5 Levers to Successfully Transition to Omnichannel Customer Service

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Customers no longer think in “channels.” They naturally navigate from web to phone, chat to social media, expecting brands to do the same without hiccups or memory lapses. For them, there’s only one company, which should recognize them everywhere.

Yet for many organizations, moving from multichannel to omnichannel remains a complex and daunting project: scattered technologies, siloed data in non-communicating systems, teams still working in silos with their own goals and tools. The road to omnichannel sometimes seems littered with insurmountable technological and organizational hurdles.

Succeeding in your omnichannel transition is above all a global transformation project—human, technological, and organizational. It’s not just a software update or adding a new channel. It’s rethinking in depth how the company understands, serves, and retains its customers.

Here are the five essential levers to turn this ambition into sustainable, measurable success.

Table of Contents:

Definitions: Master the Transformation Vocabulary

Before diving into the success levers, let’s clarify key concepts:

Omnichannel Transition: Transformation process where a company shifts from a siloed multichannel approach to a unified, integrated omnichannel strategy.

CDP (Customer Data Platform): Software platform that unifies customer data from all channels to create a 360° view and enable personalized marketing activation.

Unified Customer Data: Centralized database aggregating all customer information (purchase history, preferences, interactions) accessible in real-time across all channels.

Channel Integration: Technical and organizational synchronization of all customer touchpoints (voice, chat, email, social media) to ensure experience continuity.

Seamless Customer Experience: Frictionless journey where customers switch channels without repeating information or losing conversation context.

RPA (Robotic Process Automation): Automation of repetitive tasks by software robots to free up advisor time.

1. Unify the Customer View Through Data

Why Data is the Foundation of Omnichannel

Omnichannel relies on a core principle: delivering a 360° customer understanding. Impossible to create a connected experience if your data tells different stories across departments. A customer buying in-store, browsing your website, and contacting via chat must be recognized as one person, not three separate entities.

Yet many companies face a data archipelago: sales CRM knows purchase history but ignores service interactions, marketing has website behavioral data without phone conversation access, and so on. This fragmentation prevents consistent personalization and forces customers to repeat information endlessly.

Concrete Unification Steps

Map Your Data Sources: Identify all customer data collection points. Website, mobile app, POS system, call center, social media, email campaigns, chatbots… The list is often longer than expected. This mapping reveals duplicates, inconsistencies, and data black holes.

Implement a Customer Data Platform (CDP): A CDP acts as your data conductor. It collects, cleans, unifies, and makes all customer information available in real-time from a single source of truth. Unlike a simple data warehouse, a CDP is designed to create actionable unified customer profiles. According to the CDP Institute, companies using a CDP see an average 27% improvement in customer data accuracy.

Establish Strict Data Governance: Unification is useless without quality. Define clear standards: field naming, interaction categorization, duplicate management, critical vs. optional data. This governance must include rigorous GDPR compliance, as centralizing data amplifies privacy responsibilities.

Key Role of a BPO Partner

Specialized outsourcing partners like Armatis play a crucial role in this unification. They support real-time customer data collection and exploitation via operational platforms and proven processes. Instead of building complex infrastructure alone, you gain immediate unified customer data and teams trained to leverage it for value creation.

This approach accelerates your transition, avoiding costly implementation errors and freeing internal teams for strategic analysis rather than technical plumbing.

2. Harmonize Tools and Channels

The Technology Proliferation Challenge

Phone, email, live chat, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, SMS, video calls… Channel multiplication often brings tool proliferation. Each channel comes with its own platform, interface, logic. Result: advisors juggle 5, 10, sometimes 15 different screens. Not only inefficient, but it guarantees fragmented customer experience.

An advisor switching between three apps to retrieve customer history wastes time, makes errors, and passes frustration to the customer. Technology, meant to ease service, becomes an obstacle.

The Unified Platform Imperative

The goal isn’t adding more tools, but consolidating them. Adopt a single or interconnected contact platform aggregating all channels in one interface. Advisors see all ongoing conversations, switch channels without changing screens, and access full context instantly.

This channel integration radically transforms operational efficiency. Example: a customer starts a live chat at 10 AM on your site about a product. At 3 PM, they call customer service to complete purchase. The advisor sees the morning chat, viewed products, questions immediately. They pick up exactly where chat left off: “Hello, I see you were interested in model X this morning. Can I help finalize your order?” The customer feels understood, recognized, valued. No repetition, no friction.

