Customer service is a key way to differentiate your business with millennial customers–the 80 million young people who have overtaken Boomers as the largest demographic in the marketplace, and will soon overtake them in purchasing power as well.
Not only will great customer service and a great customer experience often make the difference in whether a particular millennial chooses to do business with you, it makes the difference in whether other millennials ever hear the word about your business. Why? Because millennials are hard-wired to spread the word about companies they like doing business with, and know the digital tricks to make this spreading efficient and powerful.
As Boston Consulting Group puts it, “the vast majority of millennials report taking action on behalf of brands and sharing brand preferences in their social groups”: millennial customers share when they’re considering using your business; they share as they interact with your business; they interact as soon as they leave your business. And a lot of what they share is about how well your customer service experience suits them.
However, here’s the twist you have to watch out for: What millennials consider a great customer experience may be different than what you’re trying to provide, so adding more of the same, simply throwing “more customer service” at them — more bodies, longer hours answering the phones – may not help you as much as you’d expect with millennial customers.
The customer experience that millennials, as a rule, are looking for is a hybrid experience: They want digital, streamlined, mobile-friendly assistance wherever that makes the most sense, and they want the best of the best in human assistance wherever that digital support is lacking, confusing, or not appropriate for the situation.
If you only devote yourself to human-delivered customer service, you’re going to frustrate your customers, because the last thing millennials want is for human employees to gum up the works where technology can be more efficient. And if you only work on the digital side and have understaffed, undertrained, grudging customer support for the moments where your customer wants the human touch, the human insight, you will drive customers away as well.
To give you an example of a business where a well-thought-out hybrid approach is attracting an enthusiastic following among millennials – young families as well as singles and couples in their late teens and twenties – consider Colorado Springs' Natural Epicurean, located on the grounds of the Broadmoor Hotel. At Natural Epicurean, a restaurant devoted to natural foods that fit a variety of diets and food restrictions (while still being, in my opinion, ridiculously delicious) offers every customer the option of assisting their meal choices by use of a tablet. The Natural Epicurean’s tablet menu allows you to
• Select your meal based on food restrictions or dietary requirements (for example, select “items under 400 calories—desserts” and you see what is available)
• Browse every menu on the item to see very specific information (calorie count, sodium content, etc.) about any items that are catching your eye
• Allow you to consider substitutions for item ingredients and to see the resulting difference in nutritional value
The factor that sends the Natural Epicurean service approach through the goalposts, however, is that they also staff the restaurant fully with highly-trained waitstaff who appear to have been hired for attitude as well as ability: servers who welcome and assist guests with enthusiasm, tact, and helpfulness.
At no point did I feel pressure from my waitress to figure everything out for myself electronically. The tablet was merely an adjunct, to similarly save a customer with dietary restrictions from having to, awkwardly, ask question after question while nailing down choices (and perhaps to prevent the ridiculous ad libs waiters sometimes are forced to make when asked complex nutritional and ingredient-related questions on the fly).
The waitress, also, was there when a question came up for which the tablet could not have prepared: my 11-year-old son asking for help finding “the least healthy item on the menu.” While she didn’t oblige with a direct answer, she did clarify that the “ancient grains” bun on the bison burger could be swapped out for brioche, and the pesto on the burger replaced with American cheese (excuse me a moment while I hang my head in parental shame), and—this in response to my question – that a smaller burger could be made to keep us within dietary sensibility for a kid his size.
****
This hybrid, digitally and human-assisted approach is important to get right. Most companies veer in one direction or the other. Some go overboard trying to pressure everyone to use digital solutions and providing the most limited human support when the customer refuses to get with the program. Others do the opposite, hiding their heads in the sand and refusing to understand that today’s reality, where smartphones, apps, GPS, Kayak, and so many other digitally-driven shortcuts are a part of life for your customers, especially your millennial customers, requires businesses today to make use of digital tools as well to provide a customer experience that will appeal to customers, keep them coming back, and have them singing (or, really, thumbing) your praises to all their friends.
Micah Solomon is a customer service consultant, customer experience speaker and bestselling business author, most recently of the new Forbes Signature Series eBook on customer service for millennials, Your Customer Is The Star
