Customer Service for Millennials: What Your Business Needs

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It’s crucial that customer service departments and their operations are properly geared towards the audiences that use them. One of the largest generations currently is the Millennials. According to MSCI, Millennials, born between the early 1980s and mid-1990s, made up 23% of the global population in 2020. That is 1.8 billion people overall.

So, to ensure your business properly caters to Millennials, global businesses must strive to understand their preferences in terms of marketing, purchase experience, and customer service expectations. In this guide, we explore these preferences, offering insights on how companies can gear their customer service offerings towards them.

Customer Service Everywhere

Whereas older generational cohorts might be content with email and phone support options, Millennials expect more. Smartphone natives, their customer service preferences are just as boundless. As such, they expect a wide array of customer service channels to choose from. They desire a 360-degree experience.

However, alongside phone, email, and contact forms, social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter should be available for smaller-scale customer service requests. Live chat and video chat should be available via company websites. And, in-depth knowledge bases should also be on offer to customers who want to solve their issues without needing to spend time talking to representatives.

Speedy Service

Millennials (just like Gen Z) always want immediate customer service at their fingertips. Indeed, a survey by Desk.com found that 25% of Millennials expect companies to respond to their social media customer service requests within just 10 minutes.

As a result, companies need to be able to offer 24/7 care. Thankfully, this once lofty aim is now possible thanks to new technology such as social media customer service, knowledgebase, and chat-bots. These forms of service must be administered effectively and backed by expert technical support to ensure systems are always on.

Personal Service

Understanding of the opportunities offered by technology and experienced in the personalization found in the ad space, Millennials, alongside the cohort nipping at their heels, Gen Z, want to feel special. They want to feel like brands know and understand them. So, customer service departments must adapt accordingly.

This can be done by utilizing smart email automation tools that allow millennial leads to be segmented and targeted in an optimized fashion. It can also be a good idea to feed in customer data sources from sales and marketing into customer service, utilizing data from multiple touchpoints to inform better, more targeted approaches.

Post-Purchase Matters

With so much competition and such research-savvy customers happy to drop a brand at a moment’s notice, post-purchase care is more important than ever. If a business drops the ball the retention can become an impossible goal.

So, to make sure Millennial customers feel they matter and do not jump ship, customer service departments should aim to provide the best quality service possible. They must analyze poor interactions and reviews and feed this information into the ongoing development cycles of approaches and systems.

Visual Service

Millennials want to have plenty of customer service information at hand. However, they are used to consuming content in visual form such as images and video. These forms of information can be more easily and rapidly understood. Thus, companies should adapt to make their communications more easily digestible and more effective in kind.

How will you cater for Millennials in your business? Join the conversation in the comments section below.