Whether you communicate with customers via a call center, a multichannel contact center, or an omnichannel CX hub, your customers don’t care. Outcomes and the quality of their experience are the only things they really care about when contacting your outsourcing partner. So, engage a top BPM solutions provider to offer your customers and prospects the best business process management experience with company.
The platforms, services, and channels consumers utilize nowadays are many. Also, individuals like to communicate with businesses using these same channels they use for their personal and professional lives, whether it be text, live chat, Facebook, WhatsApp, or a website. They also desire convenient 24/7 access and a consistent, tailored experience across all these touchpoints while contacting businesses for any purpose.
Therefore, to meet and surpass these customers’ expectations, businesses and outsourcing partners are diligently adopting new strategies and technologies. Contact centers sometimes misinterpret the terms omnichannel and multichannel. However, in practice, significant operational and customer experience differences exist between an omnichannel and a multichannel contact center. It is explained in this article to help contact centers and businesses decide whether to implement a multichannel contact center.
Let’s get down to business! First, understand the terms.
Explain Multichannel and Omnichannel Contact Center Operation
From their basic definitions, omnichannel and multichannel contact centers differ in many ways:
An omnichannel contact center system is one in which the backend unifies all support and communication channels. An agent may easily examine all the information needed for a contextual and customized conversation with a customer by quickly accessing this through a solution. It can help create a more unified, seamless, and connected experience across diverse channels with the help of a top BPM solutions provider.
Agents may communicate with customers via a variety of channels, including voice, email, web forms, social media, fax, chat, and text, with the help of a multichannel contact center solution. Hence, it gives clients the freedom to select the channel or channels they want to interact with a business. However, the backend does not integrate channel interactions, which means they operate independently in such contact center solutions.
Omnichannel vs. Multichannel Contact Center Comparison
While both platforms give clients a wide range of options for interacting with a company, they employ dissimilar technologies that have distinct end goals, address various business difficulties, and necessitate various degrees of agent training and infrastructure requirements.
Different Technologies Utilized
Each communication channel operates independently in a multichannel contact center solution environment. Information and messages from customers are not synchronized. So, by switching between tabs or using different software solutions, agents may view the history of client interactions.
On the other hand, the unified communication solution provided by an omnichannel contact center with a Top BPM solutions provider unifies channels on the back end. Through a dashboard, agents may quickly view customer engagement history to engage consumers in more relevant, meaningful, and personalized conversations.
The effective integration of an omnichannel contact center system is essential for fulfilling the omnichannel promise. It is more sophisticated and complicated when compared to multichannel operations. For instance, it’s important to properly integrate new channels into old ones and with current back-office and business procedures, and only a top BPM solutions provider can help implement it flawlessly.
Various Agent Training Methods
Agents in a multichannel contact center system are trained specifically for each channel. They have received training in managing certain channels in order to cater to the customer demands generated by these channels.
On the contrary, agents are trained to prioritize inquiries from customers in an omnichannel contact center environment in a top BPM solutions provider. They must also be technologically savvy to provide outstanding service across the CX landscape. It takes time and effort, and agent training must be systematic to prepare them for omnichannel support.
Several Types of Business Obstacles
A unified and customized customer experience across platforms is neither consistent nor streamlined in a multichannel contact center system. To address the needs of customers effectively, both agent and customer efforts are necessary, especially if there have been cross-channel contacts with the consumer. On the other hand, proper implementation is difficult in omnichannel contact centers, where the learning curve is steeper, and agent training is more advanced. So, omnichannel and multichannel operations need the expertise of a top BPM solutions provider.
Variations in Business Impact and Output
Omnichannel contact centers manage the whole CXM more effectively than multichannel contact center solutions do in the entire customer service arena. According to industry practices, a customer experience across all channels is predicted to significantly enhance customer retention. Moreover, the cohesive nature of it also lessens the workload for both agents and customers. Also, it increases revenue and conversions. As a result, it also boosts overall profitability with optimized business process management and customer experience.
Here is a list to enumerate the key differences between these two solutions:
Both can engage customers via several channels, whereas only omnichannel can offer a unified customer journey and experience. Services provided by omnichannel contact centers are consistent, uniform, and individualized across channels as opposed to multichannel outsourcing solutions.
Agents receive specialized channel-specific training in multichannel, while omnichannel contact centers are taught to cater to the triage of customer inquiries across channels. Vital metrics are measured for performance unique to a channel in multichannel contact centers. However, omnichannel services concentrate on metrics about overall business success and the influence of particular channels on it. Monitoring and understanding customer engagement history across diverse touchpoints is critical in omnichannel solutions.
Conclusion
Businesses today have the option to select between two excellent yet fundamentally different contact center solutions. In order to choose the best option, firms should:
Find out everything there is to know about omnichannel and multichannel contact center solutions.
Determine the contact center solution that will best achieve your company’s objectives. For businesses to set up solutions as efficiently as possible, carefully consider the services they offer, the customer profile, and the customer contact contact journeys.
Also, reevaluate your chosen model’s performance on a regular basis. Identify possibilities for improvement and translate gaps in iterative implementation activities. Employ a top BPM solutions provider with adequate experience, excellent services, and technological capabilities to ensure your outsourcing initiative becomes a success.