Millennials and Generation-Z don’t want to talk on the phone is a claim that you will often hear repeated across the media landscape on a pretty regular basis.
Now, while there may be research supporting that claim, it’s not always true, particularly when we consider how customers choose to engage with brands. Moreover, to apply it as a blanket assumption can cause us to design systems and experiences that just don’t work as well as they might.
This is something that I talked to Dr. Paul Redmond, a leading expert on generations and the graduate labour market, about almost 10 years ago.
I talked to him after he was asked to analyze some research conducted by Capgemini and Pegasystems that looked into how Millennials thought about and engaged with insurance.
In particular, the research investigated whether it was true that millennials only wanted to engage with insurance brands online and via social media. However, to their surprise, they found that Millennials actually wanted to talk to people face to face or over the phone about their insurance needs, and social media was only fifth in their choice of preferred channels.
Moreover, they also found that while Millennials took it for granted that they are able to access all sorts of information on the internet, what they really value is also having the opportunity to talk to knowledgeable people who can help them with their insurance decision-making.
That was ten years ago.
Recent research from Poly AI, a leading voice AI provider, finds that things haven’t changed much over the last decade, and younger people are still a lot less phone or talk shy than many folks assume, with 86% of Generation-Z and younger Millennials stating that they prefer the voice channel for customer service and support.
Now, if you step back and think about this, then it makes complete sense. As human beings, regardless of your generation, when things get complicated or urgent or involve us making decisions about something that is important to us or that we don’t know much about, it’s only natural for us to want to talk to ‘someone’, be that a knowledgeable source or a trusted advisor.
But, if you expand your notion of what talking to ‘someone’ means and then layer in the expansion of things like asynchronous voice communication on platforms like WhatsApp, as well as the recent advances in voice AI, then ‘voice’ as a channel to support your customers starts to take on an entirely different meaning.
Furthermore, Poly AI’s research also found that customers are open to engaging with intelligent voice assistants, with 71% of customers reporting that they would be willing to speak to an intelligent voice assistant as long as it could accurately fulfill their customer service needs i.e. process a return, perform a price match, answer their questions, etc.
Yet, despite these findings, many, and predominantly older, execs and CEOs will miss out on this opportunity to better engage and support their customers because they are, as Nikola Mrkšić, co-founder and CEO of PolyAI, says, “making assumptions based on what they see their children doing.”
That’s a mistake and potentially misses a huge opportunity to better engage and support customers.
Instead, those leaders would do well to heed the words of the American actor Alan Alda, who once said,
“Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won’t come in.”
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