Millennial-Driven CX Transformation: A Future of Excellence
Customer experience is all about how a business engages with its customers, from marketing to customer services throughout their journey, keeping up with their requirements. However, the generational change ruling the consumer market is altering the future of CX. According to Statista, the consumer market is swarmed by 72.24 million millennials, leaving behind baby boomers and Gen X, creating a necessity to mold customer experience strategies for millennials. In this article, let us understand how millennials generate factors to shape the CX strategies and identify a key strategy to boost CX value for them.
Driving Force Behind the New Consumer Market
Millennials, as we know, are seen as a large group of digit-heads, influencing brands and considerably convincing them to re-evaluate their strategies to meet consumer needs and values. With the pandemic bringing changes on how to influence customer satisfaction levels digitally, the millennials representing a large section of the target population of businesses are re-wiring the overall definition of customer experience.Millennials can be represented as a hyper-connected mobile-first generation as they utilize the internet and smartphones confidently to accomplish most of their regular activities. The brands often utilize the hours spent by this consumer group as a mode of engagement through touch points such as streaming services, social media, buying, and browsing. Representing a higher consumer target potential for brands, only a limited segment of the generation is loyal as they often switch their brand interest to a competing one based on their single experience. This impacts the companies trying to develop loyalty as they move toward meeting the customer’s expectations while foreseeing the desires of the consumers.
Apart from personal desires, reduced social interaction due to increased internet activity has drastically made a difference in their product/service availing interest. A radical inclination towards social media usage led to certain good habits – click-and-collect and collect & contactless payments, making companies adopt these strategies as the new part and parcel of their sales operations while positioning digital experience at the core of their CX strategies. Thereby, the consumer market is influenced by the CX quality delivered. Millennials have created a consumer market expecting brands to be delivered at each touchpoint, with their value reassured at every interaction, emphasizing their interaction with the brand.
Meeting the Demands of Today’s Generation
Needless to say, changes in the customers’ consumption habits have redirected their CX expectations. The longing to communicate instantly with every interaction the brand holds with them through text messages or emails is a part of the new expectations. This has led to the popularisation of chatbots, allowing customers to interact with the companies in no time and in real-time, feeding their self-sufficient nature and raising the need for self-service options integrated into customer service options. Consequently, companies have begun investing heavily in their IT infrastructure to accommodate such tools, simulating multiple customer inquiry handling processes and reducing response wait time.Today’s customers want to be heard, requiring companies to improve their response rates and establish opportunities for customer retention. Millennials not only look for faster responses but rectification of the negative feedback they place, showcasing transparency. Here, digital channels are a foundational exception, with CCaaS platforms significantly offering tools to meet customer experience needs. Thereby offering these next-gen customers the comfort of not interacting with a human agent and more with virtual agents – a primary go-to option for millennials. Besides driving customer comfort, companies also yield control of their operating cost as they integrate the tech platforms, facilitating the activities of contact center advisors and leading to faster resolution to complex customer cases.
Millennials are putting a high value on personalization, convincing companies to look for the right channels to boost engagement. Depending on the industry type, companies are facing the urgency of facilitating and optimizing the work of the service agents by integrating instant messaging to bring speed and flexibility to the interactions. Therefore, social media channels are the key platforms used by millennials to initiate communication, making room for new KPIs – high traffic and high engagement. These KPIs further develop the foundation of the customer community, where members emphasize brand image and value management. Not to forget, the presence of a well-managed social media channel is what today’s market is looking out to make room for their loyalty to the companies.Strategies for Millennial-Focused CX Transformation
Using multiple channels and boosting tech usage are the primary factors ruling today’s market filled with millennials. However, after everything has been put in place, the insights generated from the customer’s experience lay the foundation for businesses willing to hit the bullseye with their target audience. Proactively utilizing the insights will be the words of wisdom for companies focusing on CX enhancement to make informed decisions supporting the brand image and tailor strategies according to the business goals.Therefore, we have come across the following tactics to deliver exceptional CX to the millennials:
- Leveraging social media platforms for success
- Website engagement with UGC and dynamic content
- Embracing optimal user experiences using mobile
- Streamlining omnichannel consistency in customer support
- Value addition to customer interactions through customer analytics