Workforce Management Featured Article
Millennials Will Dictate Big Changes to the Traditional Contact Center
Today’s younger consumer is different from previous generations. When it comes to customer support, Millennials, or young people born between (approximately) 1982 and 2003, are comfortable with (and even prefer) self-service. They are tech-savvy and quick to embrace the ever-growing influence of social media. They expect service to take place quickly (with instant gratification), and they have little patience for holding, waiting or being asked to call a different department. Unfortunately, most contact centers haven’t yet caught up with all of these trends.
In a recent article for Business2Community, Salil Gupta writes that since Millennials now represent the largest consumer market for annual revenue growth, the “wow me” factor of modern customer support is increasingly vital. To succeed, companies need to consider doing away with some old-fashioned mindsets that simply won’t please younger consumers.
9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. If you sell your products or services online, you’re selling them 24 hours a day. If customers are using your services 24 hours a day, they’re not going to have much patience with quaint nine-to-five customer support. Moving ahead, the companies that claim the lion’s share of business will be those that understand that customer support needs to be a round-the-clock service. This may mean organizing third shifts, or it may mean outsourcing to another time zone. But to people who can’t grasp the concept that television once “went off” overnight, frequently-closed customer support will be a business killer.
Social media. Accessibility and convenience is absolutely critical to younger consumers. Social media turns it 24-hour.
“Therefore, bringing customer service to the client via their social media channels creates a medium in which your company can connect, monitor, and influence the customer to praise and promote your brand,” wrote Gupta. “When it comes to social media, word of mouth spreads quickly. It is for this reason that a positive or negative customer experience via Twitter, Facebook (News - Alert), Live Chat and Instagram is more critical than ever.”
Mobility. Have you ever tried to interact with your company’s regular Web page on a mobile device? It’s probably a frustrating experience. If you’re not giving customers a specially designed mobile experience, through mobile Web or an app, you’re frustrating them. And given the habits of this generation, if they’re frustrated by your mobile Web presence, they will NOT pick up the phone and call you: they’ll try your competitors. A good mobile app can help with both self-service and live help (via chat, for example). It can help you retain younger consumers and allow them to get the answers they need quickly.
Self-service. Millennials are not interested in yesterday’s self-service solutions (such as traditional interactive voice response, or IVR). Younger consumers think of your digital presence when they think of self-service. FAQ sections, troubleshooting guides, or a community forum in which other customers can ask and answer questions, helps create the experience Millennials want, noted Gupta. Also consider “virtual concierges,” or chatbots, that can provide information in a conversational way using natural language processing.
These changes will likely involve big alterations to your current contact center operations. The switch to “omnichannel” is more important than ever. If you’re still waiting for your customers to come to you by telephone, you may find that in a short few years, you no longer have many customers.
Edited by Alicia Young
