Omnich vs multichannel customer service, why brands don’t get it

There is a common belief in modern customer service, and it’s that to meet rising expectations, you need to be everywhere, on every channel, at every moment. The logic makes a lot of sense – if customers want convenience, then surely more access equals better experience?

It’s an idea that has shaped over a decade of CX investment. It’s no longer enough to be present via email and phone – now, we need to be on WhatsApp, we need to be on live chat, we need to have a web form, we need to be on social (X, Facebook, Instagram, etc) – and businesses have raced to expand their contact footprint in the name of service transformation and better CX.

But here is the question; has that transformation actually happened? Has customer experience genuinely improved by giving the customer more ways to reach us, or has CX just grown noisier, more fragmented and harder to manage? We think it’s the latter.

This piece isn’t about defining omnichannel. It’s about rethinking why we as an industry started chasing it in the first place – and whether, in the rush to be everywhere, we’ve lost sight of what great customer service actually looks like.

Omnichannel vs multichannel customer service – what is the difference?

These terms are sometimes used interchangeably, even by vendors and industry leaders – but they refer to fundamentally different approaches to customer service. Understanding the distinction is crucial, because confusing the two often leads to poor customer experience, inefficient operations and misplaced investment.

Multichannel customer service

Multichannel support means offering customers multiple ways to get in touch – phone, email, live chat, web forms, social media DMs, SMS, WhatsApp and more. Each channel exists independently, with its own team, tools or workflows.

The goal of multichannel is coverage. The idea behind it is that the more channels you offer, the more accessible your brand becomes.

However, while multichannel increases availability, it doesn’t ensure consistency or continuity. Customers must often repeat themselves across channels. Data doesn’t move fluidly, and agents don’t always have access to previous interactions that happened elsewhere. Each channel is an island – it’s useful, but it’s isolated.

Omnichannel customer service

Omnichannel customer support goes one level deeper. It still provides multiple channels, but the critical difference is integration. In an omnichannel model:

• Customer data, context and history flow across platforms
• Conversations can start in one channel and resume in another without loss of information
• Agents have a complete view of the customer’s journey, not just a single interaction
• The experience feels continuous, coherent and emotionally aware

The goal of omnichannel is not just presence – it’s connection. Customers don’t think in terms of channels, they think in terms of outcomes and feelings. Omnichannel recognises this by designing service around the customer’s perspective, not just the business’s communication options.

Why the difference matters, and why most brands get it wrong

From the outside, omnichannel and multichannel might look similar – both offer choice and flexibility. But what happens behind the scenes makes all the difference. In a multichannel model, customers often feel like they’re starting over at every step. In an omnichannel model (done properly), customers feel known, remembered and supported, no matter where their conversation begins or continues.

This difference isn’t just operational, it’s emotional. It is the difference between just resolving issues and rebuilding trust, or missing the opportunity entirely.

Many businesses think they’ve “gone omnichannel” just because they’ve launched more channels. But without the infrastructure, processes and team alignment to connect those channels behind the scenes, they’re still multichannel – just with more complexity.

This leads to fragmented experiences, overstretched support teams, frustrated customers and wasted tech spend. Ultimately it leads to the illusion of progress, where CX looks better on paper than it feels to your customers in reality.

Why more customer service channels doesn’t equate to better service

It’s a story so common it’s almost become a trope at this point. A customer reaches out via WhatsApp with a simple billing query. “We can’t help with that here, you’ll need to email in.” So they do. Two days pass with no reply. Frustrated, they pick up the phone, only to be told, again, that they need to email. The agent tries to help, escalates the case, and then the trail goes cold. Trust is lost and the customer churns.

At some point in our industry, being easy to reach became more important than being easy to help. This is wrong. It started with good intentions; meeting customers where they are, staying competitive and making support more convenient. But what began as progress quietly turned into pressure – pressure to launch the next channel, pressure to match what competitors are doing, pressure to be available everywhere, all the time.

And so, the service footprint grows. WhatsApp gets added. Then it’s live chat. Then it’s social DMs. Then it’s in-app messaging. And while each one arrives with the promise of better customer experience, the experience doesn’t improve. In many cases, it actually gets worse. It gets busier, harder to manage and more disconnected. We create more entry points; we invite customers in through a dozen doors. But if there’s nobody waiting on the other side, or worse still, there is someone waiting, but they’re in a different country, on a different platform, with no visibility of what’s come before and no way to be empathetic and emotive in addressing the customer’s problem.

This is the truth that many teams live with in 2025 – we offer more access, but less assurance. Our “omnichannel” customer service offering is fragmented, frustrating and ineffective. Customers can reach us in a hundred different ways, but to them, it doesn’t feel like anyone is actually listening.

