Date: August 14, 2024A multichannel contact center is an indispensable part of an evolving business. It allows you to seamlessly interact with customers on multiple touchpoints and improve customer engagement and satisfaction.
At a time when 76% of customers turn to competitors after just 1+ bad experiences, you cannot afford to ignore the importance of serving your customers across channels. That’s what a multichannel contact center facilitates.
Here’s a guide on the multichannel contact center, its key components, types of channels, strategies to manage it, its benefits and limitations, and the top 6 multichannel contact center providers.
What Is a Multichannel Contact Center?
Multichannel contact center is a contact center software that allows you to extend seamless multichannel customer service via different communication channels–IVR, SMS, Email, and web chat from a single platform. This improves your agent’s efficiency and helps them deliver better support.
From sending real-time SMS to accessing customer journey histories and automating workflows, a multichannel contact center can do it all and more. The results? Improved customer relationships, high customer engagement, and boosted retention.
Don’t confuse a multichannel contact center with a call center.
"An ideal multichannel contact center empowers you to have fruitful interactions with customers across multiple channels and build lasting customer relationships. But not all contact centers will match your business needs. So, choose the one that is highly functional and aligns with your specific requirements. Apply our listed strategies to manage it perfectly. "
Importance of Multichannel Contact Center
92% of customers would abandon a company with which they experience negative interactions. To promote positive and prompt conversations, a multichannel contact center is essential. Here are some other points on why a multichannel contact center is important:
- Increases customer satisfaction by allowing your customer base to reach out via their convenient channel.
- Enables contact center agents to support customers across multiple touchpoints in one place and automate operational tasks, which improves agent productivity and lowers wait time.
- Makes spotting and improving deviations in agents’ performance, quality of support, and customer satisfaction easy through contact center analytics and reports.
- Helps deliver the best customer experience by solving issues efficiently, making you stand out from competitors.
- Integrates all the channels that free you from the burden of keeping up with different platforms.
Benefits of Multichannel Contact Center
Multichannel contact center enables you to entertain customer inquiries on the channel of their choice. But wait, there’s more to it. Here are the benefits of a Multichannel Contact center:
1. In-depth customer interaction insights
A contact center software platform can give you insights into customer interactions across multiple support channels in a single place–live chat, social media, calls, and so on.
Agents can instantly access customer-specific information–previous interactions, behavior, and likes to provide tailored support.
Also, when customers can access multiple support channels to reach out, the chances of issue resolutions are higher, improving their satisfaction and engagement.
2. Enhanced contact center performance
Want to ace customer relationships and have better customer retention without an increased physical infrastructure? Well, constantly monitoring and improving the contact center performance can help. Leverage the contact center’s single dashboard that furnishes customer behavior, preferences, analytics, and reporting on its overall performance.
Not just that, the contact center enables you to:
- Live track agent-customer conversations
- Gauge customer sentiments
- Review/improve agent’s performance
This can help you optimize your services/products/marketing to better satisfy your customers and boost profits.
3. Improved productivity and performance
An efficient multi-channel contact center is built to reduce the agent’s workload without compromising customer service, increasing business efficiency.
- The AI support feature can automate repetitive tasks and auto-answer general complaints.
- Workforce management tools can auto-generate agents’ schedules that are customizable to their requirements.
- The shift bidding feature can help agents exchange shifts with other agents.
4. Improved customer service and brand image
A multi-channel contact center helps you monitor customer behavior, spot any sentiment changes, and take immediate action. It’s critical as 89% of consumers will repurchase from a brand that offers positive customer service.
Not just that, the multichannel contact center has Interactive Voice Response with skill-based routing, so the customer is always handled by an agent best at solving that specific query.
All of this significantly enhances customer service. And when your customers trust you and keep returning to you, your brand image is bound to improve.
Key Components of Multichannel Contact Center
Remember, your multichannel contact center is only as robust as its components. When each component is efficient, your multichannel contact center inevitably drives desired results such as high customer satisfaction and engagement, customer loyalty, and agent productivity.
Let’s thus look at the top 7 components that make a multichannel contact center:
- Automatic call distribution to distribute calls based on agents’ skills/availability or predefined routing rules to best resolve queries.
- Multiple communication channels–voice calls, email, web chat, video call, and more- allow customers to choose the one that suits them.
- Agent multichannel dashboard to view customer interactions across channels. It can integrate with third-party apps–UCaaS platforms, communication platforms, and CRM for a deeper view.
- Analytics, reporting, and monitoring tools to monitor multichannel contact center agents’ and centers’ functioning. It also creates reports on agents’ performance, support quality, center usage, etc.
- Self-service option includes IVR and a knowledge base. This allows customers to solve their problems using IVR voice commands or via FAQs/product information/other resources provided in the knowledge base.
- Quality assurance features to monitor and improve agents’ performance and incorporate customer feedback to enhance service.
