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The Trillion Dollar Generation: How Millennials Are Changing the Way Business is Done

The last generation of the 20th Century is the first generation of the digital world, and 80-million people strong, they are the first

generation to outnumber the Baby Boomers.

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The Millennial as Your Customer

According to a 2013 retail industry report published by Accenturei there are roughly 80 million Millennials in the United States alone, and they are spending approximately $600 billion annually, an amount expected to grow to $1.4 trillion by 2020. As the Baby Boomer generation retires and reduces their spending, building lasting customer relations with this demographic will be a key performance indicator for stability and growth over the next 40 years.

Unlike preceding generations, Millennials (those born between1980-2000, also known as Generation Y) grew up with computers and internet access as a staple in their educational and experiential diet, paving the way toward their eager embrace of online interactions that started in the late 80s with the growth of personal websites, email and online communities, forums and chatrooms; then matured to online shopping experiences, and social media. The digital age enabled the world to feel smaller and more connected than it had been for any generation before, and with that connectedness came a shift in attitudes, personal consumer habits, and employment patterns.

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For those Millennials entering the work force in 2001, and again in 2009, the U.S. economy was in recession, leaving many in meager circumstances, resulting in the delay of traditional rites of passage like marriage, starting a family, and buying a first house; and in many cases post-college millennials found themselves moving back home with their parents, unable to find sufficient employment or financial stability to progress toward such goals. While some critics hailed this digression as evidence of a generation that was lazy and entitled, others claim that these economic hardships have led and will continue to resonate as the era of the cautious and informed consumer, with more information and negotiation power available to them than had been seen in prior generations.

This infographic by Jonathan Halliwell shows statistics on Millennial

financial realities published in The August 2013 Consumer Price Index for

Canada.ii

Showrooming

According to the same Accenture study, 41% of shoppers across all generations say they will examine merchandise at a nearby retail store, and then shop for the same item online to find the lowest price. This phenomenon has been largely attributed to the widespread adoption of smartphones and tablets enabling customers to do this research easily, sometimes even while in the store. Transactions are beginning to rely less on face to face contact and more on text and graphical interfaces.

iii

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24/7/365

Approximately 36% of shoppers in the Accenture survey reported that they will opt to purchase a product online when the retailers’ stores are closed. Likewise, consumers are making the same choice to resolve customer service and support problems with mixed satisfaction levels based on how quickly an issue could be resolved. The ‘round the clock availability of all things internet means that traditional business hours are less and less taken into consideration by younger or more tech savvy consumers who are demanding what they want, when they want, forcing businesses to find ways to accommodate their needs through automation, self-service options, or additional shift schedules for live agents to meet these demands. Companies unable to keep up with these needs are falling behind in customer satisfaction ratings even when previously accepted levels of service have been upheld.

This growing emphasis on non-voice channels of communication to conduct the sale or customer support transaction has paved the way for language learning artificially intelligent programs like Lymba’s PowerAgent to automate customer service by interpreting text based requests and employing semantic matching to pull up the appropriate response from a company’s Knowledge Base.

The Millennial as Your Employee

Multi-Channel Contact Center Dexterity

Changes in technology and consumer habits are driving toward a convergence of mobile, SMS, web, social media, email and voice customer support offerings to take place within a single contact center, and as a generation that grew up with these

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technologies, the Millennial is well suited for communication across all of these channels.iv

Transience

Millennials joining the workforce within the past ten years have been dumped into deep economic slumps that matched, or, according to some sources, hit greater depth than the Great Depression experienced by their grandparents; and with advances in technology allowing businesses to automate tasks that previously required human labor, the employment tides changed.

The concept of employee tenure beyond a few years is dwindling toward nonexistence. Career paths are becoming nonlinear and often the only option for increasing income in a noncommissioned environment is to make a near lateral move to another company. This is not to say that Millennials are not loyal employees; rather, they view transience between jobs as an ordinary and expected bump in the road.

As one of the industries already dealing with up to 40% employee turnover, contact centers offering multi-channel support are deeply impacted by this trend. Smart contact centers are investing in Knowledge Bases to capture common knowledge used by their employees so that the information is not lost when employees turn over. Being able to manage Knowledge and make it universally accessible aids in both training new employees and automation of certain tasks.

Providing the Right Tools

Regardless of the year a person was born, nothing is more frustrating than being faced with a problem without being equipped with the appropriate resources to solve it. Call

center fatigue is defined as the strain experienced by contact center employees taking on the emotional burden of dealing multiple times daily with customer problems that they do not have the authority or knowledge to solve.

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Call center fatigue is one of the leading causes of contact center attrition, but steps can be taken to minimize this

burden.

