Five years ago you could ship a chat widget on a website and call it a customer support tool. Today that is a fraction of the problem. Depending on the business, the website chat might be the smallest channel. WhatsApp Business, Instagram DMs, Facebook Messenger, SMS, and in some markets Telegram or WeChat, all carry more traffic.
The problem is that almost every "chatbot" tool on the market started as a website widget. They added other channels as integrations, bolted on, often missing features. The context does not sync across channels. If a customer messages you on Instagram and then again on WhatsApp, your bot treats them as two different people. That is a bad experience and it is the default experience in most tools.
What we push clients toward is a channel-agnostic core. The conversation logic lives in one place. The channels are just thin transports. A message from WhatsApp and a message from the website widget hit the same engine, produce the same response, and get logged against the same customer profile. This is not a new idea, it is just not what most products actually do.
The biggest unlock from doing this right is that you can stop asking customers to repeat themselves across channels. Customer emails support on Monday. Calls on Tuesday. Messages WhatsApp on Wednesday. In most stacks, these are three separate tickets and three separate agent interactions. In a unified stack, it is one thread.
The second unlock is that you start seeing where your customers actually are. A surprising number of businesses discover that WhatsApp is their biggest channel by 3x, but they have been investing all their support engineering into email because email was the historical default. Once you see the real distribution you reallocate. You staff differently. You route differently.
If you are building or buying a bot this year, channel coverage is a table stake, not a feature. Ask the vendor how the same conversation flows across channels. If they say "you build it once and it deploys to all channels" without a shared customer record, they are selling you three bots in a trenchcoat.