• IVR Service Provider
• Articles

Service gets Boosted a Notch with Millennials on the Line

The millennial generation seems to get mixed views from their predecessors. This generation has developed work characteristics and tendencies from doting parents, structured lives, and contact with diverse people. They’ve grown into adulthood with some personality problems that the baby boomer generation lacked, including high rates of narcissism, materialism, unrealistically inflated expectations and a startling lack of independence. As consumers, they know what they want, and when they want it. What does this mean for these folk as members of the workforce? Believe it or not, it’s not bad at all.

According to a recent blog post from Gavin Gustafson, Communications manager at inContact, millennials have some decent skills to bring to the table, and would be well-suited for the contact center. How so?

“Millennials tend to excel at multi-tasking (thanks to that short attention span), work well in team environments, are highly communicative with supervisors and are very at ease with technology,” writes Gustafson.

Millennial workers act as a bridge to future generations; through social media, mobile, the cloud, and other real-time technologies that haven’t even been invented yet. They are on the cusp of those inventions. They are graduating with both academic skills and innate behavioral skills that companies will need to engage with customers in much more meaningful ways, and this bodes well for the contact center on every level.

According to PricewaterhouseCoopers (News - Alert), millennials say that a strong cohesive, team-oriented culture at work and opportunities for interesting work — including assignments around the world — are important, even more so than their non-millennial counterparts. This is also favorable to the contact center environment.

So, how do older generation managers stay on top of their millennial staff? This is where workforce optimization comes in.

A good workforce optimization solution can provide insight into your employees’ wants and needs -- insight that could help you make better, more strategic decisions about staffing. It also allows managers to effectively deliver a pleasing customer experience — not only in the contact center, but across all the areas of the enterprise that “touch” customers in some way. In the case of millennials, it’s the multi-channel experience, from social media to in-app customer support.

Why does it behoove contact centers to focus on the millennial workforce, then?

“As the customer service industry reverses course from outsourcing back to “rightshoring” their operations, the contact centers of the future will need to become more efficient in terms of costs, and more appealing to their potential employees,” Gustafson notes. “Cloud solutions provide the customizable features needed to support tomorrow’s customer service industry.”