More channels don’t equate to better service unless they’re unified and built with intention. If the people providing the service are not equipped to offer consistency, care and continuity, no matter where a conversation begins, be it live chat, web form, email, whatever – omnichannel fails. And unfortunately, in the majority of cases now, the drive to become “omnichannel” has often made customer service feel less human, not more.

Real CX progress isn’t about being everywhere, it’s about being coherent, consistent and above all, human. And there is a real, tangible cost to this shift to be everywhere at once, which we will explore now.

The quiet damage done by disconnected support channels

Let’s get back to our example of the customer sending a WhatsApp, being told to email and ultimately being given the run around. Nobody was rude in this situation. In fact, everyone tried their best to help the customer. Nobody dropped the ball – except maybe the team responsible for responding to emails. But what this customer walks away with is a quiet but powerful impression – nobody knows me, nobody remembers me and nobody is actually accountable to giving me the help I need.

On the surface, the problem with disconnected customer service like this is that it looks operational. Messages get missed, systems don’t sync and teams struggle to keep track of conversations. But underneath all of this, the real cost is human. That feeling that our customer felt, won’t show up on your CSAT. It won’t be flagged as a complaint, particularly if the customer just decides to go somewhere else. But it spreads, and it undermines trust, brand affinity and emotional connection every time this interaction repeats. The issue isn’t just that the customer didn’t get a resolution, it’s that they weren’t heard.

This is the quiet damage that disconnected omnichannel support causes. It’s not an explosive failure – it’s more of a steady erosion. A relationship that wears thin over time. Teams work harder to achieve less. Customers stop contacting you not because they aren’t satisfied, it’s because they’ve come to expect that with every interaction, nothing meaningful will happen. And when customer experience becomes a series of disconnected, disparate moments, nobody owns the journey. And when nobody owns the journey, the journey breaks.

What a proper omnichannel strategy really looks like

If we want to stop confusing omnichannel with “just being everywhere” we must look beyond the list of individual channels and into the structure that holds it together – because an effective omnichannel customer service strategy isn’t built on volume, it’s built on integration, alignment and intentionality.

Omnichannel isn’t something you have, it’s something you design. Most businesses miss this. Here’ s what it takes to build an omnichannel strategy that actually works – one that aligns systems, teams and intent around a unified customer experience.

Start with the journey and NOT the tech

Before any tools are chosen, before a platform demo is even booked, the real work starts with journey mapping. Not process flows, not internal workflows – actual customer journeys. The goal here is to undertand where customers struggle, what frustrates them emotionally and where transitions between channels break down.

You don’t need an enterprise consultancy to do this (although it certainly helps). You need focused conversations with frontline teams, insight from surveys or post-contact feedback and access to real transcripts or call recordings. Tools like Miro, Smaply or even sticky notes in a room can help visualise the problem. The outcome, however, should be the same – clarity on how customers move between channels, and where they feel abandoned.

This is where businesses start to realise that omnichannel doesn’t mean building a new journey. It means connecting the one your customers are already on.

Make ownership and accountability shared

Most omnichannel failures can be traced back to internal silos. One team owns email, another owns live chat, social media sits with marketing, etc. The result is a fractured service model where nobody is actually responsible for the overall experience.

Omnichannel only works when ownership is shared, across teams, systems and outcomes. This doesn’t mean that everyone needs to use the same software, it means that everyone needs to have visibility into the same customer journey and be measured against the same success metrics.

This is where operational design matters. Shared SLAs, unified customer records and governance structures that cross departments aren’t nice to haves, they’re the difference between collaboration and chaos. If your teams don’t talk to each other, your channels won’t either – and your customers will suffer for it.

Choose tech that enables emotional context, not just access

There’s no shortage of omnichannel platforms promising faster response times, better routing and cleaner dashboards. But speed isn’t the problem – context is. The best technology doesn’t only unify contact methods – it gives your agents emotional visibility. What did the customer say last time? How did they feel about the interaction through sentiment analysis? Has this issue been escalated before? That context should live in one place – whether you use Zendesk, HubSpot, Salesforce or something else.

Done well, the right stack brings together CRM, contact history and sentiment data into a single agent view. It turns fragmented messages into a coherent conversation, and gives your people the insight they need to treat customers like people – not tickets.

Train for continuity, not just consistency

Most agent training focuses on consistency – tone of voice, SLA adherence, correct process. All important. But omnichannel adds another dimension – continuity. When a customer moves from chat to email to phone, the agent must not only understand what happened, they need to emotionally pick up where the last person left off. That requires a different kind of training.

It means helping agents develop emotional recall. Encouraging them to scan for unresolved tension or repetition. Giving them the space to be present in a conversation that started on a different platform, with a different colleague, in a different moment. This is where omnichannel becomes truly human – and it’s where most training programs fall short.