- AI and automation to automate repetitive agent functions and workflow automation/optimization. For instance, the contact center automatically creates agents’ schedules after considering the center’s demand and the agent’s availability.
Check out 2023 contact center trends so you are not left behind.
Types of Channels in Multichannel Contact Center:
Here are the types of channels in a typical multichannel contact center that facilitate multichannel communication.
1. Phone calls
Phone calls are one of the basic digital channels that almost all multichannel contact centers must include. Phone support offers a quick, hassle-free solution through automated and live agent responses.
2. Email
Customers prefer email as a communication tool as it requires relatively low effort, minimal engagement, and can work with an average internet connection. Also, sending automated emails–bulk emails, password verification, service promotion, etc.- saves you time.
3. SMS text message
SMS text messages help you quickly update customers on urgent updates without wasting time scheduling a call. Incorporate automated triggers–live order updates, order confirmation, SMS chatbots, and more into your direct messages for better management.
Social media is among the indispensable digital channels as customers prefer it for quicker responses to their queries. Contact centers with social monitoring capabilities can easily manage and monitor company-related activities on social media. This helps to increase your brand follower count on social media. If you are a new brand, you can get some free IG followers from reliable sites to further improve your brand reach
5. Live chat fv
Live chat is one of the quickest issue resolution channels for complex, elaborate queries. Agents can provide instant, definitive solutions on the live online chat or direct customers to a knowledge base. Live chat software enables quick resolution of complex queries, making it an efficient channel for issue resolution saving time and effort.
Strategies for Managing Multichannel Contact Center
A multichannel contact center only drives customer satisfaction when you use the right strategies. Here are 3 strategies that can level up your contact center management:
1. Consider high-utility technology
Effective multichannel communication requires the right technology and features to facilitate a seamless customer experience. For instance, AI support like auto customer sentiment analysis and live agent guidance can help agents have customer information at their fingertips to provide a better customer experience.
Also, self-service options–IVR and AI chatbots instantly resolve general customer queries, improving customer satisfaction and saving agents’ time for more complex issues.
2. Call center performance analysis
Regularly monitoring and improving your contact center’s performance helps you spot improvement areas and deliver the best customer experience.
Performance analysis can help you understand trends like the channel customers prefer, interaction on a certain channel, customer satisfaction levels, agents’ responses to customer issues, and so on. This data can help you optimize your strategies for maximum returns.
3. Incorporate limited channels
You must only have channels that your customers would find useful, make customer service seamless, and maintain service quality. More channels would become unmanageable, leading to poor customer support, and decreased customer retention.
For example, you may extend customer support through SMS texts or chatbots if your business requires customers to place regular orders or book appointments, respectively.
Challenges of Multichannel Contact Center
Multichannel contact centers come with some challenges; however, you can overcome them all if you manage things efficiently. Here are 3 challenges you might face:
1. Multichannel data management
Multi-channel contact centers are meant to give you a holistic view of customer interactions. But the growing number of channels has made integrating and managing all interactions difficult.
2. Finding skilled agents
To handle interaction on multiple channels, you’d need to hire proficient agents who can deliver exemplary customer experience on different channels. Now finding and regularly training such agents is an extensively time-consuming and expensive task. In fact, 54% of companies are having difficulty finding skilled workers.
3. High technology advancement rate
Multichannel contact center software gets outdated with time. So, you need to upgrade it, which requires money and time and might disturb business operations. Acquiring the most relevant yet latest technology contact center that fits your business needs can be difficult.
You can, however, overcome these challenges by opting for the multichannel contact center with highly functional features trusted by thousands of users, just like the ones listed below.
Top 6 Free Multichannel Contact Center Providers
Choosing from the plethora of contact center providers in the market can be challenging. Here are thus the top 6 providers you can consider:
1. CallHippo
CallHippo, a multichannel contact center with 14 days free trial, enables you to level up your processes and connect with more customers and prospects. You can expect enhanced agents’ productivity, automated workflows, thoroughly tracked team performance, and lowered communication costs.
Features
- In-depth integration with CRM and Helpdesk
- Interactive Voice Response
- Call center analytics
CallHippo Pros and Cons
- 99% Uptime guarantee
- Resolve queries faster by accessing customer feedback and call recordings in a shared inbox
- Enhance customer experience by assigning customer queries to agents with relevant skills through call routing
- Customer support team might take slightly longer to respond
- Limited trial
Pricing
- Starter – $18 Per user/Month
- Professional – $30 Per user/Month
- Ultimate – $42 Per user/Month
*Pricing as of 11-06-2024.
2. Five9
Five9, a multichannel contact center platform, arms agents with the best tools to deliver a worthwhile personalized customer experience. Unleash agents’ skills by combining their service with AI/automation with Five9.
