Omnichannel customer experience

Omnichannel describes one continuous conversation and history across chat, email, voice, and social, so a customer who switches channel does not have to restart. The distinction from multichannel is continuity: offering many channels is not omnichannel unless context follows the customer between them.

A unified inbox is one workspace where conversations from every channel land, so agents work a single prioritised list instead of switching between tools. It reduces context-switching cost and makes cross-channel history visible at the moment an agent is drafting a reply.

Live chat is real-time text support delivered in-product or on-site, fronted by a human agent, an AI agent, or both in sequence. Its defining constraint is synchrony: the customer is waiting, so response latency and handoff quality matter more than in asynchronous channels.

Routing is deciding which agent, team, or AI agent receives a contact, based on intent, language, skill, customer tier, and availability. Accurate routing is the cheapest available reduction in handle time, because a misrouted contact pays the cost of being read and reassigned twice.