1. What is omnichannel customer contact, and what is multichannel?
Multichannel means you can be reached through several channels: phone, email, chat, WhatsApp, counter. Each channel has its own team, its own queue and its own reporting. That is where most hospitals and municipalities are today, and it works until a patient calls this morning, emails in the afternoon and is standing at the desk tomorrow, and has to tell the same story three times.
Omnichannel customer contact means those channels come together. One customer view, so the agent can see what happened before. One queue, or at least a distribution that lets an agent combine chat and phone. And one set of figures, so you can compare the service level of chat and phone using the same definition. It is not about the number of channels. It is about whether they form a whole.
2. Why the channel is the wrong question
“Should we switch on WhatsApp?” is a question you cannot answer without asking another one first: why do people get in touch, and what do they expect when they do? A resident who wants to book a bulky waste collection is helped faster by a chat or a form than by a phone call. A patient hearing a test result wants a human being on the line. A member of an association with a complaint above all does not want to be transferred three times.
“Adding a channel without a strategy is adding a queue. The customer notices the difference, and so does the team.”
So start with the contact reasons and the expectation for each reason. Only then do you choose which channel suits it best, what you can absorb through self-service and where a human being is indispensable. That is the essence of “strategy first, then the channel”. It stops you buying something you will want to replace in three years, and it gives you a story you can explain to the council, the board or the works council.
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3. Four questions for an omnichannel strategy
An omnichannel strategy does not have to be a weighty tome. In our approach we answer four questions, in this order:
- What do we have now? An internal functional and technological analysis: which channels, which systems, which teams, which figures. This is often where it already emerges that three departments use three definitions of waiting time.
- What do customers, patients or citizens want? Customer research into contact reasons and expectations for each reason. Not what they say they want, but what they do.
- What do we want to achieve, and what are the preconditions? Goals, objectives and the limits: budget, GDPR, existing contracts, what IT can support.
- How do we get there? A practical implementation plan with phases, followed by the functional and technical design per channel.
The order is what matters most. Start with the fourth question and you buy a platform and then go looking for a problem. Start with the first and after a few weeks you usually already know that the channel everyone wanted is not the channel that delivers the most.
4. Channel blending: how many chats alongside a call?
As soon as channels come together, a practical question arises: can an agent hold a phone call and keep up with three WhatsApp conversations at the same time? The answer is usually no, and that is exactly why an omnichannel strategy is also about staffing and distribution. Channel blending is the agreement on which combinations you allow and when.
| Situation | What you agree | What you measure |
|---|---|---|
| Quiet, all channels open | One agent handles chat and email, another phone only | Service level per channel, defined the same way |
| Phone peak | Limit chat temporarily, move agents from chat to phone | Phone queue, missed chats |
| Agent on a call | Assign no new chats, at most finish one in progress | Call duration, wrap-up |
| Outside opening hours | Chat and WhatsApp closed with a clear expectation, phone to on-call duty | Contacts outside opening hours, response lead time |
Those agreements can only be kept if the team and the team leader see in real time what is happening per channel. A wallboard that only shows the phone queue is too small for omnichannel customer contact. A dashboard that combines multiple sources shows phone, chat and email side by side, with the same colour codes.
5. From practice
A Belgian grid operator for electricity and natural gas wanted to take a step forward in customer service. Instead of choosing a new channel, we first drew up a customer service strategy, aligned with changed customer needs and its own brand promise. The result was a governance model, a test of that strategy against the market and a roadmap from multichannel to omnichannel, with self-service and new channels at the point where they add something.
An association with almost 800,000 members already had phone, chat, WhatsApp and email, but a contact centre solution that was no longer up to the job. There it started with a preliminary study of the current and desired situation, then an RFP process and finally a migration to a new omnichannel platform, entirely remotely. Here too, technology came last. For a municipal KCC the logic is the same: first the contact reasons and service standards per channel, then the platform. More on that in The municipal KCC: measuring citizen satisfaction and managing on service standards.
6. One customer view, one set of figures
What makes omnichannel succeed or fail in practice is whether everyone is looking at the same reality. One customer view: when a call comes in, the agent sees that there was a chat yesterday. And one set of figures: the service level of chat and phone is measured using the same definition, and the reporting to the board comes from the same source as the wallboard on the floor. That does not necessarily call for a platform that does everything. It calls for integrations that bring together the data from your existing systems, without you having to replace everything. Effecta Connect is exactly that kind of layer: it reads data from telephony, chat, email and other sources and shows it on one screen, with no migration and no vendor lock-in.
7. From strategy to roadmap
A strategy without a roadmap is a presentation. Work the strategy out in phases that each deliver something on their own: first insight into what is happening now, then a service standard per channel, only then new channels or self-service, and finally the platform if the current one really is no longer up to the job. For each phase, set out what it costs, what it delivers and what the risk is if you do not do it. That is the business case a board or municipal executive needs in order to say yes.
Want an independent assessment of where you stand, with market analysis, interviews and mystery customer contact? That is what the Real Contact Audit does. Prefer to get an impression yourself first? The Real Contact Scan gives you a score for reachability, insight, on-call duty and continuity in three minutes.