Omnichannel Meant Being Everywhere; In the AI Era, It Means Not Forgetting Context

In the digital transformation era that predated AI's ubiquity, omnichannel had a fairly narrow definition: the ability to service or engage a customer across multiple channels, whether that meant an app, a retail store, or a contact center. Most communication service providers (CSPs) cleared that bar over a decade ago, building out the infrastructure to be present wherever a customer chose to show up.

That definition is quickly becoming outdated, because being present is no longer the same as being useful. Gartner's own research shows how fast this shift is accelerating. In a survey of 199 service and support leaders conducted this spring, AI spending rose 38 percent.

When AI is absorbing that much of the investment, what it knows about a customer starts to matter more than which channels it can receive them.

Why Customers Expect Continuity, Not Just Access

Customers today demand continuity, which means providers’ systems need to remember who someone is and what they have already done rather than asking them to fully or partially re-explain their situation from scratch. What a customer did in the app by themselves, in a store with a rep, or on the phone with a contact center agent should be read as one continuous process, not three separate ones. 

When compared to the digital-native experiences mastered by leading technology service companies like Amazon, Apple and Meta, who’ve set the standard for experience continuity, most providers still fall short. Sixty-two percent of telecom customers report having to repeat steps they have already taken to resolve a service issue, and that repetition carries a real cost, dragging Net Promoter Score down by nine points on average. 

At an AI-driven enterprise scale, a gap like that does not stay small, since every handoff between channels over time becomes another chance for the system to forget or miss information, and as more of those handoffs involve an AI agent instead of a person, the forgetting is accelerated and exacerbated. These poor experiences also degrade a provider’s ability to retain and upsell a customer.

The Blank-Slate Challenge

The second piece of the puzzle is context itself: the service and account history that comes from call center notes, device status, CRM and billing records and network data. Without that context, a customer becomes something close to a blank slate every time AI enters a service interaction, regardless of how much history actually exists somewhere in the provider's systems.

This is not a niche problem. A cross-industry study from Oxford Economics and SAP found that only 25 percent of organizations describe their customer experience technology as fully harmonized, while 29 percent remain highly fragmented [Source: Oxford Economics/SAP, The CX Leaders Playbook, January 2026].

Accenture's research points to why that gap matters specifically for CSPs. Seventy-four percent of customers say they would be frustrated by a service experience from their provider that lacks personalization, and hyper-personalization is exactly what a fragmented data picture cannot deliver with each interaction.

What Actually Closes the Gap

Omnichannel in the AI era will be measured less by how many channels a provider covers and uses AI agents in than by whether context and history follow the customer across all of them. 

Providers already have an abundance of information they collect on the customer – billing, CRM, network operations, and, to a degree, device. In working to enhance existing channels of service with AI agents, what enhances it is the connective architecture, one that breaks the siloes where those data points live. More importantly, said architecture should make the data easily accessible between the channels and their systems and structured as usable insights for customer engagement.

In fact, customers will pay more for these kinds of personalized, proactive and seamless service experiences – up to 86 percent, according to Deloitte's 2026 Telecommunications Industry Outlook.

MCE Systems is your partner to achieve that. Our dDLM platform connects customer journey history, channels of service and other context that allows your AI models for customer service and experience to deliver on your customer engagement, marketing and care KPIs. Three quarters of customers indicated they would stay with their existing provider for these kinds of unified and personalized experiences.

Explore our telecom solutions for the AI era.