Teams Use Omnichannel Strategies and Speed to Lead to Improve Contact Rates

The use of omnichannel solutions allows contact centers to meet consumers on their preferred mode of communication. And it’s not a new trend.

So, with the capability to automate text and email as outreach tools for sales and lead gen campaigns, contact rates should be higher than ever, right?

Unfortunately, many omnichannel approaches are failing to live up to this promise. What’s more, not all call center managers are using the full range of capabilities in their platform’s arsenal.

But to stay competitive (and TCPA compliant) in 2025, we need to evaluate the best ways to weave multiple channels into an overall omnichannel strategy.

Here’s what we’ll cover in this 2025 trends article:

• What is omnichannel and why you should use it

• Speed to lead and automated efficiency across channels

• Boosting contact rates with customized cadences

• Meeting customers where they communicate best

• Why not all omnichannel solutions are created equally

This trend article is part of the series, “Contact Center Trends,” helping you stay current with issues, technologies, best practices, and strategies that impact your business. Our aim is to provide tools and guidance that will improve productivity, efficiency, and sustainable profitability for your sales and lead generation team.

What is an omnichannel contact center?

Omnichannel contact centers offer an update from the single channel call center of the past that meets the needs of modern communications. Whether for organizations focused on outbound lead gen and sales, inbound customer care, or blended call centers, an omnichannel contact center uses multiple channels to connect with its customers and prospects, typically via phone, email, and text (SMS). Other potential interactive channels include live chat, conversational AI, and social media.

So why use omnichannel contact center solutions?

Because it’s what consumers expect. Research shows that 74% of consumers want an omnichannel experience, yet only 31% of contact centers offer it. 

Below we cover some of the best ways to incorporate omnichannel solutions into your sales and lead generation operation this year.

1. Dial smart (and fast!) with omnichannel strategies 

The days of aggressively dialing leads and expecting productive results are over – besides the cost risks of fines and lawsuits for not operating in compliance with TCPA regulations isn’t worth it. Today’s businesses need to dial smarter, not harder.

By using a powerful, automated autodialer solution, leads move through your hopper quickly, at the best time of day, and only deliver to your agents those calls that connect. One health insurance agent described this capability as “how you put time back in your agents’ pockets to do the things that matter in the downtime, and you’re staying really productive in the hot time.”

With automated omnichannel, SMS and email are working in the background, even when your agents are focusing their best efforts elsewhere, generating prospect engagement more efficiently.

The quickest draw gets the customer with speed to lead

One of the smartest things you can do is focus on your speed to lead (aka, lead response time). Speed to lead measures the amount of time it takes your business to contact a lead after they’ve raised their hand and expressed interest.

This call center metric is about seconds and minutes, not hours and days. When a lead opts in on your website or elsewhere, don’t waste any time reaching out to them. Research shows that when sales teams respond to leads in under five minutes, their chances of engagement and conversion of leads skyrocket by eight times.

Leads who aren’t contacted quickly may simply lose interest. What’s more you’ve probably lost them to your competition.

To fend off your competition and get to leads as fast as possible, your business needs to rely on technology that provides intelligent automation across channels.

Automating tedious tasks is key to building the next-generation call center you need to stay competitive. With streamlined processes and improved efficiencies, you can not only drive growth but support a more successful and satisfying experience for your agents.

2. How AI is changing omnichannel outreach

How would your sales operation change if you could turn over some of your routine text- and voice-based communications to an AI solution? What would happen to your bottom line if your agents could focus more of their time on the leads that matter most?

AI is reshaping the modern contact center. One leading example of this is conversational AI which interprets customer intent over text and voice channels and responds in natural language. This technology, like Convoso's Voso.ai, enables leads and customers to interact just as they would with a live agent. This capability unlocks a wide variety of possible use cases.

Voso.ai can take on the repetitive tasks of agents so they can focus on fine-tuning tactics and closing sales. Over both voice and text, Voso.ai schedules callbacks and sends reminders, responds to customer queries, reengages with aged data, and even pre-qualifies leads before transferring them to a closer. One single AI solution can revolutionize your entire approach to outbound sales and lead generation.

3. Boosting contact rates with customized cadences

When it comes to the voice channel, a couple of contact rate killers are caller IDs that get blocked or flagged as spam, and voicemail  [an agent morale killer]. Low contact rates are costly and defeat the purpose of driving revenue.

Invest in a caller ID reputation management solution like ClearCallerID Pro increase call deliverability and to prevent flagged or blocked numbers with proactive tools and automatic remediation.

Keep agents active in conversations, not waiting around for voicemails. With an accurate answering machine detection tool, you save agent time, boost morale, and increase revenue as agents have more opportunities to convert leads. By adding in smart voicemail drops, you’re using yet another outreach channel that can be customized with the cadence that works best for your campaign.

Smarter outreach strategies also require different cadences depending whether you’re working with high-intent or low-intent leads.

Omnichannel for low-intent leads

Low-intent leads call for a bit of extra caution. Your dialing solution should utilize tools that automatically rest your leads based on inputs like intent level and prior dispositions and offer redial/recycle logic. Customize cadences to rest low-intent leads and build awareness with emails that grab attention between scheduled phone outreach.

Omnichannel for high-intent leads

For your valuable high-intent leads, use time saved on the sales floor with smart autodialing to strike the right balance between voice, text, and email for costly leads.

Develop smarter call cadences for high-intent leads synchronized with automated omnichannel workflows, including SMS drip campaigns, that do much of the work for your team.

4. Automation based on events

The best omnichannel solutions rely on event-driven workflow automation to achieve scale and speed. Event-driven means that you can configure an outreach action—whether text, email, callback, or smart voicemail drops—to take place when it’s triggered by one or more specific events.

For example, you send an email and that email gets opened. With event-driven workflow automation, you can automate an action based on this event, ensuring a call is placed, say, 10 minutes after this email is opened.

But the chain reaction doesn’t have to end there. With the right system, you should be able to automate a workflow based on a long list of interlinked events, creating thousands of different outcomes that are tailored to your particular marketing and sales strategy.

When you automate lead follow-up across voice, text, and email you can dramatically boost contact rates—and, done right, while staying in compliance with regulations.

5. Meeting customers where they communicate best

Omnichannel is all about connecting with customers in the way they prefer. Giving customers options and adding a personalized touch—it’s basically Sales 101.

Speaking about her experience in the solar energy market, lead gen industry veteran and call center expert Heather Griffin says omnichannel is critical when dealing with shifting demographics, which come with their own biases toward certain channels. 

Millennials and Gen Z in particular don't like talking on the phone in general. Griffin says. “So that’s where SMS and omnichannel come in” and have an important role to play in keeping contact rates up as market demographics change.

Regardless of whether you’re trying to bridge generational gaps, though, the key here is to keep the conversation going. As we pointed out above, successful experiences in more channels means more opportunities to drive revenue. That means the prospect’s experience should be easy and consistent across channels, whether phone, email, or texting.

Give agents insight into the ways a lead has connected with your company and the relevant information you have on that lead, with robust lead management and customizable dashboards.

Why not all omnichannel solutions are created equally

For many contact centers, omnichannel is apparently easier said than done. According to Convoso’s Chief Product Officer Bobby Hakimi, “there are call centers that don’t have a true omnichannel system.”

Even if they have omnichannel built into their approach, Hakimi says, “many of the channels they use are controlled manually by agents. Or, if it’s automated, they have little to no control over when to automate that channel.”

From driving smarter dialing strategies and maintaining compliance, to reaching customers over multiple devices and across generations, the right omnichannel solutions for 2025 and beyond are backed by automation that saves you and your team time.