Providing the accessibility of solutions to incoming problems and minimizing the monotony of simple questions with simple answers is the most straight-forward solution. Artificially intelligent automation of responses to simple requests like password resets and FAQs can minimize call center fatigue by allowing agents to focus their attention on more challenging and important problems. Savvy companies are investing in building comprehensive Knowledge Bases that can make answers to customer support questions more readily available to the contact center agent and/or the customer directly. For the contact center using a good Knowledge Base, the emphasis for the agent shifts from having to acquire the knowledge and learn the answer by rote to simply understanding where and how to find answers that already exist for them to use.

Lymba’s PowerAgent addresses both monotony and availability of answers to combat call center fatigue by using artificial intelligence to automatically answer simple incoming text based requests and employing semantic matching to suggest answers from the Knowledge Base to save agents the time it takes to look them up.

The contact center agent never has to look at auto-answered cases, but PowerAgent

stores the data for analysis by contact center managers and Knowledge contributors, enabling the Knowledge Base to evolve and offer more and better answers. When a more complex case is routed to an agent with auto-suggestions, he or she can select the best fitting of multiple choices offered and send a response with a single click, or opt to edit the chosen response to fine tune the detail or add a more personal touch.

As an additional benefit, PowerAgent also interprets the sentiment of inbound text based requests rating them as positive, negative or neutral, for managers to prioritize and

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delegate and for agents to mentally prepare themselves for the tone of the communication in the case they are about to handle. Using PowerAgent’s sentiment rating to prioritize and distribute cases helps minimize call center fatigue by ensuring that employees are getting balanced volumes of negative versus neutral cases so that an individual agent doesn’t perceive that he or she is getting all the hard cases while someone else gets all the easy ones. With Millennial tendencies to compare each other’s performance and advantages or disadvantages, this tactic can be extremely beneficial for maintaining positive morale that correlates directly with the quality of contact your agents give your customers.

Gamification

Automation and self-service resolution options are solving simple issues, leaving more complex and challenging issues to be handled by the live contact center agent, requiring better interpersonal skills and higher level interaction to achieve a successful outcome for the support requests that come through to them.

According to Ben Warner of Microsoft Dynamics, Millennials have spent the last two decades with near real-time feedback on academic and social performance, coupled with online social gaming that give them virtual battles and quests for which they earn badges or points that allow them to track their progress and compare against their peers, has conditioned them to be energized by game-like competition in the workplace.

Constant Communication

According to Manpower, Millennials are used to, and expect, constant communication and feedback.

They are used to looking for, finding and knowing information very quickly…Unlike prior generations, Generation Y loves to voice their opinions and be actively engaged in coming up with solutions. (They’ve been coached to do this in their home lives, often being involved in family decisions, and so expect this same ability to voice their thoughts and ideas at work.)v

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Transparency is a value prized by this generation far higher than generations past. They want to know exactly where they stand at any given point in time, and see clear paths from problem to solution. Access to information that enables them to understand their strengths, limitations and opportunities is key to keeping this employee engaged.

To learn more about PowerAgent and how it can improve your contact center experience please visit: http://www.lymba.com/crm-support-optimization.html .

i Donnelly, Christopher and Renato Scaff. (2013) Outlook, Issue 2. Who are the Millennial Shoppers? And What Do They Really Want? http://www.accenture.com/SiteCollectionDocuments/PDF/Accenture-Outlook-Who-Are-Millennial-Shoppers-What-Do-They-Want-Retail.pdf (Accessed 18.8.2014) ii Tews, Mary. (9.9.2013) The Inside Agenda Blog. Infographic: Dude, Where’s My Future?

http://theagenda.tvo.org/blog/agenda-blogs/infographic-dude-wheres-my-future (Accessed 18.8.2014) iii Bulldog Reporter (11.12.2012) Catering to the Unique Millennial Market: Restaurants Look to Meet Gen Y’s

Needs Without Alienating Others, New Technomic Study Finds. http://www.bulldogreporter.com/dailydog/article/catering-unique-millennial-market-restaurants-look-meet-gen-ys-needs-without-aliena (Accessed 18.8.2014) iv Gustavson, Gavin. inContact Blog. 15.7.2014. Millennials’ Influence on the Contact Center of the Future.

http://www.incontact.com/blog/millennials-influence-on-contact-centers-of-the-future/ (Accessed 19.8.2014) v Childs, Kevin, Becky Thorne & Kate Donovan. Working Successfully with Gen Y: How Best to Manage and

Motivate Today’s Contact Center Workforce. ©2012 Manpower Group. http://www.manpower.us/Website-File-Pile/Whitepapers/Manpower/ContactCenter_Working-with-Gen-y.pdf (Accessed 19.8.2014)