Customer Service Channels: Scaling Your Support Footprint

Have you ever wanted to contact a business to ask a question but saw that they only had phone support and changed your mind? Or maybe you’ve felt frustrated that you had an urgent issue you just wanted to resolve with a phone call but could only find an email address. These businesses are not making use of multiple customer service channels.

Offering a single channel for customer support is no longer good enough because each customer will have their preferred channel and may even prefer different channels for different issues.

As a result, if you’re assessing your business’s support capabilities or launching a customer service contact center, there’s no one “right” customer service channel. You need to consider them all.

In this post, we’ll discuss the advantages, challenges, and best practices you should keep in mind for each customer service channel.

Customer Service Channels: Strengths, Limitations & Best Practices

Want to boost your customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores and improve your customer experience (CX)?

Let’s look at each essential channel that customers expect in 2025.

1. Phone support

Phone support remains one of the best customer service channels when customers have complex or urgent issues. Despite digital channels growing in popularity, 23% of companies plan to increase their investment in phone support this year.

While phone support can be highly effective, it is one of the most demanding channels for call centers, requiring live agents to resolve customer inquiries.

Strengths

• Real-time communication allows for immediate issue resolution.
• Human agents can easily adapt to match a caller’s tone, quickly understand their needs, and deliver more personalized service.
• Consumers may be nervous about emailing sensitive information but often trust phone support in high-stakes scenarios like banking, healthcare, or legal matters.

Limitations

• It can result in longer wait times, which can lead to customer frustration and high abandonment rates.
• It requires significant staffing to maintain quality service and personalized support, which can be expensive and difficult to scale.
• Repetitive tasks and overwork can lead to agent burnout and high turnover.

Best practices

• Improve efficiency with IVR: Use smart call routing and interactive voice response to help customers reach the right team quickly, decreasing wait times and customer frustration.
• Offer call-back options: Reduce the time customers spend listening to your hold music to improve CSAT scores.
• Leverage AI: AI-powered agent assistance can improve response accuracy and call outcomes.
• Monitor performance: Implement call analytics to track agent performance and optimize workflows.

2. Email support

Email support is an asynchronous customer support channel that allows customers to respond at their convenience. It’s a good platform for non-urgent customer concerns, especially if you or the customer want written proof of the discussion.

Most customers believe support emails should be answered within a single business day, so you should include emails in your customer service software.

Strengths

• Creates written documentation that customers and agents can refer to later.
• Gives your agents more flexibility, as an immediate response is not necessary.
• Offers scalability, as agents can handle multiple email threads simultaneously.

Limitations

• Slower response times can frustrate customers who want quick resolutions.
• The lack of immediacy makes it unsuitable for urgent issues.
• Large volumes of inbound messages can overload email, making prioritization difficult.

Best practices

• Create SLAs: Set clear response times in your SLAs or state expected response times on your site, such as “we’ll respond within 24 business hours.”
• Create automated responses: Automated responses for common inquiries can reduce agent workload and speed up overall response times.
• Integrate with your CRM: Give agents essential context on each customer’s past interactions with access to CRM data.
• Use email sorting: AI-powered email sorting can help your team prioritize urgent issues.

3. Live chat support

Live chat support is highly popular among many customer demographics, offering quick and convenient response platforms. However, it can increase your agent’s workload unless you’re leveraging AI-powered chatbots as a first line of defense in your customer service strategy.

Strengths

• Immediate assistance and fast responses can increase customer satisfaction.
• Agents can multitask, chatting with multiple customers at once.
• Chatbot integrations can enable automation for FAQs and may help route customers to the right support teams.

Limitations

• It requires a high agent workload, often needing constant staffing for peak efficiency.
• Its limited depth means that it may be unsuitable for complex troubleshooting.
• Customers demand quick responses, which can put pressure on agents.

Best practices

• Leverage chatbots: Implement chatbots to filter simple inquiries and improve routing.
• Create templates: Response templates and canned responses can improve efficiency.
• Offer escalation: Provide seamless escalation to support team members or other channels when needed.
• Access CRM data: Integrate with your CRM tool to give agents access to a complete customer history.

4. Social media support

Social media platforms are now considered essential support channels and include public comments on your profiles, posts, and private direct messages.

There are high customer expectations for fast response times, and public-facing interactions can significantly impact your brand’s reputation. It’s no surprise, therefore, that 56% of companies plan to increase their social media CX investment this year, making it the fastest-growing support channel.

Strengths

• Quick responses can improve brand reputation due to public visibility.
• It’s a convenient option for customers already using social media.
• Direct interaction with followers can create engagement opportunities.

Limitations

• Customers expect rapid responses, sometimes within minutes.
• High message volume can make filtering genuine support requests challenging.
• Different messaging policies can create confusion or limitations for your support team.

