How the Millennial Workforce is Changing Customer Care (Video)
Learn more about call centers and the customer experience at the next SpeechTEK conference.
Read the complete transcript of this clip:
Allyson Boudousquie: Millennials are changing us. They're changing Convergys for sure. So this is that stat I wanted to share with you. 81% of our workforce are millennials. That's who makes up our agents, right? Our workforce. We've done a lot, there have been a lot of studies that we do from a Convergys perspective and certainly Forrester/Gartner, all the prestigious analyst firms, Opus, go out there and they do research around customer experience and what customers expect. There's always that outside-in view. We've started doing a lot of research about the inside-out view from an agent perspective.
What do we need to provide agents and hire agents that have different attitudes about work and technology? That has that digital fluency in social media. They want that sense of belonging. You have to, as we want to provide a superior experience. We want every single transaction to be self-service, customers want them to be self-service, "I want to serve myself", but in some cases, I may not be able to. So we have to look at, "How do we shift the mindset designing for customer experience, both externally but also internally?"
This rise in the Millennial workforce is forcing us, forcing everyone here--anyone who works in a contact center today--to adapt to that changing landscape. Both for clients and the people that service those clients. We all have increased pressures to perform, from both customers and employers. Part of this is solving the attrition question that comes up. We always talk about customer attrition or customer experience or the bad customer experiences that drive NPS scores externally. There's also a net promoter score that's internal in contact centers. And that is often driven by attrition rates. There are contact centers that I've been in who have 100% attrition rate. It's two dirty words that are out there but that do exist in our industries.
We have to be able to solve the puzzle of how you keep people, and now how to keep Millennials engaged, because you're going to have to solve the puzzle around serving more complex transactions. You need a different skillset of agent. You have to pay them more, you have to train them better, they have to have a deeper level of understanding, they have to have a problem-solving skillset in order to provide the promise of that designed customer experience that we want to get to.
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