Gen Y and the Changing Contact Center

There is a great new presentation from Nortel called "Multimedia Means Money" which discusses the rapid evolution of call centers into contact centers. This has huge implications on the outbound call center world, especially those companies in my world whose traffic is driven from Internet advertising: e.g. post-secondary for-profit education companies with a large online presence, and online mortgage, brokerage and financial services companies. Typically these companies market in four steps:

    1. Advertise online through affiliates like ad.com or via paid search
    2. Drive clickthroughs to a landing page and force them to fill out a lead form
    3. The lead is funneled into a lead management system and distributed to an agent
    4. An agent calls the lead from a physical call center and attempts to enroll a student

As Gen-Y (12-29 year olds) becomes the next generation of consumers, these industries' strategies will need to change. Gen-Y uses the full gamut of multimedia tools to communicate - they will demand their product information via live chat, company/customer blogs, SMS, podcasts and social networking sites like MySpace. They do not want to fill out a form and wait for a call - Gen-Y wants many ways to access information and companies can no longer approach the customer acquisition process on their own terms.

Those companies who will succeed in this new world will find a way to use these new channels of communication to communicate with each customer the way that customer demands to be communicated with. Gone will be the days of the static lead form and we will usher in the days of click to chat, click to call, more free upfront content, product blog feeds and self service as a primary means to sign up as a customer and manage a customer account.

Those who will succeed will be forward thinking enough to participate in this very public conversation with their customers, and will be proud enough of their product to open themselves up to the inherent risk involved.

Comments

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