Demographic shift changes services thinking

The youngsters are coming! The youngsters are coming! A quick glance at demographic data by age tells you that as Baby Boomers bounce off into retirement, a younger generation almost as large is moving into the workforce to replace them. No surprise there. Tracking one generation after another goes back to the book of Numbers in the Torah, but Moses didn’t have to bother with customer satisfaction. Businesses do. And the differences between how Boomers relate to services-based companies and how Generation Y (or Generation X, or Millennials, or “whatever”) interacts with business is significant. If you want to attract the younger set, you need to rethink the way you serve them. Traditional CRM tools don’t cut it when it comes to the up and coming generation.Or, so says Frank Florence, chief marketing officer at Chordiant Software Inc. in Cupertino, Calif. He claims younger folks are more likely to switch banks, change telco services or drop an insurance company than older folks. He speculates that “the insurance agent we’ve known for years may very well disappear.” Forrester Research backs up Florence’s assertions, noting in a recent report that while more than 67% of Boomers are unlikely to switch banks, that number tumbles to 55% for adults between 18-27 years old. Young adults expect you to know more about them in order to serve them better, whether they reach you online or on the phone, Florence says.

In spring, Chordient intends to ship visualization software that works with its Chordiant Cx “customer experience” software. The new tool will give business managers 3-dimensional views in a dashboard of real-time customer-service conditions, such as how up-sell promotions are working in your call centers. Florence calls it a “throttle for your business.”

Extracted from ComputerWorld.com.