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
Leveraging social media platforms for success
Social media is like a goldmine to connect with millennials and extract real-time insights like preferences, behavior, and opinions of the target customers by monitoring conversations, customer feedback, and comments. The insights can be further utilized to develop marketing campaigns, content, and product development aligning with the target audience’s desires. Coming across marketing campaigns and content development using insights, influencer marketing – a huge success in promoting brands at the current time, can be the ideal advertisement method. The influencers present on social media navigate the purchasing decisions for the millennials, making them the golden ticket to success for businesses. The posts uploaded by these influencers are often bombarded with reviews from the existing users’ experience, again influencing the purchasing necessities of the millennials. Therefore, getting a strong hold on social media platforms with the right content and channel can be a tool to create exceptional customer experience.
Website engagement with UGC and dynamic content
UGC or User-Generated Content can unlock the full potential of brand promotion by collecting unique insights from the customers. The key here is to create an authentic and engaging brand story using the unique insights leading to a box of consumer-generated content that will build credibility and trust among the customers and further develop important insights on millennials’ overall preferences, behaviors, and desires. Additionally, the insights will set the right tone to alter content resonating with the consumers, making them relevant to their interests and needs. The customer experience to be developed here will be based on continuous clicking and scrolling through the company website, enjoying unforgettable and satisfactory customer service.
Embracing optimal user experiences using mobile
The device that sets the tone to use websites and social media platforms is a smartphone. Millennials use These basic instruments to shop, discover, and socialize new products, services, and information. Thus, mobile optimization and mobile-specific features need to be prioritized within their digital campaigns as the companies cater to customer preferences in the digital world. Further, it allows the companies to bridge the gap between companies and customers using location-based push notifications, delivering contextually tailored information to each consumer. Therefore generating a higher scope of sales generation through satisfied customer service.
Streamlining omnichannel consistency in customer support
Floating in the digital world through all touchpoints and channels can be confusing, but companies maintaining consistency in it can deliver a seamless experience for customers as they jump from one channel to another with an aim to interact with the brand. Again, consumers’ insights will be the foundation to cater to their omnichannel strategy, aiming to deliver a satisfying and cohesive customer experience.
This Forbes study shows that companies with superior omnichannel customer engagement tactics retain 89% of their customers, while those with weaker strategies only keep an average of 33% of their customer base. By driving data and leveraging insights using data analytics, businesses can fabricate an omnichannel strategy – seamless and well-conducted to influence today’s customers to purchase their services and products.
At Conneqt, we believe in making data-driven decisions is quintessential to improving customer interaction quality. We regard data analytics as gaining insights on the grounds of personalized customer experience, revealing their entire journey to map possible customer behavior changes and monitor feedback to curate a more satisfactory customer interaction. We implement data analytics in the form of speech and sentiment analysis – an effective method of measuring customer loyalty by leveraging the analysis of metrics such as repeat call rates, customer lifetime value, and net promoter scores gained through different touchpoints.
Final Thoughts
There is a saying, ‘Customers are always right’. However, meeting millennials’ demands is a complex task in the current digital world. Brands must identify transparent and innovative ideas to generate customer experience that aligns with their preferences. Engaging them further with satisfactory interaction, campaigns, reviews, influencer content, convenient social channels, and personalized customer service where self-service is set at the core. With technology playing a major role in curating customer experience development strategies, millennials are forming the key foundation of tech-enabled CX in the market.
At Conneqt Business Solutions, we provide end-to-end digital Customer Experience solutions, helping you deliver personalized customer experience by leveraging speech and text analytics. Call us for a free consultation to learn more, and we would be happy to discuss how we can help you delight customers.