What is omnichannel customer experience? The complete guide for 2025.

The concept of an omnichannel experience is transforming businesses globally. But what exactly does omnichannel customer experience mean for your contact center? Omnichannel customer service is reshaping how companies engage with consumers. Implementing an effective omnichannel strategy requires the right contact center platform to ensure seamless interactions.

This guide explores what omnichannel customer experience is, how omnichannel customer service works, and how businesses can leverage it to enhance customer satisfaction and operational efficiency.

What is omnichannel customer service?

Omnichannel customer service is a strategy that enables businesses to provide seamless customer support across multiple communication channels, including phone calls, SMS, email, social media, live chat, and chatbots. Unlike traditional models, an omnichannel approach ensures that customer interactions remain connected, allowing for a smooth and uninterrupted experience.

What is omnichannel customer experience?

Omnichannel customer experience is the broader strategy that encompasses omnichannel customer service. The goal is to provide a consistent and personalized journey across all touchpoints, ensuring that customers can transition between channels without losing context or repeating information. A key component of an omnichannel strategy is ensuring that all channels are interconnected and provide a seamless customer journey.

Omnichannel vs. multichannel: key differences.

While both omnichannel and multichannel strategies involve multiple communication channels, the main difference lies in integration. A multichannel approach allows customer interactions across different platforms, but these channels operate independently. In contrast, an omnichannel strategy ensures that all channels are interconnected, providing a unified customer experience.

For example, in a multichannel environment, a customer may start an inquiry via social media but must start over when calling a support line. With an omnichannel approach, the customer’s history is accessible across all platforms, enabling a seamless and efficient experience.

Why omnichannel customer service is essential.

Customer service is a form of marketing. It makes people happier with a company and, therefore, likelier to stay subscribed or to re-buy. It also means customers are more likely to recommend a business to others. Because an omnichannel contact center can be critical to customer service, that makes it a form of omnichannel marketing.

Executing an omnichannel customer engagement strategy successfully requires consistency. This can be difficult because customer expectations are forever changing and people are increasingly expecting a deeply personalized customer experience. That can be challenging to deliver, but omnichannel support can definitely help. The key is to avoid a disjointed customer journey, as this can adversely affect customer retention and loyalty.

What are the key benefits of omnichannel customer support? Some of the primary advantages of an omnichannel strategy include:

Faster time to resolution.

Let’s say an organization operates an inbound call center and offers no other form of contact for customer engagement. Not only will this put off many customers and potential customers from contacting the organization, it also creates a kind of bottleneck. A company can hire as many agents as it wants, but those agents can still only interact with customers via phone calls. This can mean long wait times for customers and it can be exhausting for call center agents.

An omnichannel approach—powered by a contact solution that allows for easy movement across different channels—speeds up query resolution. Many customer issues and questions are relatively simple. An email, a social media interaction, or a chatbot—AI or otherwise—can often solve these issues. This avoids a customer having to call a contact center and wait on hold for half an hour just to talk to an agent for two minutes. The increased efficiency of an omnichannel strategy can reduce the time to resolution significantly.

Improved agent retention.

A company can invest in the best contact center solutions and have the best intentions in mind, but ultimately, a contact center is only as good as its agents. Hiring the right quantity and quality of staff is crucial for contact center performance—as is keeping those agents.

Burnout is a big problem in a contact center environment. This can be especially true for call centers. Having to always take or make another call can exhaust agents, causing them to slow down at work or ultimately leave for another job.

Furthermore, it may be difficult to hire the best candidates, because they may prefer to work in a contact center that allows them a variety of ways to interact with customers. An omnichannel contact center can give agents that variety, letting them respond to emails, social media messages, chats, or SMS/text messages on certain days, certain shifts, or sometimes just to break up the monotony of fielding phone call after phone call.

Increased customer engagement.

It’s not in a company’s interest to make it difficult for customers to interact with them. Customer engagement is crucial to just about any organization’s success, so it’s logical to make it as easy as possible for a customer to engage with it. An increase in positive customer interactions can lead to increased customer loyalty; customers feel better about a brand, more valued by that brand, and that the brand cares about them and their business.

None of these benefits can transpire if it’s too difficult for customers to engage with a company or if they get the impression that any engagement must occur on the company’s terms, making them feel uncomfortable and left out. An omnichannel approach makes it easy for customers to interact with an organization, empowering them to do so via any medium they like. It also allows for that engagement to happen quicker and more conveniently.

Increased customer satisfaction.

