An omnichannel strategy for customer contact – part 2

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This article is intended as a guide for contact center managers, team leaders, CX specialists, and IT decision-makers who want to organize omnichannel customer contact as a mature business process. In this second part, we discuss the organization and implementation of omnichannel and the most common pitfalls.

In this article about the omnichannel strategy:

What personnel choices can you make?
What does omnichannel mean for process design?
what can technology offer
the integration of channels
the agent desktop, the place where everything comes together
the possibilities of automation
steering and KPIs

With multichannel, customers have to start over for each channel; with omnichannel, all channels and back-end systems are integrated so that customer and agent can switch without loss of context. For organizations that have not (yet) integrated their contact channels, there is a world to be gained.

But how do you develop your contact center from a multichannel to an omnichannel customer contact center?

Omnichannel customer contact intersects with operations, IT, data, CX, compliance, and other departments such as sales or marketing. Because omnichannel shifts complexity from the customer to the organization, organizations must put in a relatively large amount of effort to ensure omnichannel functions well.

In the first part of this knowledge article, you will read what omnichannel is, why it is relevant, and what it can yield for the company and the customer.

It helps if a specific employee is ultimately responsible for the service experience, customer journeys, and service promises – you could call this person a CX manager. That same person must also ensure that IT and security are in order and that there is staffing for every channel, which, moreover, leads to the same service quality at every contact.

Various conditions must be met to realize omnichannel customer contact. This involves choices regarding personnel and organization, as well as technological choices.

Personnel choices and organization

Omnichannel is not an IT project, but an organization-wide transformation. Omnichannel requires clear choices regarding processes, working methods, skills, and routing.

Do employees have the skills to handle customer contact across all channels? Are there blended teams, or are teams composed of channel specialists? How do these teams collaborate with each other and with, for example, second-line specialists, stores, field service, or the back office? This organizational choice must align with your customer demand mix, your volumes, your quality ambitions, and your labor market.

The extent to which employees can be deployed across all channels has consequences for recruitment, selection, training, and workforce management. Furthermore, not all channels are equal: telephone and live chat operate synchronously and require tight staffing per interval. For messaging, social media, web forms, and email, you can apply different response times and handle contacts in batches, but this requires sound priority rules and SLAs. Chatbots en voice bots They are a special case: in principle, they can fully handle customer inquiries, but a portion is escalated to employees. Omnichannel therefore requires a supply-driven approach, taking into account the total workload, the sequence, the lead time, and the deployment of skills.

Process design

Implementing omnichannel means that employees may need to switch between more interaction types than just telephone and email. Channels such as chat and messaging require different written language skills than email and postal mail. Moreover, employees themselves must treat all channels as equal and interchangeable towards the customer. Failing to help a calling customer, but instead referring them back to the website or the self-service environment, is contrary to the principle of omnichannel.

Training and quality frameworks must therefore be cross-channel and share the same core, focused on problem understanding, correctness, empathy, clarity, and ownership. Channel-specific differences belong in the execution of the contact, not in the standards associated with that contact. If you help customers better on the phone than via a chatbot, the channels are not equivalent.

The introduction of omnichannel also impacts the work of team leaders. Paying attention to the entire customer journey was already important, but with the implementation of omnichannel, aspects such as service culture and adoption become a core component of leadership.

Harmonization of channels means not only that customers receive the same answers, but also that processes (ID verification, complaint handling) must be uniform.

Technology

The second prerequisite for implementing an omnichannel customer contact strategy is the deployment of the right technology. An omnichannel approach to customer contact does not start with opening as many channels as possible, but with a technical architecture that connects all those channels and in which customer data, interaction history, and context travel along, so that the customer does not have to tell their story over and over again.

The first building block of this architecture is the channels themselves: telephony, email, chat, web forms, social messaging, SMS, and WhatsApp or video. These channels should not function as isolated islands, but should be connected to a single contact center routing platform. Not every contact center platform is suitable for a full-fledged omnichannel setup.

With an omnichannel platform, you can configure the processing and routing of the various channels. To which employee groups are the different channels routed? Which interflows and overflows are set up? How are volumes and service levels monitored?

Channel integration

The second building block is the integration of channels, customer data, and contact history. For omnichannel, connections between the customer contact platform and the CRM application are at the very least a prerequisite for making linked channels and customer data available to employees.

For example, it is possible to recognize or identify the customer, the customer request, customer history (such as open tickets), or the urgency prior to routing to an employee.

Other solutions that may or may not be integrated include applications in the fields of social media, training or e-learning, knowledge management, workforce management (WFM), quality monitoring, business intelligence/reporting, et cetera.

For many organizations, the CRM system also draws from various sources: financial systems, ERP systems, online catalogs, and so on. Omnichannel means that information from these sources is also available across all contact channels. So, not only for agents and back-office staff, but also for stores or the counter.

Agent desktop: where everything comes together

The third building block is the agent desktop: the cross-channel 'screen' with which the employee works. This is an important point where the benefits of omnichannel must become apparent. In addition to a softphone and status information regarding availability and service levels for channels, a good agent desktop brings together customer data or customer inquiry, contact history, the knowledge base, and workflow steps in a single work environment. This prevents agents from switching between systems and increases productivity. This shortens handling time and limits the risk of errors.