Define what you won’t do, and why

Just because a channel is available doesn’t mean it should be used for every purpose. One of the most overlooked parts of a proper omnichannel strategy is restraint.

Complex complaints shouldn’t be handled in social DMs. Highly sensitive account issues shouldn’t be sent through web chat. Bots are useful for triage, but not for anything involving nuance, frustration or loyalty risk.

Good omnichannel strategies include boundaries. They define which channels are right for which interactions, and they make those expectations clear to customers upfront. This isn’t about limiting service, it’s protecting the quality of it – and it’s one of the clearest markers of a brand that understands what omnichannel really means.

A proper omnichannel strategy is built around people, not platforms

Let’s return to that same customer – the one with the simple billing query who first reached out via WhatsApp. In a properly designed omnichannel environment, the outcome would have looked very different.

They send the message via WhatsApp. The agent, seeing that the issue involves account-level billing that can’t be fully resolved through that channel, doesn’t just refer them elsewhere. Instead, they explain clearly: “This issue needs to be handled more securely, but I can call you directly now to resolve it. Would that work for you?”

The agent already has access to the customer’s profile, purchase history, and conversation history. They trigger a secure outbound call from the same service platform, pick up the thread, and resolve the issue; no handoffs, no repeated explanations, no emotional drop.

This is omnichannel, functioning properly. The customer didn’t have to repeat themselves. The channel shifted, but the context didn’t. The result is resolution, trust, loyalty.

This is the difference between adding channels and designing experience, and it’s the kind of service orchestration most businesses still can’t deliver on their own.

Why Ventrica is the partner that makes omnichannel work

This kind of joined-up, emotionally aware customer experience isn’t achieved through platforms alone. It takes design. It takes operational intelligence. And above all, it takes people. This is where Ventrica comes in.

We’re not just a contact centre. We’re a partner in customer experience transformation, helping brands move beyond fragmented multichannel support and towards something more strategic, more scalable, and more human.

Our clients don’t come to us just to answer calls or manage chat. They come to us to:

• Rethink their support model
• Connect disjointed channels
• Align internal teams around a common service vision
• And ultimately, turn customer contact into competitive advantage

What makes us different is that we approach omnichannel from the inside out; not as a technology overlay, but as an integrated part of how your brand communicates. That means:

• We design and run omnichannel environments that work across platforms, time zones, and customer expectations.
• We train agents to think across channels, and to carry emotional context forward, not just repeat process.
• We use the right tools for your business and configure them around real journeys, not abstract service models.
• We work with you to define what not to do, because restraint is as important as reach.

If you want omnichannel to stop being an ambition and start becoming a reality, get in touch with us today to see how we can help.

Final thoughts; omnichannel vs multichannel is the wrong question

For years, the industry has been asking: How many channels should we be on? That was never the right question. The real question is: How do we create experiences that actually feel connected, human and easy to trust – no matter how or where the customer reaches us?

That’s what omnichannel was supposed to mean. Not presence, but coherence. Not more options, but better service. Not automation for its own sake, but empathy at scale.

For most businesses, the gap between ambition and execution still exists. And that’s why choosing the right partner, one who understands both the operational and emotional realities of omnichannel service, makes the difference between ticking a box and transforming your CX.

If you’re ready to stop adding channels and start designing experiences, let’s talk.

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Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between omnichannel and multichannel customer service?

Multichannel customer service offers several ways for customers to get in touch (phone, email, chat, social, etc.) but each channel is typically siloed. Omnichannel integrates those channels so that data, context and conversation history flow seamlessly between them, creating a more cohesive and human customer experience.

Why is omnichannel customer service better than multichannel?

Omnichannel offers continuity – customers don’t have to repeat themselves, switch platforms unnecessarily or experience disjointed support. This improves satisfaction, reduces frustration and builds stronger brand loyalty.

What are the biggest challenges in implementing omnichannel customer service?

The biggest barriers aren’t technical, they’re organisational. Misaligned teams, siloed data, inconsistent training and unclear ownership often prevent businesses from delivering true omnichannel experiences, even when the right tools are in place.

What are the benefits of omnichannel customer service for brands?

Properly implemented, omnichannel support improves customer retention, reduces contact fatigue, enhances agent efficiency and creates more emotionally resonant experiences. It also enables more effective data collection and journey analysis.

How do I know if my business is really delivering omnichannel service?

If your customers can switch between channels without repeating themselves, and your agents can see full context across touchpoints, you’re on the right track. If not – you’re likely still operating multichannel support under a different name.

Can Ventrica help with omnichannel strategy design, or just delivery?

We do both. Ventrica partners with brands not only to operate best-in-class omnichannel environments, but to design them from the ground up – including channel strategy, journey mapping, agent training, system integration and performance optimisation.

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