This fluidity distinguishes brands mastering omnichannel transition from those just piling disconnected channels.

Orchestration Technologies

Beyond centralized platforms, invest in intelligent orchestration: automatic routing to best-fit channel/advisor, context-triggered automated workflows, robust APIs for real-time system dialogue.
At Armatis, we deploy mature solutions natively integrating all relevant channels. Our approach ensures every interaction instantly feeds the global customer view, creating the seamless customer experience consumers expect today.

3. Train Teams in Omnichannel Culture

Why Technology Alone Isn’t Enough

You can invest in top platforms, perfectly unify data, but if teams keep thinking and working in silos, transformation fails. Omnichannel isn’t just a tool change—it’s a profound posture and mindset shift.

In traditional multichannel, advisors specialize: email, phone, or chat. They optimize their channel, know processes, hit volume targets. In omnichannel, that advisor understands the full customer journey, fluidly navigates multiple channels, collaborates with marketing/sales/IT, adopts a holistic customer-centered view over channel focus.

This requires training, support, and cultural change led by management.

Omnichannel Training Pillars

  • Global Customer Journey Understanding: Train teams to visualize real zigzagging customer journeys. Use journey maps, personas, case studies. Goal: every advisor sees themselves as one link in a broader conversation.
  • Multichannel Technical Mastery: Advisors must handle all relevant channels comfortably. Includes media specifics (chat tone vs. phone, SMS character limits, social codes), plus seamless switching without disruption.
  • Soft Skills Development: Omnichannel amplifies empathy, active listening, creative problem-solving. With tech handling repetitive tasks, human value lies in nuanced need understanding, complex situation management, emotional connection.
  • Cross-Functional Collaboration: Break marketing/customer service/IT silos. Organize joint workshops, cross-projects, sharing rituals. Omnichannel requires shared language and goals.
 

Outsourcing Advantage for Training

Specialized BPO partners bring invaluable expertise. At Armatis, our teams are already trained in new customer journeys and omnichannel management. We invest heavily in continuous training, leveraging best practices from dozens of clients/sectors.
This expertise transfers immediately to your brand. Our advisors become your company ambassadors, creating memorable connected experiences from collaboration week one.

4. Automate Intelligently to Boost Efficiency

Balancing Automation and Humanity

Automation scares. Many fear it dehumanizes customer relations, replaces jobs, or frustrates with robotic responses. Yet well-designed, automation frees advisors for what they do best: building connections, solving complex issues, providing empathy when it matters.

The key is intelligent automation: automate what’s repetitive/predictable/simple, while preserving quick human access when needed.

Omnichannel Automation Use Cases

  • Chatbots & Conversational AI: Deploy 24/7 virtual assistants for frequent requests: order tracking, password reset, FAQ, appointments. Ensure they quickly detect escalation needs and pass full conversation context to avoid repetition.
  • Intelligent Message Prioritization: Use AI to analyze sentiment, urgency, complexity of incoming requests, then auto-route to right advisor/channel. VIP urgent requests go to senior advisors first; simple questions to digital/junior channels.
  • Administrative Task Automation: RPA handles data entry, ticket creation, status updates, report generation. These time-consuming zero-value tasks suit automation perfectly, freeing up to 30% advisor time per studies.
  • Automatic Personalization: Leverage AI for personalized recommendations, preference-adapted messages, proactive solutions before requests. Example: device buyers auto-receive relevant tutorials or compatible accessory offers.
 

Our SquAire Suite: AI Empowering Advisors

At Armatis, we developed SquAire, our AI agent suite assisting advisors real-time. SquAire enriches interactions with contextual suggestions, auto-summaries, intelligent knowledge base, predictive analytics. Advisors retain control and human touch, with an AI copilot making them faster, more relevant, more efficient.

This well-designed customer relationship automation simultaneously boosts satisfaction (faster/precise responses) and advisor engagement (focusing on rewarding rather than repetitive tasks).

5. Rely on an Omnichannel BPO Partner

Why Outsource Your Omnichannel Transition?

Omnichannel transition is a marathon, not a sprint. It demands expertise, tools, management capacity, and agility for surprises/client expectation shifts. Few companies have all these internally simultaneously.

Specialized omnichannel customer service outsourcing partners bring decisive acceleration/security advantages.