Best practices

• Track brand mentions: Use social media monitoring tools to track all mentions and monitor your reputation, even when you aren’t tagged directly.
• Create support handles: Dedicated support handles like @YourBrandSupport can help you identify and prioritize support requests.
• Have dedicated protocols: Train agents on how to handle public issue resolution and private issue resolution.
• Integrate with contact center software: Omnichannel contact center software can streamline and automate social media support for improved CX.

5. SMS & messaging support (WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger)

SMS messaging (or text messaging) and social media messaging apps are now essential business communication channels. Customers have high expectations for fast responses, but they’re convenient, have high open rates, and may be a good option for automation.

Strengths

• Convenient for customers to engage at their own pace.
• Read faster than emails, as SMS messages have high open rates.
• Reduce service agent workload, as AI chatbots can often handle common questions.
• Popular among customers who prioritize omnichannel customer service.

Limitations

• Limited message length can impact customer communication, which may make complex issues harder to resolve.
• There are significant challenges posed by privacy concerns around personal data security.
• Compliance with individual platform restrictions and regulations is essential but can be difficult to track.

Best practices

• Use outbound SMS messaging: Remind customers of appointments or follow up after a customer support exchange to improve CX.
• Leverage two-way support: Two-way messaging for support interactions can increase resolution times.
• Incorporate chatbots: AI-powered chatbots can respond instantly to commonly asked questions.
• Consider privacy: Choose communication platforms that ensure data encryption for privacy protection.

6. Self-service support (knowledge bases, FAQs, AI chatbots)

Self-service support options, such as knowledge bases, FAQ sections, forums, and AI-powered chatbots, can resolve many customer issues.

These channels provide instant and round-the-clock assistance, drastically reducing customer wait times and overall agent workload. They can be pivotal to your support strategy as long as you don’t rely too heavily on them.

Strengths

• Eliminates the need to wait for human support by providing 24/7 customer support availability.
• Reduces inbound inquiries and operational costs, making it highly cost-efficient.
• Empowers customers to resolve issues themselves, which many prefer.
• Resolves simple customer concerns, freeing up agents to tackle complex issues.

Limitations

• Limited personalization can lack the human touch and still require escalation for some issues.
• Regular updates are required for knowledge bases that can become outdated quickly.
• Poorly designed self-service tools can frustrate customers.
• Customer distrust may prevent them from using tools like AI chatbots.

Best practices

• Stay updated: Keep your knowledge base updated with search-friendly content, creating new pages as new customer concerns arise.
• Offer guided assistance: AI chatbots can provide guided assistance, pulling from your knowledge base.
• Use multimedia options: Video tutorials can be essential for step-by-step troubleshooting, but text walkthroughs can help customers understand what’s causing an issue.
• Have clear escalation protocols: Make it easy for customers to contact your customer service team and get support from human agents.

7. Video chat support

Some customer needs are more technical or complex, which is why call centers and businesses are increasingly offering video chat support. While it requires significant resources in agent time, training, and bandwidth, it can be a valuable part of high-touch or technical customer service.

Strengths

• The highly personal nature of video can build strong customer trust.
• Visual demonstrations improve clarity, making them ideal for complex issues.
• Human connection can help with high-touch customer service and relationship-building.

Limitations

• It requires significant resources in terms of internet connectivity, agent bandwidth, and rep training.
• Increased bandwidth requirements mean agents can only handle one call at a time, making it difficult to scale.
• Many users won’t prefer video interactions.

Best practices

• Use it strategically: Offer video chat as an optional escalation channel instead of a primary support option.
• Provide dedicated training: Train agents in video call etiquette and specialized skills, such as IT troubleshooting.
• Offer interactive assistance: Features like screen sharing and co-browsing can improve support quality.
• Prioritize security: Ensure secure connections for private or sensitive conversations and account for general best practices and industry-specific regulations like HIPAA.

Unifying Your Customer Service Channels Isn’t Optional

Customers don’t just want fast responses — they want personalized support on their preferred channels. That means you need the right digital customer service platforms to keep up, and many businesses are struggling to manage customer service channels individually.

According to Nextiva’s State of CX report, the average company uses 6.3 different tools to manage customer interactions across various channels, which can ultimately lead to inefficiencies and poor customer experiences.

An omnichannel contact center solution solves this by centralizing all communication channels into a single platform, ensuring:

• Seamless customer interactions across channels.
• Full context visibility for support agents.
• Data-driven decision-making through analytics.
• Ability to offer truly personalized interactions for each customer.

Nextiva’s AI-powered contact center integrates key customer service channels: phone, email, live chat, social media, and messaging apps, providing a cohesive experience that optimizes agent workflows and enhances customer satisfaction.