Higher levels of customer engagement don’t automatically lead to higher levels of customer satisfaction, but there’s a strong connection between the two. Even if a customer encounters a problem with a company’s product or service, if they can access help for that issue quickly and conveniently, they’re still likely to be satisfied.

An omnichannel approach acknowledges customer preference. It makes it easy for customers to reach out to an organization with their questions and problems. It also means they are less likely to procrastinate when an issue arises, which is important because a customer’s own procrastination can lead to them feeling more dissatisfied and negative about a company.

For example, if someone feels uncomfortable making a phone call, they might put off some troubleshooting they need. As time goes by and they’re continuously unable to use a product, they may resent the company who made the product, even if that company has an inbound call center with plenty of agents available. However, if that company had a chatbot or text channel available, that same customer could contact the organization and receive the troubleshooting help they need in minutes, and thus feel much more satisfied with their purchase and their relationship with the business.

Greater cost optimization.

It’s usually cheaper for an organization to retain an agent rather than search for a replacement and train them. The same logic applies to customer retention; it’s often better and more cost-effective to keep the customers a company has as opposed to looking for new ones to replace those who have left. Customer retention boosts the lifetime value of that customer. This translates into revenue and it also decreases acquisition costs.

Omnichannel capability can be an important factor in customer loyalty. High levels of customer engagement and customer satisfaction can lead to higher retention rates. By simply shifting some call center agents to operate chatbots, social media response channels, and/or email messaging—and equipping them with an efficient contact center solution—a business can achieve a significant rise in customer retention. It can be just as effective as any customer loyalty program.

Streamlined channel activation.

Brands that have an established omnichannel strategy can design and activate new touchpoints quicker. This can be a big competitive advantage. Meeting customers where they are breaks down barriers. Being able to activate and continue customer interactions on one or more channels that suit the customer helps streamline operations. Otherwise, bottlenecks may occur, and customers will experience long wait times before reaching an agent.

Better data utilization.

Omnichannel support doesn’t work well without customer data synchronization. A customer may contact an organization via phone call one month, by email the next, and then through social media another time. It may be critical for the organization to verify it is the same customer in each case. It may also be crucial for each of the different agents to know why the customer contacted the center previously and if a previous agent helped resolve their query, and how.

This is why it’s necessary to support an omnichannel strategy with data synchronization. A contact center solution that makes it easy for agents to log data and store it is key. This way, when a customer calls back, a different agent can access that customer’s data quickly.

A solution with an easy-to-use dashboard that prominently displays relevant data, or where to access that data, is valuable. This helps to avoid data silos. Some companies track all the data they need, but if they don’t have a simple way to share that data across agents and departments, then they can’t utilize it to their benefit.

How does omnichannel strategy work?

What does an omnichannel approach actually look like in practice? Let’s examine an example of an organization that moved to an omnichannel model and the results it achieved by doing so.

Cover-More

Cover-More is a global travel insurance provider. They were already looking at ways of expanding their use of cloud-based solutions and hybrid or remote work before the COVID-19 pandemic began, but when it did strike, they had to accelerate their plans. Cover-More selected Webex Contact Center and cloud calling to help them achieve their goals and successfully launched them across their entire global customer service network in just one day.

Webex offers an intuitive omnichannel solution with real-time global reporting and data analytics. While Cover-More’s focus may have initially been expanding their cloud solutions and enabling remote work, they found they had unlocked major benefits to their customer support services, too.

“Our customers won’t necessarily want to just call us—they may want to email us—or SMS—they might want to use chat—they might want to use Facebook. Webex gives us that ability to have that discussion on how we’re going to better serve our customers,” explained James Hill, Global Manager, Infrastructure and Cloud.

With Webex, Cover-More was able to migrate almost 300 agents, upgrade its IT stack, streamline workflows, and make travel insurance more accessible by integrating with business partners. “By removing all the old stuff, and moving to Webex, we actually saved over 30 percent on our operating costs year over year,” said Hill.

This goes to show how an omnichannel strategy—with the right contact center solution behind it—can improve efficiency, reduce costs, and make an organization more accessible to its customers and potential customers.

How to implement an omnichannel approach

The benefits of an omnichannel strategy are clear now. But just knowing a strategy can be beneficial doesn’t mean an organization will go out tomorrow and begin implementing an omnichannel approach. Many businesses have to overcome inertia to make significant changes to how their contact centers operate, even if they’re aware of the potential advantages of doing so.

That’s why it’s important to know how to approach an omnichannel marketing strategy. Having a framework for how to transition to an omnichannel strategy can get past organizational inertia. Here are five best practices for building an omnichannel contact center:

Centralize customer data.

