Re-aligning Your Offerings For Generation Y

Customer is king. Always. And that's truer now. It is now time for the millennials or Generation Y to rewrite the rules of customer relationship, how organizations engage with them and how they are serviced. The truth, however, is that few businesses are prepared for this generation. Organizations are scrambling to cope with the millenniums most defining trait: the use of IT. Gartner refers to this generation as 'digital natives' because technology is deeply embedded in their lives - so much so that many of them haven't really experienced life outside the Internet and mobile phones.

What's worrying from an enterprise's point of view is that millennials are fast outnumbering the baby boomers and have begun entering the workforce. To add to the mix, their influence is extending beyond their demographic. They are driving social networking and Web 2.0 among Generation X and the baby boomers.

This generation, with its traits of word-of-mouth recommendation and need for convenience, quality of experience and style - has begun impacting the way most businesses engage with their customers. And they are hard to ignore. As the purchasing power of Generation Y grows, businesses need to redefine customer experience and service strategies. Businesses see the rise of millennials as an opportunity to - not only bridge competitive gaps - but also race past competitors by re-aligning themselves to the new realm of customer service.

As a result, customer experience strategies are going beyond basic demographic-based CRM practices like capturing addresses or age groups and extending to include the psychographics of a customer base. Technology is helping organizations reshape customer service strategies to stay in tune with digital natives. Here's how.

Hit the Sweet Spot

Lesson: Get customers to the right resource - the first time. The most important step for businesses is to ensure that they offer superior, customer-centric service. Given the high expectations of millennials, customer-centric routing strategies should first, adequately understand the needs of customers and then find the services that can best address those needs - irrespective of how and when a customer contacts a business.

For example, agents interacting with millennials should have instant access to relevant information and the people with the right skills to address their needs. If customers follow up on an issue, either the same agents should be contacted or new agents should have ready access to the customer's information - ensuring that customers don't retrace their steps with new agents.

"Our key driver is still customer satisfaction. Our agents are trained to own customer problems and are equipped with the right technologies to resolve them," says Rajib Chowdhury, GM outsourcing and customer care, Virgin Mobile India.

Virgin Mobile India is among the first national mobile service in the country to targets millennials, about 215 million Indians between the ages of 14 and 25. The prepaid service player has deployed multi-site architecture to allow calls to be re-routed to language-specific agents across the country.

The platform optimizes agent productivity with automatic task prioritization and integration and has resulted in a significant increase in calls being terminated at the IVR level.

"We're still quite low in terms of termination at the IVR, but as we add scale and enhance the self-care capacities of the IVR, we expect termination to go beyond 60 percent," says Carl Ambrose, CIO, Virgin Mobile.

The Right Channel

The Right Channel

Lesson: Support channels that the customer uses and be consistent - no matter which channel is employed.Generation Y will not wait on hold to interact with businesses.

Instead, they will browse sites, send text messages and use other non-voice channels such as e-mail and chat. Organizations need to re-look their customer service infrastructure to accommodate customers who may want to use text chat for simple questions, phones for deeper dialogues or co-browse for visual reference. An Economist Intelligence Unit survey reveals that over 70 percent of C-level executives accept that online and e-mail channels are going to be the most important tools to support millennials in the near future, while in-store, in-home or in-office support will shrink to be the least important tool.

Leveraging IT, businesses can create differentiation by allowing customers to choose their channel of communication. Organizations should use various customer service technologies to allocate resources between channels based on traffic and support customers' need for instant gratification.

Virgin Mobile India is a good example of a company that leverages IT to support its multichannel strategy of engaging customers. The telecom company supports its customers not only telephonically, but also through SMS, e-mail, the Web and chat channels.

"Our customer service technologies provide end-to-end control of the interaction lifecycle across any media or activity, linking it to overall business processes. These solutions maximize agent productivity with automatic prioritization and the blending of traditional customer service interaction like voice, e-mail or chat with other service-related activities such as training and off-line work item processing," says Ambrose.

Organizations also need to ensure that customer interaction is not siloed so that customer experience is consistent across channels. Optimus Global Services, the BFSIservices BPO wing of Polaris Software Labs, faced such a dilemma.

Siloed channels prevented the BPO to scale up as quickly and enhance customer experience. "We had outgrown our original call centre infrastructure. Everything about that original architecture had begun to hold us back. It was inflexible, too expensive, and unreliable. It would not support our plans for expansion into other regions of the country," recalls S.S. Sivakumar, head-IT at Optimus.

"Dialer technology is supposed to boost productivity, but it was having the opposite impact," Sivakumar recalls. "We needed a solution that could be managed centrally, and enable us to integrate with our customers' CRM systems. We also needed greater speed and flexibility in deployment and better reporting capabilities."

To get rid of siloes, Optimus shifted to pure IP infrastructure and introduced customer service technologies that helped bring in a software based dialing engine for its operation of 40,000 outbound calls a day.

"Now we are winning more business because we can ramp up very quickly to meet customers' needs. We've also increased agent productivity by over 40 percent and cut dialer-related costs by 30 percent," says Sivakumar. "We can arm agents to address unique customer needs. All of this integration, including CRM data, helps agents resolve a higher percentage of cases and take more calls overall."

Experience Orchestra

Experience Orchestra

Lesson: Align customers with the right resource, based on customer data and real-time insight. Businesses need to stress on listening and learning from customers. Organizations that will be most successful with this generation are the ones who introduce reporting and analytics that allows them to study customer behavior, analyze and monitor customer experience, and track trends. Driven by customer intelligence, businesses can leverage their IT infrastructure to support evolving needs and orchestrate customer experience.

"As we roll out new plans and products, the ease with which we can make changes with the customer service technologies will be a great advantage for us. It's not only a key differentiator. It also helps us gain significant competitive advantage," says Ambrose.