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The Millennial Generation Makes Ideal Call Center Workers (Under the Right Circumstances)

By Tracey E. Schelmetic, TMCnet Contributor

In the past few years, we’ve seen unprecedented technological changes in the contact center, including the advent of Voice over IP (VoIP) call-center platforms and cloud contact centers, allowing companies to build virtual and remote contact center networks that spread all over the world.

We have seen speech recognition-based interactive voice response (IVR) solutions taking the place of the hated (“press one,” “press two”) IVR boxes. We’ve seen analytics solutions that can listen and pluck relevant data from interactions with customers and turn it into actionable intelligence.

So where haven’t we seen an improvement in contact center operations? That’s pretty easy: in the workforce. The human resource factor has always been the trickiest to manage in any call center. The work is repetitive and often not very well paid, which leads to high turnover. In turn, this leads to escalating recruiting, hiring and training costs for the organization, and a great deal of lost time.

There are many ways to reduce turnover – for starters, better recruiting and training processes – but one of them involves understanding your employees. Since call centers tend to hire a large number of young people just starting out in their careers, this means understanding the so-called “Millennial” generation, or young people born between about 1980 and 2000.

They are a very different group than previous generations, wrote Microsoft Dynamics’ Ben Werner in Forbes recently, and they share some interesting traits.

“Over the past two decades, they have received constant, near-real-time feedback about their academic and social performance and logged untold hours on Facebook (News - Alert) and Xbox Live, waging virtual battles, playing games, and earning badges, points, and respect as they track their own progress and that of their peers (often quite publicly),” Werner says.

While focusing on a single task for a long period may not play to their strengths, this is a trait seldom required in a call center. Millennials are excellent at multitasking (being used to watching television, listening to music, texting, playing video games and doing homework all at the same time), and smart call centers can take advantage of this skill.

Werner notes that a call center is also ideally set up to play to Millennials’ skill with video games and preference to receive fast, customized feedback. The “gamification” of many enterprise solutions today, or giving applications a more video game-like outlook, works well with employees of the Millennial generation.

“Now imagine these same 20-something agents keeping an eye on their real-time ‘leader dashboards,’ which show how many points and badges they have achieved today while interacting with customers, and that rank their performance against their friends in the neighboring cubicles,” writes Werner. “This highly interactive scenario of rewards and incentives, known in the industry as ‘gamification,’ is being adopted in large, high-volume contact centers at leading companies with promising results.”