So many of the conversations from the Oracle Modern Customer Experience conference in Las Vegas are still on my mind. Many participants focused on how companies design the CX experience for the millennial generation. It was eye opening and frankly, also a bit perturbing.
It was perturbing because as a baby boomer I don’t always understand how millennials think. In general, as baby boomers we want to be the ones to initiate our exchanges with the companies we patronize. We usually don’t usually want the people we buy from to have a deep and personal understanding of us. The idea of a company having personal information, combined with them reaching out to us, proactively makes many of us especially uncomfortable. Privacy and even a sort of anonymity are important to us.
Yet, paradoxically many of us would still prefer a real person on the other end of a phone call instead of an automated system. We tend to get comfortable using one channel or another and mostly stick with that. And in general we still segregate the marketing, buying and support experiences. We tend to be more likely to forgive a company for a bad experience. And if they make it right we will forgive them even more. We are loyal to our brands and will associate ourselves with them to some extent. Most of us don’t have thousands of followers on social media and even if we did, many of us don’t use social media to discuss our experience with a particular business. We tend to be more private than that. As a group we generally don’t want to ‘make trouble’ for the person on the other end of the line.
Millennials see the world differently. Millennials as a group don’t want to have to reach out to a company. They want the company to reach out to them. They are aware of the value of their personal data. Most are more than happy to share some personal information but when they do they expect to get something back in return. Personal engagement, rewards, and personalized proactive offers matter to millennials. It makes them feel recognized and rewarded for the valuable customers they are. Theirs is the age of proactive engagement, instantaneous exchange and immediate gratification. And that has to come consistently over any channel whenever it is wanted. They tend to be connected on a variety of devices and expect to be able to switch channels even during the same interaction and still have the same experience. Loyalty, what’s that? One bad experience even if made good can turn a millennial away. They expect vendors to anticipate their problems and meet their needs before anything ever gets to be a problem. They do not hesitate to reward or punish their vendors publicly on social media. And who wants to have to talk to a real person when you can work with an online system on your own so much more quickly?
Furthermore, the challenges marketing selling and supporting across different generations are about to become even more complex. It will no longer be a ‘simple matter’ of seamless data across a single organization to a particular generation. We are reaching an age when organizations in a common “knowledge cloud” will work together across common big data pool to proactively give their common customers a winning experience.
In the example I saw even Cupid was riding the big data cloud. The scenario I am using below is only slightly modified from the one I saw at the CX Experience conference. Let’s start with a credit card company who has some travel vouchers to award to a man who happens to be about to propose to his girlfriend. Let’s call this man George Jetson. Now George’s credit card company shares a data cloud with some other companies that also do business with George. They include the George’s bank, his florist, and his jeweler. All of these companies also mine data about their customers from various social media sites as well as the cloud. George had given permission long ago for certain data to be public in the cloud. So it was already known that George had been looking at jewelry stores online and asking questions about ring re-sizing. He often used his credit card to send flowers to a woman named Jane. Jane’s data was also in the cloud and it was known that Jane’s birthday was coming up. With all that common data out there it’s not too hard for the marketing company to build rules that put two and two together. So instead of sending an old fashioned email that offered George some credit card vouchers, they sent him a very personalized text message that said “Hey George – How would you like to take Jane on a romantic getaway for her birthday?”. Maybe without even consciously realizing it, George had been wondering just how he was going to pop the question… and big data just proactively sent him an answer.
Now, as a baby boomer, receiving a text like might make me feel very creepy. But as a millennial, George felt very lucky and very understood and appreciated. If anything it endeared him to his credit card company. Not only did they have vouchers, they had great ideas.
When George clicked the link to indicate interest, he was instantly connected to a virtual travel assistant. ‘She’ confirmed that George planned to propose to Jane and was able, based on her interview and prior knowledge of George’s preferences to quickly suggest Portugal. George agreed and she put him in touch with an online community of real people in Portugal who were only too excited to recommend great places for him. (I should mention that George was trying to keep this a secret from Jane and she kept coming onto the scene as George was interacting with the virtual assistant and online communities.) So this exchange took place over several different sessions and on several different devices.
Love was in the air. And it was online. As the community sent George suggestions, he was able to book restaurants and hotels and activities. As George made his reservations, those businesses, also plugged into the cloud, also got the message that this was possibly going to be a marriage proposal trip. Alerts were triggered so personnel knew something big was coming down for this particular guest. One restaurant was already tied into the same data cloud as this George’s florist. They knew what kind of flowers he always ordered for Jane. So guess what was waiting on the table when George and Jane arrived for dinner! In our example George left his camera the seat pocket of his plane seat. The airlines located the camera and needed to get it to George. Since George’s cab company was also using and contributing cloud data George was located while still in his cab from the airport to the hotel. As he approached his hotel a message appeared on the screen in the cab alerting George that his camera would be there ready for him to retrieve. Talk about good proactive service! This happened before George even realized he had lost his camera!
As a baby boomer I’m thinking Big Brother, but millennials apparently love this kind of thing! The bottom line is that all of these companies conspired using George’s data to make sure he and Jane had an amazing trip. On top of their great experience the companies in the hub also benefited as they were able to successfully up-market to George to maximize both his experience and the amount of enticing add-ons that would make this trip so special for him. A win-win all around.
