Omnichannel and multichannel are some of the terms that are commonly used in the contact centre industry. Oftentimes the people are confused with these terms, some people think omnichannel is a fancy name for multichannel. These two have a different purpose in the industry but first, we need to understand what is multichannel and omnichannel in contact centres.
What are multichannel contact centres?
A multichannel contact centre allows customers to connect to multiple channels like email, web, call, social media, and many other channels, but each channel has its separate database.Agents cannot access previous user interaction data from other channels. Multichannel contact centres cannot have contextual information about customers if customers use different channels every time. Some customers only want to interact with one channel and want all information on a single channel.
For example, if a customer interacted with a company or an organization about an inquiry through email and later the same customer interacted through phone or any other channel, the agents will not have any customer information or context to the conversation. The contact centre agents will have to ask the customers for information every time they use different channels. This is not an efficient way to interact with an organization or a company.
Hiring agents for a multichannel system of a company or an organization is an expensive process. Hiring agents from a third-party marketplace like Voizworks can help bring down costs because of the flexibility and scalability of their agents.
What are omnichannel contact centres?
The term “Omni” means all, so an omnichannel is all channels. Similar to multichannel, customers can interact with an organization or a company through multiple channels, unlike multichannel the channels in omnichannel funnels to a single centralized channel and have a single user database. Agents can have previous customer interactions across all channels all in one screen, this helps to have context and pick up the conversation where it was left off.
For example, if a customer interacts with an organization or a company about an inquiry through email and later the same customer call through phone, omnichannel will have information about the customer from the email at the agent’s screen so that the following conversation will have context, this is only possible in an omnichannel contact centre.
The journey of a customer is easy to track in an omnichannel contact centre. In future, if the customer interacts with the company or organization again, the agents can pick up the conversation where they left off in the previous interaction.
Hiring agents for an omnichannel system of a company or an organization is complex since omnichannel requires agents to manage multiple channels and it is difficult to find agents with adept skill sets. Hiring agents from a third-party marketplace like Voizworks can help bring down costs because of the flexibility and scalability of their agents. Companies can find agents with low skill levels to high skilled well-experienced agents depending on the type of tasks.
Which system is better?
Companies can choose between an omnichannel and multichannel system depending on the size of your business and customers. Omnichannel provides flexibility for customers and a seamless experience on different channels while the multichannel, the customers can prefer single-channel what they are comfortable with. An omnichannel contact centre is helpful in large companies or organizations, where they have multiple channels of communication and customers can interact with any channel. In Omnichannel, tracking of the customer’s journey is effortless compared to multichannel. For medium to small businesses multichannel can be helpful because they have fewer channels of communication.
New age market places like VOIZ support all systems. By efficiently piecing together the best support systems, companies can see improvements in the bottom line.
