichannel strategy enables your business to:

  • Provide immediate and personalized solutions and support to the customer through live agents
  • Improve customer satisfaction with  prompt responses and streamlined omnichannel customer support that encourages brand loyalty
  • Proactively engage with customers to drive conversions and resolve issues before they get exacerbated.

Enhance your social media presence

Nowadays, social media has expanded beyond being a simple tool for communication between family and friends. It’s also leveraged by brands which provide great social media customer service to drives customer satisfaction.

Most people have at least one account on social media. Whether it’s Facebook, X (Twitter), LinkedIn, or something else besides, brands can leverage them for their omnichannel strategy by:

  • Delivering efficient and effective support through prompt responses to customer inquiries via messaging and comments
  • Increasing brand awareness and omnichannel customer engagement by positioning products and services for a target audience
  • Collecting social data insights and integrating them with other platforms in your strategy to provide cross-channel support.

Understand that customers care about self-service options

As part of your omnichannel service strategy, provide your customers with self-service options that enable them to resolve their support issues by themselves.

Providing self-service options where customers can look up answers in online knowledge bases, like a resource library or FAQ section, is convenient and saves time for both customers and agents.

Sharing reliable and valuable information builds trust and helps to facilitate the customer experience. It can also lower costs for your business by reducing the amount of time spent on simple queries and freeing up agents to deal with more complex support requests.

A working woman on her cellphone talking to contact center agents inquiring on her business.

Empower your support team with the right skills and tools to deliver effective customer experiences

An important aspect of implementing an omnichannel service strategy is to ensure your team possesses the right skills to carry it out.

Support representatives are the face and voice of your business, and often the only point of human contact a customer has with your brand. Therefore, it’s crucial that they possess the right skills to deliver effective omnichannel customer service.

Customer service teams should be knowledgeable about products to answer support queries, possess excellent communication skills to deal with all kinds of customers, and have appropriate support etiquette across online and offline channels.

It’s also important to empower your support team with the best tools that enable them to deliver effective and cohesive support across channels. Consider:

  • Agent scripting to guide agents through workflows and ensure efficient interactions across channels every time
  • Machine learning tools and artificial intelligence to enhance support operations, improve response times, introduce automation, and increase agent productivity and efficiency
  • The right call center software and ticketing service that centralizes customer conversations, data, and support.

Ensure you have a contact center solution to manage digital channels

Call centers provide a phone-centric approach to customer support. In today’s digital world, consumers connect and interact with brands across diverse channels including phone calls, text messaging, video, and more. Traditional phone-based support centers can’t facilitate an omnichannel support strategy.

Upgrade to a contact center solution that provides all the functions of a traditional support center, as well as managing interactions across diverse channels to help you deliver an exceptional digital customer experience. By integrating your contact center with your CRM, too, you can provide customers with omnichannel support that drives customer satisfaction and boosts your business.

It’s also worth noting that cloud-based communications solutions like those RingCentral provides enhance business continuity by keeping data, resources, and customer interactions safe, secure, and accessible even during disasters and other unexpected situations.

The User List of the RingCentral Admin Portal

How to choose the right omnichannel customer service software

When it comes to choosing the right omnichannel customer service platform for your business, there are some important functions that will enable your support team to best address and prioritize every channel.
The customer service software you choose should feature:
  • Features and functionality to easily manage all the communication channels that are important to your customers.
  • A simple interface that combines customer context and data on one easy-to-use platform
  • Quality management and workforce management tools for tracking agent performance and CX, to train and improve representatives
  • Cloud architecture to increase flexibility, streamline operations, and store customer data safely and securely
  • Contact center reporting and analytics to track performance across channels and teams, and improve customer satisfaction with personalized experiences
  • Native integrations with your chosen CRM, other business-critical tools, and a unified communication platform for your internal collaboration.
  • Open APIs that make scaling up or down simple and integrations that quickly adapt to new technologies as they become available
  • Omnichannel for customer service pricing plans that are straightforward and easy to understand.
Taking an omnichannel approach to customer service enables businesses to meet their customers where they are. Being available to customers across a range of devices and channels enables support teams to deliver consistent support that’s tailored to an individual customer’s needs. When implemented successfully, omnichannel customer service solutions can help you enhance CX, boost brand loyalty, and drive sales with every interaction.

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Omnichannel customer service FAQs

Omnichannel customer service is no longer a new concept. As such, it’s something that customers are already coming to expect. If you don’t meet those expectations—and soon—your customers might seek a brand that will. Signs that you may already be overdue in adopting an omnichannel approach include:

 

  • Your customer satisfaction scores are falling and people are complaining of having to repeat themselves when seeking support.
  • You don’t have a 360-degree view of your customer journeys and can only assess service provision via each channel, separately.
  • Your customers and others are talking about you on platforms where you’re not present. 

As mentioned, omnichannel customer service isn’t something you can provide without work. Some of the most common challenges businesses encounter include the complexity of managing multiple, interconnected channels and the issue of training staff to ably do so. Fortunately, if you invest in a holistic omnichannel contact center solution like RingCentral RingCX it mitigates these challenges. The platform is designed to be easy to implement and intuitive for users. 

 

Choosing the right software solution is crucial for successful omnichannel customer service provision. How much a given solution may cost will depend on the provider. RingCentral RingCX pricing is designed to be both easy-to-understand and predictable to help businesses keep costs under control.