Guide to building vs. buying an AI Agent for customer service
This guide will help you assess the build vs buy question from 5 main angles so you can make a confident, informed decision.
Learn MoreIf you’re a CX leader or manager, how to get an edge on your competitors is likely top of mind.
Omnichannel customer service is a game-changer that's redefining the rules of customer engagement — and it's a must-have for businesses today. Yet, many companies still struggle to deliver a truly seamless customer experience across multiple touchpoints.
The result? Frustrated customers, lost revenue, and a competitive disadvantage that's hard to overcome. But if you leverage AI correctly, you can offer a unified and personalized experience — one that not only impresses customers, but drives loyalty, revenue, and boosts your bottom line.
A well executed AI omnichannel customer service strategy is your straight shot to the top, with benefits like:
Let’s discuss these game-changing benefits of omnichannel customer service in more depth, and explore how your business can achieve this with an AI agent.
One of the most significant benefits of omnichannel customer service is the ability to provide round-the-clock support on every channel a customer (or potential customer) may want to reach you.
It's nearly impossible and exceedingly expensive to support customers 24/7 on every channel with a human agent. They can typically only manage a few chats, emails, or one phone call at a time, and they can't feasibly service every channel at once. But an AI Agent can.
An AI agent is the customer service employee that never sleeps, never takes a coffee break, and never calls in sick.
But that’s not to say that an AI agent replaces your human agents. An AI agent handles the bulk of your routine and mundane customer inquiries on every channel — live chat, email, social media, phone calls — freeing up time for your human team to focus on more valuable tasks and move into higher roles, like the emerging role of an AI Manager .
With the right AI agent platform, AI management is unified across all channels. It centralizes your conversation data, analytics, and performance metrics in a single spot to enable AI managers to make improvements — improvements that will automatically apply to every channel.
But omnichannel’s benefits go beyond improving the customer experience — it has an impact across the entire business .
A robust omnichannel strategy breaks down the silos between departments. It not only centralizes all your customer data, it gives your CX team a larger corpus of data to draw on. Pulling all your customer data and interactions from every channel into one place gives every department — from customer service, to product, to sales and revenue — a better view of the customer and their preferences, allowing the entire organization to make more data-driven decisions.
Companies that successfully integrate data across channels can achieve revenue growth of 5-15% and cost reductions of 10-20%.
- McKinsey
At its core, an effective omnichannel customer service strategy is all about meeting customers where they are, whether that's through live chat, email, social media, or by phone.
Reaching customers on the platforms they use daily and feel most comfortable with isn’t just a nice-to-have, it reduces friction in the customer journey. Companies with strong omnichannel customer engagement see a 9.5% year-over-year increase in annual revenue , compared to just 3.4% for those that don’t.
That’s because customers don’t need to learn a new interface or change their habits to interact with the business. Instead, the business becomes more convenient for them to engage with.
We could even turn it up a notch to say that interacting with people on more personal, social channels allows the business to create more familiarity with their customers. Being a part of the same digital space as their personal contacts can make an interaction feel less transactional and more like a conversation with a friend. And imagine doing all this instantly, without lifting a finger.
That’s the power of AI omnichannel automation. Personalization at scale: The holy grail of customer experience
One of the key benefits of omnichannel customer service is the ability to deliver hyper-personalized experiences. No matter how quickly your company grows, an AI agent scales with you.
With AI management unified across channels, the AI agent can not just match human-level personalization — it surpasses it by analyzing a vast amount of customer data in milliseconds.
With an AI agent you can power personalization in a few different ways:
80% of consumers are more likely to make a purchase when brands offer personalized experiences.
- Epsilon
We’ve talked about the unified view of your customer service and the importance of personalization, but that’s not the be all and end all of AI agent offerings. There are some behind-the-scenes features that you should look for in an AI agent platform if your goal is to implement omnichannel customer service.
By leveraging AI to power your omnichannel customer service strategy, you're not just improving support — you're fundamentally reimagining what's possible in customer engagement. You're turning support centers into profit centers, customer interactions into growth opportunities, and data silos into gold mines of insight.
The future of customer service is omnichannel. The question isn't whether you can afford to implement this game-changing strategy. The real question is: can you afford not to?
Explore what capabilities AI agent platforms need to unlock the omnichannel experiences customers crave.
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