Managing Gen-Z and Millennials in the Contact Center
by Ashlee Hinds
August 23, 2019
Millennials – born between 1980 and 1995 - have been workforce rookies for the past 15 years, but there is a new kid in town, Generation Z. Gen-Z was born between 1996 and 2010, with the oldest workers of the era being 23 years of age, and prime entry-level job candidates in your contact center. While both generations have commonalities, it’s important to recognize the differences and how to cater your performance management strategy to their unique needs and preferences.Both generations are tech-savvy, but each rely on technology differently. Millennials pioneered the internet, texting, and emailing. In a professional setting, they prefer texting, digital messaging apps, and emailing over talking in person (Forbes, 2017). Gen-Z doesn’t know a world without the internet and social media; however, the best way to communicate with Gen-Z in a professional setting is through face-to-face communication (HR Exchange Network, 2019).To cater to both generations, you need to provide up-to-date communication solutions in your contact center. Contact center performance management solutions offer dashboards with internal messaging, announcements, and work aids that promote collaboration to keep agents informed and foster consistent communication. This type of communication is vital to the fast-pace environment of a contact center. Just don’t forget to make time for face-to-face conversations with Gen-Z employees too!With the instantaneous nature of smartphones and the internet, it’s no surprise that all employees’ attention spans are shorter than ever, and Millenials and Gen-Z are no exception. The attention span of Millennials is estimated to be 12 seconds, and only eight seconds for Gen-Z (Forbes, 2017). Ironically, while both generations can be difficult to engage, they are always connected. One of the most important ways to engage and satisfy agents of both generations is to implement cutting-edge, intuitive contact center technology that offers an appealing UI, automates workflows, and unifies all agent activities into one place. In fact, 91% of Gen-Z said technology use in the workplace would influence job choice among similar employment offers (CMO, 2019).Both generations are also eager and hungry to understand their performance at any given moment. These generations don’t want to get a performance report at the end of the week. They want to see it instantly because that’s the world they live in. The dynamic dashboards and wallboards offered by performance management solutions give agents a quick view of their KPIs in real-time with user-friendly designs such as gauges, graphs, and leaderboards.Not only do they need a way to see their performance, but they also need to be engaged in moving the performance needle. Gamification is one key way to do so. Gamification is critical in a contact center, but we’re not talking about your old school, gamification where supervisors manually tally scores at the end of the week. The best performance management software automatically scores and tallies competitions based off metrics generated from agent-to-agent, team-to-team, floor-to-floor, or site-to-site. Then it automatically disperses coins, gems, badges, and awards. Gen-Z thrives on competition and expects rewards for their input, making gamification more necessary than ever as they merge into the workforce (Forbes, 2017).With knowledge about generational preferences, coupled with innovative technology, you can satisfy both Gen-Z and millennials in your call center, find out more in this webinar.