With the agent desktop, as a manager, you face the choice of which system takes precedence: do you integrate all CRM elements into the contact center platform, or do you integrate contact center functions into the CRM platform? Additionally, there are combined solutions on the market. In any case, it is essential that there is a cloud-based CCaaS-a platform is available that can seamlessly connect via open APIs with CRM, WFM, IVR, and other systems, including AI applications.

Legacy often plays a role in the implementation of technology. Many organizations still have older telephony platforms, various applications, point solutions, and custom systems, and/or fragmented data sources. Sometimes contact centers employ an all-in-one strategy where new point solutions are added over time; at other times, contact centers adopt a best-of-breed approach, placing great value on the best functionality in every area.

Automation

AI applications in omnichannel customer contact can contribute to efficiency gains and quality improvement. In short: opportunities for generative AI exist in the use of speech-to-text for intent recognition and routing, but also for quality monitoring and analytics across all contacts; there are solutions that allow you to support agents during the call (agent assist, next best action) and to automatically summarize calls. Integration into the agent desktop is essential for the use of agent assist; automated call summarization works best when the summaries are also written to the CRM system. AI can also be used for smart routing and predictive analytics.

Agentic AI goes a step further than AI solutions based on generative AI. Agentic AI can perform actions independently within predefined frameworks. For example, such an AI agent can interpret customer queries, retrieve data, implement a status change, initiate a follow-up action, provide feedback to the customer, and, if desired, transfer the case to an employee. In omnichannel customer contact, this is particularly relevant for repetitive, process-oriented customer queries that span multiple systems. Agentic AI requires reliable API access to back-office and customer systems, strict authorizations, logging, monitoring, and governance. Auditability is also becoming more important: organizations must be able to reconstruct which decision was made by which AI agent, based on which data, and with what result.

In omnichannel AI, attention is often focused on customer-facing applications such as chatbots, agent assist, or automatic summaries. However, operational automation is at least as important: the automatic coordination of people, time, and work across channels and teams. Think of real-time capacity reallocation, adjusting schedules, shifting work between queues, or freeing up time for training when demand allows.

AI enriches omnichannel customer contact with analysis and support; agentic AI adds autonomous execution to this. The art is to deploy both variants in such a way that they do not cause additional fragmentation, but rather create more cohesion in operations and, consequently, in the customer journey.

Steering and KPIs

Steering and KPIs form the final building block of omnichannel. With omnichannel customer contact, you can stick to steering based on classic metrics such as AHT or waiting time per channel. However, it becomes more interesting to also look at first contact resolution, channel switching, percentages of successful switching between channels, customer satisfaction, or response time per channel. With omnichannel, you will need to pay closer attention to the flow of a customer journey rather than the handling of a contact within a single channel.

You can also focus on employee satisfaction and adoption: are employees using the desktop effectively, do integrations work stably, and does automation truly result in less friction? For the organization as a whole, you can look further at the cost savings resulting from working with integrated solutions – both in the IT field and in terms of efficiency gains in customer contact, because information does not need to be retrieved from many different systems, with or without copy-pasting.

A common problem is that organizations measure omnichannel but do not yet truly act on it. CX metrics such as CSAT, CES, and NPS are often reported systematically, while their influence on daily decisions remains limited.

For mature omnichannel, retrospective reporting is not sufficient. The next step is for operational, financial, and CX data to converge in a governance model that enables real-time intervention: predicting friction, adjusting priorities, and actively steering customer journeys instead of merely analyzing in hindsight.

Implementation and pitfalls

For omnichannel to work, many process steps, systems, and integrations are required. In doing so, organizations still make the mistake of involving employees too late or too little in the changes, and failing to adequately explain why the changes are necessary.

A pitfall, therefore, is that organizations start with technology and stack channels without a well-thought-out strategy. The risk of this is that essential components are overlooked, causing omnichannel to remain simply multichannel in practice. Omnichannel requires a sound change program with engaged employees.

Another pitfall is that teams across different channels compete with each other based on KPIs. This can occur, for example, between the first and second lines ('frequent call transfers contribute to achieving first-line objectives') or because employees lack the information to properly assist customers after a channel switch – for example, from website to telephone.

A third pitfall is customer recognition. If this is lacking, employees continue to ask customers questions that they have already answered. This requires up-to-date, reliable systems for customer information and knowledge management.

Anyone wishing to manage multiple channels simultaneously needs advanced WFM tools. Telephony can be organized to a certain extent using Excel, but Erlang formulas do not work for email or chat because these channels are asynchronous.

More channels, but no foundation

Perhaps the biggest pitfall of omnichannel is that organizations get stuck in the middle: more channels, more data, and more automation, but without a fundamental redesign of the customer journey. While this adds extra complexity, it does not automatically create more value. Those who truly want to grow must approach omnichannel as an enterprise-wide design challenge: with a uniform customer identity, real-time management, clear governance, and automation that actually translates insights into action.