Essay: What Millennials Want
It is important to keep customer care smart enough for today’s fast-growing younger generation.
Dennis Balogh
The customer experience is undergoing its greatest transformation yet with the rise of the most demanding, most diverse, most empowered and most connected generation ever. Numbering nearly 80 million Americans with $1 trillion in spending power, they are the future of every U.S. company: the generation of teens to thirtysomethings known as the millennials.
They prefer technology-friendly, anytime, anywhere service, and when millennials have a positive experience with a company, they may recommend it and its products to friends and colleagues via social-media networks, creating a positive viral effect for a brand.
Proprietary customer-experience research from Convergys provides a revealing picture of this powerful, fast-growing customer group and the traits that set it apart. Sixty-five percent of all customers we’ve surveyed rank getting to a knowledgeable agent and addressing their needs on the first contact as the most important customer-service attributes. Millennials, however, define both “knowledgeable” and “first contact” differently than do other survey respondents.
Millennials identify knowledgeable employees as those who know about their competitors’ products and how their company’s offers compare. This varies from non-millennials, who define a knowledgeable agent as someone who can quickly access information without putting them on hold or transferring them.
According to the survey, most customers want to resolve their issue on the first contact. However, 61 percent of millennials indicate that they are happy to resolve their own issues via an automated phone system or the Web versus waiting to talk to an agent. And this preference is having an impact: Convergys’ research indicates that the adoption of automated self-service has doubled since 2004.
The Millennial Generation at a Glance
Convergys President and CEO Jeffrey H. Fox says that millennials are the future of every company. Here is a snapshot of who they are and what they do.
Millennials are the nearly 80 million Americans born between the mid-1970s and the mid-1990s. Today they range in age from their teens to their mid-thirties. Millennials are also commonly referred to as Generation Y or echo boomers, because many are the children of baby boomers. In a typical week, 58 percent of millennials create personal content online, and 71 percent consume user-created content.
Because of how millennials want to access information and what they value as important, a new relationship-management approach to service is needed to effectively reach and create long-term loyalty within this technology-driven generation. Companies must leverage intelligent self-service to deliver uniquely personal care across any channel, including automated voice, mobile, Web and e-mail, when and where the customer wants it. Using systems that filter customer, product and billing data in real time, companies are able to “know” customers and respond to their needs accordingly.
Such intelligent systems have a spillover effect in traditional customer care. When a millennial does opt to speak with an agent, these systems provide the representative with the information needed to create the best possible experience. The customer’s history, along with account and other pertinent information, pops up automatically so that the caller doesn’t have to repeat everything. The “smart” systems also provide known buying preferences, as well as eligibility for competitive offers of likely interest to the customer. This creates a richer, more satisfying service experience in a fraction of the usual time and cost. And superior service through continuous innovation and investment in technology is what companies need to keep customer care smart enough for today’s millennials and generations to come.
Convergys Corp. (CVG) is a leader in relationship management, delivering a broad range of customer-management solutions. The company, with a market cap of $1.4 billion, has nearly 70,000 employees who serve clients in more than 70 countries.