As mentioned above, data silos create fragmented journeys. This happens when all the data exists somewhere, but center agents can’t or don’t know how to access it. This can make customer interactions longer and less pleasant. There are few things more aggravating for a customer contacting an organization to address an ongoing or recurring issue, only for the agent on the other end of the channel to ask them a series of questions they’ve already answered.

A comprehensive contact center solution can solve this problem. A good solution makes it easy to track, store, access, and share customer data. In seconds, any agent working any channel can access a customer’s information. This includes basic information, such as their name, account number, and location, but it can include more in-depth information, too. For example, a customer’s account profile in an efficient contact center solution might also list their reasons for contacting the center previously, with a label for the issue they were experiencing and whether the agent responding was able to resolve that issue.

Map the customer journey.

Webex Contact Center helps companies centralize their customer data and map customer journeys. It’s a comprehensive solution that can help on-premise and cloud-based contact centers. With a platform like Webex Contact Center, brands can activate customer data by orchestrating the optimal customer journey map.

With that map, an organization can use tools like the virtual flow builder to enable the next-best action decisions and route inbound engagements to the best possible solution. That solution might be a virtual agent or a human agent, but whatever is the best fit for that customer, Webex Contact Center can help agents find it and assist the customer in the quicker, most efficient ways.

Leverage AI-powered self-service.

Contact center AI is becoming increasingly important, especially for omnichannel strategies.

One way to ease the workload on contact center agents is to introduce an AI-powered chatbot. These can operate as virtual agents, using AI to learn about customer needs and address them. Crucially, these virtual agents must communicate with customers in a way that feels human. Even if the customers know they’re interacting with an AI chatbot, if it responds with stilted or unnatural language, the customers might feel uncomfortable or frustrated.

If the virtual agent can respond in a human-like cadence and provide quick answers and solutions, this can speed up the customer interaction process significantly. Customers can begin to address their concerns without waiting for a live agent. Some customers may not need to interact with a human agent at all. By automating routine interactions, chatbots help manage call volume, allowing agents to focus on more complicated cases while customers with simpler queries can enjoy a quick and convenient path to resolution.

Contact center AI can also help power interactive voice response (IVR). An IVR system can answer a call and guide the caller through an automated menu, helping them reach the appropriate resources quickly. AI can strengthen IVR by providing Natural Language Processing (NLP) and speech recognition.

NLP helps IVR systems understand and process language input from callers. This allows for more natural and conversational IVR interactions; callers can speak as they normally do. They don’t have to over-enunciate and speak abnormally slowly to be understood. Nor do they have to navigate rigid menu options.

An AI-powered speech recognition system enables the transcription and interpretation of spoken language with a high level of accuracy. Callers can interact with the system using voice commands. Advanced speech recognition technology allows IVR systems to understand a broad range of accents and dialects. For many callers, this type of interaction is preferable to pushing a button to respond, especially when using a mobile phone with a touch screen.

Analyze customer experience data.

An omnichannel approach can help organizations analyze the customer experience they provide. Something as simple as an email after an interaction can log useful data about the customer journey and experience. Webex Contact Center can help companies track and compile customer experience data across each communication channel.

One important piece of data is the customer effort score, or CES. This measures the relative effort required for a customer to complete a task or interaction. CES can give organizations a vital insight into how easy or difficult their customer interactions are. Customers don’t want to experience friction when trying to contact a business to resolve an issue, so the easier it is for them to do this, the more satisfied they’re likely to be.

Deliver a personalized experience.

Customers don’t want to feel like just another number. They want to feel valued and recognized. This underscores the importance of delivering a personalized experience. They don’t expect contact center agents to know them personally, but they do want each agent to understand their critical information as it relates to the business.

Webex Contact Center provides agents with real-time visibility into previous customer survey responses. This allows them to personalize interactions. Critically, they can also access information from previous customer queries, regardless of which channel they used. An agent answering a phone call can find all the same customer information as one responding to an email.

Optimize the customer journey with Webex Contact Center.

Omnichannel support can bring so many benefits to an organization’s contact center. From operational advantages such as increased contact center efficiency and agent retention to customer experience benefits such as improved customer satisfaction and customer loyalty, an omnichannel strategy is a great approach for your contact center. It’s great for right now, and because it allows for scalability, it can help your organization grow, too.

To support an omnichannel strategy properly, though, you need the right tools. Learn more about Webex Contact Center and how it enables effective and efficient omnichannel capabilities.

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