Only 29 percent of millennials today are engaged in the workplace, meaning they’re emotionally and behaviorally connected to their jobs and employers, according to recent research by Gallup.
Yet, with millennials expected to constitute 46 percent of the workforce by 2020 and demand for skilled call center employees on the rise, organizations need to find ways to attract and retain workers amongst this cohort. Here are five effective approaches to doing so.
1. Enable Omni-Channel Communications with Customers
More so than previous generations, millennials are particularly accustomed to using the internet, cell phones and instant messaging for both professional and personal purposes, according to a recent study by Robert Half International.
Millennials spend much of their time outside of work online, where they use an assortment of channels, including voice, text and mobile web, to socialize, shop, watch movies, look for jobs and carry out an expansive assortment of other activities.
Meantime, research consistently shows customers want a choice of multiple channels when communicating with company call centers. With this in mind, millennials can feel right at home interfacing with customers in this omnichannel world.
2. Offer a Modern and Well-Designed User Interface for Contact Center Use
Millennials might not even remember a time without the presence of personal computers in their daily lives. Long accustomed to using personal devices for everything under the sun, there’s really no reason for younger workers to want to put up with a cumbersome and monolithic user experience while on the job, suggests a recent report by the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
State-of-the-art call contact centers provide customer service reps as well as enterprise staff with a consistent, user-friendly dashboard user interface for easily viewing a customer’s multichannel interactions with the company.
3. Provide Easy and Flexible Work Scheduling
A total of 73 percent of younger millennials surveyed in the Robert Half study admitted to worrying about balancing their professional and personal obligations. This generation wants to find fulfillment through their personal and professional lives. Many millennials also want to have second jobs, do volunteer work and include favorite hobbies in their schedules.
To better attract and engage millennial workers, customer call contact centers should incorporate flexible work scheduling, including the ability to schedule different shifts for various days of the week and to work partial shifts. For many on-the-go millennials, it’s easiest to manage a work schedule through an employer-provided mobile app.
4. Evaluate Employees Frequently and Fairly
Millennials have also been raised with frequent input from parents and feedback on their performance, observes the report by Robert Half.
Software used in modern-day call contact centers should also include workflow optimization tools, which let workers access an analysis of their performance and productivity on an ongoing basis, as well as benefit from manually or automatically initiated coaching, when needed.
5. Offer Abundant Opportunities to Learn and Advance
Almost one-third of millennials find learning opportunities “critical to workplace happiness,” and nearly half of them say they would quit a job due to a lack of these kinds of opportunities, according to a study by Docebo.
Moreover, opportunities for career advancement are highly important to millennials, too. In the Robert Half survey, for example, millennials ranked career advancement/growth third in importance among 11 factors in considering a job, right behind salary and benefits.
The most modern call contact centers today enable workers to hone their technical and customers skills while furthering career advancement by eliminating boring and repetitive work from their job duties.
When simpler calls are handled through the company’s IVR-enabled self-service mechanisms, service reps handling the more complex and sensitive interactions routed through to them can easily view a customer’s multichannel communications with the company, explore problem history, and respond with solutions.
Conclusion
Organizations stand a great chance of recruiting millennial workers and keeping them onboard by providing a workplace and accompanying technology that appeals to their interests and needs. In that vein, call centers should offer omnichannel communications, a well-designed user interface and tools for automated customer self-service on simple transactions, employee self-scheduling and ongoing employee performance evaluation and feedback.