Omnichannel BPO Partner Strengths

  • Immediately Operational Tech Infrastructure: Skip massive investments in platforms/licenses/integrations taking months/years. Access mature, tested, optimized infrastructure instantly. At Armatis, unified platforms already orchestrate millions of annual interactions across all channels.
  • Proven Operational Expertise: We’ve guided dozens of omnichannel transitions across sectors. This lets us anticipate pitfalls, avoid classic errors, apply best practices from day one. Gain immediate know-how vs. trial-and-error learning.
  • Flexibility & Scalability: Seasonal peaks? New product launch? Crisis doubling resources in 48h? BPO absorbs variations without hiring/training/layoffs. We adapt real-time to actual needs.
  • Multilingual & Geographic Coverage: Omnichannel often means international ambitions. Our distributed teams master numerous languages/cultures for globally coherent connected customer experiences.
  • Continuous Innovation: Top partners constantly invest in tech/process improvements. You benefit automatically without extra effort.
  • Advanced Quality & Analytics Management: Full dashboards, real-time analysis, rigorous quality control ensure performance and continuous omnichannel optimization.
 

Armatis Accompaniment: From Strategy to Execution

At Armatis, we go beyond managing contact volumes. We become your strategic partner orchestrating all channels (phone, email, chat, social media, instant messaging) within a unified platform ensuring customer relationship continuity.

Our approach combines:

  • Real-time 360° customer view
  • Advanced technologies (AI via SquAire, predictive analytics, intelligent routing)
  • Multilingual teams trained to your sector challenges
  • Agile model adapting to seasonality/activity variations
  • Activatable consulting expertise to audit/transform operations
 

We don’t just handle interactions. We create memorable experiences boosting loyalty, generating measurable value, propelling growth.

In Summary: Omnichannel Transition, a Sustainable Performance Lever

Omnichannel isn’t a mere multichannel evolution. It’s a complete customer relationship overhaul, organized around the customer rather than channels or internal departments.

The five levers form a coherent ecosystem:

  1. Unify data creates the knowledge foundation
  2. Harmonize tools enables seamless execution
  3. Train teams unleashes human potential
  4. Automate intelligently maximizes efficiency
  5. Rely on expert partner accelerates/secures transformation
 

Combining these, companies gain operational agility and customer satisfaction simultaneously. Data confirms: successful omnichannel transformations see average 27% client retention improvement, 23% operational cost reduction, 19% customer lifetime value increase.

With the right partner/strategy, transformation shifts from daunting project to true growth/competitive edge lever. Customer relations’ future is omnichannel. Companies mastering transition today build tomorrow’s advantage.

Your Outsourcing Partner

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An omnichannel strategy integrates/synchronizes all company communication/sales channels for homogeneous/continuous customer experience. Unlike multichannel where channels operate independently, omnichannel unifies data/processes/teams around 360° customer view. Customers switch channels frictionlessly; company recognizes at every touchpoint.

Duration varies by existing ecosystem complexity, channels to integrate, digital maturity.

Key: progressive/structured approach. Start with pilot on 1-2 channels for part of clientele, measure, adjust, scale gradually. Transparent communication with teams/clients on changes. Use “quick wins” methodology: identify fast improvements proving omnichannel value/building buy-in. BPO partner lets you test omnichannel parallel to current ops, minimizing disruption risks.

Specialized BPO offers decisive levers: immediate access to performant tech infrastructure (unified platform, CDP, AI) without heavy investment, expertise from multiple successful transitions, flexibility for peaks/seasonality, multilingual/international coverage boosting growth.

Outsourcing lets internal teams refocus on core business, delegating customer service operational complexity.

AI isn’t strictly mandatory but greatly enhances omnichannel performance/efficiency.

It enables intelligent request routing, auto-interaction summaries, predictive need analysis, large-scale personalization, repetitive task customer relationship automation.

Modern solutions like Armatis’ SquAire suite integrate AI to boost advisor capabilities while preserving human relation aspect.

No, omnichannel accessible to all sizes via SaaS/externalization. Modern cloud platforms offer scalable packages for SMEs.
Channel unification implies customer data centralization, requiring strict governance. Best practices: data encryption in transit/rest, rigorous access/permissions management, GDPR compliance with explicit consent/right to be forgotten, regular security audits, full transparency on data use. Certified BPO partners already have these processes/certifications, ensuring end-to-end security.

Sources and References

This article draws from reliable sector research/analyses:

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