Features
- User, role, access, and queue management
- Automatic call distribution to avoid agents manually routing calls
- Co-browsing to browse the website with customers to clear their doubts
Five9 Pros and Cons
- Fulfill customer expectations by referring to past customer interactions through call recording
- Track and save key analytics through the custom reports feature
- Easy to set up by referring to Five9’s online documentation and classes
- The platform is buggy at times
- Integration with HubSpot is a hassle
Pricing
- Digital: $149/month
- Core: $149/month
- Premium: $169/month
- Optimum: $199/month
- Ultimate: $229/month
3. TalkDesk
Talkdesk, an end-to-end contact center platform, empowers you to deliver a better customer experience. It allows you to create a friction-free customer journey across different channels with its automation-first solutions.
Features
- Concurrent calling to make a large number of calls simultaneously
- Inbound screen pop to access available customer data over ongoing call
- Call back to allow users/agents to request a callback
TalkDesk Pros and Cons
- Get an overview of high-utility metrics--customer data through custom dashboards
- Intuitive UI
- Dive deeper into the contact center’s performance with comprehensive reporting
- Call sound may lag sometimes
- May experience downtime
Pricing
- CX Cloud Essential: $75/user/month
- CX Cloud Elevate: $95/user/month
- CX Cloud Elite: $125/user/month
- Experience Clouds: Contact Sales
4. Dialpad
Dialpad is a multichannel contact center software that allows you to extend customer support and seamlessly collaborate with teams while driving sales. Real-time coaching to agents and integrations with help desks allow agents to give solutions to customers without switching apps.
Features
- Call monitoring
- Session summary notes to access caller’s information and contact history quickly
- Administrator access to guide agents during calls
Dialpad Pros and Cons
- Improve call success by incorporating Dialpad’s AI suggestions
- Dialpad’s setting up and navigation is easy
- Understand customer queries easily with real-time transcript
- Sometimes that application freezes
- Slow load time
Pricing
Pro/Enterprise: Contact Sales
5. RingCentral
RingCentral, a multichannel call center software, enables you to make your contact and call center profitable. RingCentral does everything from empowering your agents with call scripting to gaining actionable insights while improving security and compliance.
Features
- Ticket collaboration allows agents to solve an issue collaboratively
- Voice broadcast to play a pre-recorded audio message when a call is picked
- Agent scheduling and assignment
Ringcentral Pros and Cons
- Protect your data and communications with enterprise-grade security
- Reduce customer repetition and empower agents with agent notes and customer deposition
- Understand and help customers better through customer sentiment analysis
- Integration with Salesforce is a hassle
- Limited customizations available
Pricing
Essentials/Standard/Premium/Ultimate: Contact Sales
6. Genesys
Genesys, a contact center software, aims to empower employees and make customers happy. Give seamless cross-channel support by responding in real-time via website/social media/web chat.
Features
- Automatic call distribution
- Customer journey orchestration to optimize customer engagement based on goals, prior experience, and customer preferences
- Workforce scheduling and forecasting
Genesys Pros and Cons
- Solve customer issues in real-time with web messaging
- Improve efficiency and quality of customer interactions with an agent assist feature
- Deliver the best customer service by routing customer calls to the most relevant agent
- Limited customizations on the dashboard
- Introduces unexpected changes in UI
Pricing
Genesys Cloud CX 1
- Voice: $75/month
Genesys Cloud CX 2
- Digital: $95/month
- Digital + Voice: $115/month
Genesys Cloud CX 3
- Digital + WEM: $135/month
- Digital + WEM + Voice: $155/month
Wrapping Up
Multichannel contact centers enable you to manage customer conversations regardless of the platform by bringing the inclusivity of different channels into one software. This improves agents’ productivity and boosts customer satisfaction.
When you’re readily available to interact with customers, their queries are resolved, and they stay longer. So, what are you waiting for? Choose one of the top multichannel contact center providers and start building customer loyalty.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. What is the main difference between multichannel and omnichannel contact centers?
Multichannel contact centers allow businesses to have customer conversations on multiple channels–phone, email, chat, and social media. In contrast, omnichannel contact centers bring all channels into one software platform.
2. What are examples of multi-channel messaging?
Three examples of multi-channel messaging are email, social media, and television.
3. What is omnichannel communication?
Omnichannel communication refers to unifying customer information and conversations from different communication channels to dive deep into and accelerate the customer’s journey.
4. How do I choose the right channels for my Multichannel Contact Center?
Choosing the right communication channels requires a confluence of 2 factors:
- Most preferred channels by customers
- Channels that match your business requirements and are feasible
5. What role does technology play in a Multichannel Contact Center?
Multichannel contact center requires technology like:
- Reporting tools to analyze the contact center performance and improve customer service
- Workflow optimization/automation tools to make it easier for your internal team to manage customer interactions
- Different channels–SMS direct messages, video meetings, email, and social media to communicate with customers freely
Supriya Bajaj is a senior content developer with immense experience in the VoIP telephony domain. With a deep knowledge of VoIP systems and emerging technologies in the field, she provides insightful and targeted content. Known for simplifying complex topics and her thought-leadership articles, Supriya delivers actionable content for both technical and non-technical audiences.
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