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Multimodal customer service is the CX strategy of the future, today

Contributed article by Devidas Desai, SVP of Product at PolyAI  

If someone wants to contact a company’s customer service team, they can call the contact center, chat with a bot on the website, send an email or post on the company’s social media pages. With customers expecting service across their preferred channels, the traditional siloed approach to customer service will no longer suffice.

Recognizing this shift, forward-thinking businesses know that the key to exceptional customer experience lies not just in offering multiple communication channels, but in organizing them into a cohesive, intelligent system. Businesses that master seamless multimodal communication will define the future of customer service by delivering more efficient, channel-flexible interactions.

Seamless convenience no matter the channel

As organizations work toward delivering a more cohesive customer service strategy, let’s consider a common scenario that illustrates the power of multimodal service delivery: You’ve got a flat tire on the side of the highway. You call the customer service line for roadside assistance, and the service provider requests your exact location to dispatch help. However, there isn’t a mile marker or landmark in sight, so you don’t know how you’re going to explain where you are, which will further delay your assistance. In a traditional, single-channel approach, you’d struggle to describe your location verbally. But with multimodal service, the agent (human or virtual) can simply send you a text with a clickable link to capture your location. This is an example of an effective strategy that will help CX teams improve their approach to provide better service.

The ability to smoothly transition between channels results in a better, more efficient conversation. In the roadside assistance example, the dialogue started as a phone conversation but switched to a text to make it easier for the caller. Then, once the customer service rep received the location information, they could jump right back into the voice call like there hadn’t been an interruption at all.

Multimodal customer service meets customers where they’re at, no matter what channel they choose to reach out in, and integrates other channels to ensure the customer’s experience is a positive one. Customers demand efficiency and convenience — in fact, PwC research shows that efficiency and convenience are two of the most important elements of exceptional customer experiences. Organizations that don’t embrace multimodal strategies risk falling behind as seamless, channel-flexible service becomes the new standard for customer excellence. 

Enhancing multimodal experiences through personalization

What makes multimodal customer service truly powerful is its ability to deliver personalized experiences across every channel. By 2025, leading organizations will combine channel flexibility with deep personalization to create uniquely tailored interactions for each customer.  

Some contact centers are leveraging AI-powered voice assistants to elevate their customers’ voice channel experience. When a customer calls the contact center, the system can easily access their record via their phone number, allowing the AI to address them by name and anticipate their needs. This translates to a much better user experience because the customer gets to skip a few steps since the system already has access to their information. In a truly multimodal future, each channel reinforces and enhances the others, creating a seamless web of personalized support. 

At the end of the day, customers aren’t concerned with whether they’re being helped by a person, an AI system or some combination of both — they just want their issues resolved in the most efficient way possible. Being able to provide convenient, personalized, seamless multimodal customer service experiences will result in happier customers and sustained CX success in 2025 and beyond.