You’ll sooner see a boomer excited by a flush toilet than a millennial impressed by the internet. And this reality has major customer service and customer experience implications.
Millennials, the biggest generation of customers ever (80 million strong in the U.S., which means there are more millennials than there are baby boomers) are in some ways a different breed of customer.
For one thing, they don’t care about the Internet. Not the way older generations do. They use the internet, of course, almost endlessly, often from mobile devices. But it’s not a thing to them, a discrete, nifty invention. Rather, for a millennial, it’s just the norm. Like flush toilets. Like electricity.
Many things are different about millennials (born circa 1980-2000, also known as Gen-Y) but the one I want to discuss today is this: These are young people for whom connective technology, the internet, the web, smartphones have pretty much always been around.
This may not seem like that big a shift—hey, people of all ages use the internet, right, everyone has a smartphone—but it is. Because to someone from a previous generation—Boomer, Silent Generation, or Gen X— this stuff is still new, or newish. It’s impressive. It represents change.
Shiny and new to you, “the way it’s always been” to them
But what still seems new and shiny to boomers is “the way it’s always been” for millennials. And this is where it gets tricky. The changes brought on by the internet and other connective technology have happened over time for those of us who are baby boomers or Gen X (the small generation immediately preceding the millennials).
Baby boomers and Gen X have been watching the expanding effect of these amazing technological advancements since they first began to make an impact, watching the steady, relentless digital transformation of industries such as communications, banking, travel, recorded music, and cinema.
Older customers—those, in other words, who’ve witnessed this transformation from its feeble roots—have the perspective and appreciation for how amazing these strides are in the ease and efficiency of customer service.
"Oh, Jeepers, Ma, check out this newfangled internet!"
For these customers, there’s still an “oh jeepers!” component to this new, digitally enhanced consumer experience. Because older generations are able to conjure up comparisons to a previous, less efficient service model, they’re more likely to be satisfied with the new status quo of digitally enhanced customer service—simply because it’s so much better, even if imperfect, than what used to be.
But for the newest generation of customers, this digitally transformed landscape is how the world’s always been. These are kids who have never waited in line at the bank, never waited days for a stamped letter to arrive, never used a phone that didn’t take photos, never, or rarely, had their musical choices limited to what’s on the AM and FM band waves or to the number of tracks that can fit on a disc or cassette tape.
This stuff is not whiz-bang or newfangled to the millennial generation. A life that moves at the speed of digital and offers an array of choices defined by digital options is just how normal, day to day life.
The very definition of millennial brand suicide: Hotels that charge for wifi
So what are the implications for customer service, sales, and the customer experience? Some implications are obvious. For example, hotels are committing brand suicide when they charge for wifi. Because they're denying a millennial something that's simply expected to be there. Charging a guest for wifi is like making a customer plunk down a quarter to enter a toilet stall.
Deeper implications
But there's more, a lot more, than just keeping your wifi free and operational. The more involved implications add up to the need for a mindset overhaul. I hesitate to use jargon, but one buzzword that's appropriate for what's needed here is "omnichannel": to stop defining the experience you offer a customer based on the customer's initial choice of channel, only grudgingly, if at all, adding support from other channels. Instead, you should be taking a viewpoint that starts with the customer rather than the channel.
Omnichannel sounds a lot like the earlier term "multichannel," but the concept is different and the implementation is much more difficult. The older term, multichannel, just means you have more than one channel by which a customer may make a purchase or a contact: phone, catalog, store. Omnichannel is the ultimate realization of "the whole being more than the sum of the parts, the sum of the different channels," to quote Corey Gale from Micros, to such an extent that the customer has no need to pay attention to/keep track of which particular channel she started her journey in, or of how many times she is shifting channels, since everything is happening so seamlessly.
Because this is what customers, especially younger customers, are already expecting. They're just waiting for you to catch up.
Micah Solomon is a customer experience consultant, customer service speaker and author.
