Call Center Scheduling Featured Article
Today's Contact Centers Are Largely Staffed by the Millennial Generation. Is This Good or Bad?
In the contact center, there are people, processes and technology, and all three contribute to the quality of customer support a company can offer. But people are the cornerstone of the contact center, and the rest is often just widow-dressing (important window-dressing, but still…) Understanding employees is one of the most vital functions of a manager, and in today’s customer support environment, this means understanding the Millennial generation worker.
Millennials – sometimes called “Generation Y,” are today’s young people, aged between about 22 and 33 years old (though the definitions of each generational group sometimes vary). These individuals grew up with e-mail, the Internet, streaming video, mobile phones, social networking and text messaging. They’re used to multitasking, they are easily bored and they are surprisingly eager to do a good job. They’re also the majority of workers in today’s contact centers, according to a recent blog post by third-party contact center organization TELUS (News - Alert) International, which noted that nearly 80 percent of its team members are Millennials.
“At TELUS International, we realized that we needed to adapt our business processes to Gen Y, not expect Gen Y to adapt to existing ways of doing things,” blogged TELUS’s Jeff Gangemi. “In the process of learning to understand this group’s strengths and weaknesses, we’ve learned to unleash their capacity for delivering top-notch customer experience.”
Gangemi notes that it’s important for a company to understand Millennials in order to manage and motivate them properly. Two outstanding features of Gen Y include:
Multitasking. These workers are accustomed to using computers, cell phones and gaming consoles, sometimes simultaneously. They’re confident using technology, and even dependent on it, according to Gangemi. They are masters at flipping between screens to find information quickly, which is a boon in the contact center. “It’s not unusual to see a Gen Y agent working with 10 open windows on their computer, while also on the phone with a customer,” according to the TELUS blog.
This is the good news about Generation Y. Contact centers today often require agents to use a lot of technologies and applications simultaneously, and Millennial workers are up to the task. They’re also willing to learn new applications as necessary. Now for the not-so-good news.
Short attention spans. Activities that used to be staples to the contact center, such as classroom training, aren’t as effective with Gen Y, since many of them do have much shorter attention spans than their older peers. This group is used having constant stimulation at all times, and they’ve grown accustomed to quick shifts in their attention. In fact, many Gen Y workers have an attention span of 15 minutes or less.
“We’ve had to completely rethink our training programs. We can’t design courses where instructors step through PowerPoint slides. We have to be more dynamic and entertaining. Otherwise, knowledge won’t transfer,” Andrea Ibarguen, VP of Human Resources, TELUS International, Guatemala, told blogger Jeff Gangemi.
In the long run, however, Gen Y makes good contact center workers. They are empathetic, eager to help and connect, and are more civic minded than many of their older peers. They are determined and work well in teams on collaborative projects. While their methods may require that contact centers shift their procedures a little to better accommodate them, the benefits they offer to the customer relationship are invaluable.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi