Deliver Them Amazing and They Will Love You Back: Millennial World

This week on our Friends on Friday guest blog post my colleague, Shaista Haque, writes about the millennial generation’s use of technology and how it is affecting their customer experience. The millennial consumer must be understood in order to deliver an Amazing customer service experience. – Shep Hyken

Don’t you think your innovative business idea is on the verge of losing its charm?

Do you have any better plans for sustaining the competitive environment?

How will you justify your ROI in the next few years?

Let me give you a hint.

Your son or daughter in college is updated in all the sense, from using a new technology to saying goodbye to the frayed piece of innovation.

“Being innovative as you were born each day” is the new anthem of the young generation or the Millennials, what you call them as. This breed is interested in learning more and their comfort level with technology is very high. Millennials are the first generation who have fully grown up technology literate, practically from birth. Their expectation from any particular service remains high; be it a home delivery service at their door-step, an online shopping experience, or assistance during purchase in a physical store. They are tech savvy, expect more, are not afraid of complaining and have no regrets on switching brands.

With this sort of environment where one mistake by a brand results in a customer defecting to the competition, it becomes very difficult to reduce the attrition rate. However, organizations can still lead the pack by being less innovative i.e., they will have to maintain their brand supremacy by providing impeccable service that delivers a ‘WOW’ experience.

Differentiating yourself from the crowd is not an easy task, especially when the competition is high. Millennials today are the forefront of organizations and drive the demand proliferation of any product or service. Moreover, digitalization has set high standards of delivering exceptional customer service. Therefore, it becomes necessary for organizations to define their USP and at the same time build strategies to nurture bonds with customers. For this, organizations need to be omnipresent to serve customer expectations on their preferred mode of communication.

Brands can align their overall company goals by keeping millennials at the core of their business strategy and eliminating loopholes in delivering exemplary experience.

Here are few ways through which organizations can ensure that their service is up to speed and that they are on the road to earning future brand advocates:

Mobile Service: The tech-savvy millennials are always connected to the digital world. The usage of smartphones is very high among them. With the availability of smart features like click to call service on apps, millennials prefer to receive instant response to their queries. With a heavy focus on mobile commerce, it becomes of paramount significance for organizations to provide support on mobile.Through mobile customer service, organizations have the power to engage with customers anytime and anywhere based on the customer’s availability.

Real-time Assistance: Providing customer service through live assistance is one of the best ways to glorify your customer experience strategy. Providing service through live-assistance and live chat can help in improving the first contact resolution on a large scale. Through real-time service, customer support agents can resolve customer queries on the go when the customer browses the company’s website.

Studies by Forrester Research have shown that “Many online customers want help from a live person while they are shopping online; in fact, 44% of online consumers say that having questions answered by a live person while in the middle of an online purchase is one of the most important features a Web site can offer.” Thus, driving customer experience with real-time service can help you in winning more customers with greater speed than your competition.

Social Evolution: Providing customer service on social media is not a new concept, in fact being omnipresent on all the channels of interaction is the need of hour. With the help of social media, customers have the power to voice their opinion.

Research shows that “88% of people trust online reviews written by other consumers as much as they trust recommendations from personal contacts.” With the help of social interaction management organizations can monitor, publish and provide social support on social networks. Organizations can harness the power of social media and can keep a track on the market trends and ongoing customer discussions.

Predictive Analytics: Millennials have changed the way traditional customers used to buy, behave or react to different perspectives. Organizations have understood the importance of effective and mind capturing strategies for Millennials. These organizations cater to omnichannel needs of the millennials and apprehends their buying behavior to create better and more meaningful transactions. Based on the above speculations, they are able to create customer profiles which includes their demographic as well as psychographic insights.

These details help the organizations to create targeted campaigns for the qualified millennials and at the same time help in optimizing the media efforts for the promotion of the products or services. Such analytics can provide great turnaround to any organization and help them to stand out of the ordinary.

Millennials are doing it the way they like it, but are you doing the way they love it?

Let me know if you are facing any difficulties for your millennial customers, I will be happy to assist.

Shaista Haque is a marketing enthusiast at Ameyo. She is extremely passionate about B2B marketing strategies for products that harness the web and social media as customer channels. Armed with this information, she writes about latest industry technologies and how it benefits organizations from small scale to global enterprises.