The way companies interact with their customers has changed in recent years. New channels have been added to supplement the telephone, and many companies are struggling to integrate these channels into a single customer experience. Older customers, accustomed to interacting with companies via the telephone, have been more forgiving when it comes to multichannel missteps on the part of customer-facing companies. Millennial customers, or those born between about 1979 and 2000, will not be forgiving.

Millennials grew up with the Internet and cell phones. They are multichannel multitaskers, and they are heavy users of many different brands of social media. Research has found that 62 percent of Millennials “like” at least one brand on Facebook, and are frequent users of Twitter (News - Alert). This generation is used to instant results, and expects to be able to start a transaction in one channel and finish in another with no loss of knowledge. They are also heavy users of mobile devices, and feel just as at home interacting with them as any other wired channel.

There is a lot at stake. Considering that this year, 2015, there will be 76 million Millennials in the U.S. alone, companies must get their digital, omnichannel customer support presence right, or they could be in serious trouble, according to a recent blog post by Aspect’s (News - Alert) Christine O’Brien.

“There will be severe consequences for companies that fail to adapt their customer engagement strategies to this generation,” she wrote. No longer can companies hang on to the antiquated tactics that worked on less tech-savvy consumers of the past. So here’s the critical question for businesses as the millennials’ purchasing power rises: Is your company’s contact center sophisticated enough to sufficiently cater to this generation?  For example, does it boast omnichannel service—SMS, email, live chat—that provides millennials with anytime, anywhere access to information or social media software to enable social customer care that creates real value?”

Attempts to integrate channels piecemeal will likely lead to failure. For this reason, many companies are turning to hosted contact center solutions that offer ready-made channel integration, including social media and mobile support that will allow them to ensure that the customer is at the heart of each transaction and not the communications media. These solutions bring all contact options together in one place on one unified platform, wrote O’Brien, allowing agents to “keep talking, typing and conversing with customers through the channels that are most convenient for them.”

“By providing more channel choices and self-service features, agents will be empowered with useful, relevant and impactful information to give customers the flexibility, convenience and autonomy, which defines a digitally driven lifestyle that’s fast becoming the global norm,” she wrote.