Engaging Millennials in the Contact Center, Why Citibank Nixed Its "Digital Marketing"
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In this new feature, Call Center IQ investigates some of the contact center, customer experience and marketing stories impacting professionals.
Gamification: The Answer to Engaging Millennials in the Contact Center
They’re just people. But if you’re a contact center professional, you are required by law to also see Millennials as scary, enigmatic, unfamiliar, difficult to manage and, ultimately, the future of the customer management field.
True, they have their irrefutably admirable traits. They are great multi-taskers, very expressive, very passionate and very analytical. But for the old world contact manager, the demographic comes with a host of challenges. Millennials are driven by instant gratification, short attention spans, opposition to corporate/career rigidity, high aspirations, a need to socialize, and an aversion to grunt work.
Such personality traits dramatically clash with the traditional contact center environment, and insofar as agent attrition is already a crushing burden, contact center management is about to get immensely more challenging.
But what it should be getting is more fun.
As it happens, many elements of the modern contact center, including the rise of multi-channel communication and emphasis on "strategic" calls, are tailormade for a multi-tasking, analytical Millennial. If a brand is embracing a customer-centric culture, it is making itself more hospitable for Millennial employees.
But if that is not enough, contact center leaders have the option of playing games with their agents. Gamification, superficially viewed as a great opportunity for acquiring and engaging customers, is also an invaluable option for employee engagement.
By tapping into their competitive and creative spirits, gaming can prove an immensely effective complement to proper onboarding and salary structures. When used in such a manner, "it has shown promise in reducing agent attrition as well as in improving customer satisfaction rates, net promoter scores, and the general quality of the customer experience."
For more on Gamification, join CCIQ advisor Mitchell Osak and industry leader Badgeville for a presentation "Customer Engagement – It’s Not a Game (Or Is It?)" at our complimentary Big Data for Customer Management Summit. Register here.
Citibank Is Eliminating "Digital Marketing"
General Motors recently confirmed that it is doing away with the call center. Now Citibank reveals that it eliminated its digital marketing department.
What is going on?
Think of it this way: marketing is obviously not just about e-mail and social media. But in a multi-channel world, can a marketer achieve optimal success without competence in the digital realm?
Citibank answers no. Digital fluency is essential for marketing in the 21st century, and if a marketer lacks that skills, "there is no path" for him.
Gone are the days of the digital strategy function as a mere bragging right for brands. Gone are the days of the digital strategist exclusively representing a young, casual professional who would thrive in a Silicon Valley startup but stick out like a sore thumb on Wall Street. Business is multi-channel, and digital is one of those channels. In order to do business—and, specifically, in order to engage the multi-channel customer—professionals must do digital.
And that applies regardless of whether their wardrobe includes fine, Italian three-piece suits or a collection of jeans and polos.
By segregating digital strategy into its own division, an organization sends two improper messages. For starters, it signals that digital is only part of the business and therefore not central to the tasks of the "non-digital" people who run the business. It also signals to the digital strategists that they are fringe workers who complete a task; they are not overall business leaders who should be thinking of ways to improve the overall business.
Citibank’s desegregation avoids that.
Just as General Motors’ switch to "customer engagement centers" does not suggest that traditional phone support is irrelevant, Citibank is not saying digital is not significant or important enough to be its own task.
It is saying that digital is too important to just be a task. It must be at the heart of the business. And in order to find a comfortable residence there, it cannot be brushed aside. The door must be open to incorporating digital in response to every business opportunity and every business challenge.
Image by JB Designs
