Engage Right – Essential Series 3 : So what do you feed millennials? What makes them tick?

Over 75% of the workforce and your customer base by 2022 will be driven, served, and interacted to by millenials. This is an important constituency of the future that all of us need to understand. Unfortunately, even the millennials do not seem to understand millenials and there is a lot of “What Millennials Want” material floating on the internet. Let’s analyze this question using the backdrop of how millennials have grown up.

I live and love online and am hyperconnected.

Millenials have been born and brought up in the world of the web. Their relationships have been formed and sustained using digital media.

Here are some very interesting statistics from a Neilsen study on “Average Time Spent by Generations on Social Media”:

Gen X – 35 – 49 (7 hours)

Millennials – 18 – 34 (6 hours)

Seniors > 50 (4 hours)

This is just time on social media and not total time spent online.

We will talk about the missed engagement opportunity on Gen X since they invented the internet and are more hooked onto it than millennials but a millennial, on average, spends roughly half of all productive time in a day (deducting for sleep and ablutions) connecting with the world online socially.

This is no different from Gen X, which had a lot of literature written about their time spent watching television. Every generation has social aspects that are driven by the connectivity paradigms that exist while growing up and millennials are no exception. They are online socially keeping up with the world and their relationships.

Where do I float online?

I recently observed 2 millennials meeting up and Surprise! Instead of exchanging phone numbers to stay in touch, they exchanged their Instagram and Snapchat handles.

What does that mean for organizations that are looking to tap into this workforce and customer base? Get ready for nontraditional connects. Adopt channels that take you away from the traditional. It will become more important to have an Instagram presence for a company rather than having a phone number.

What device do I use to be online?

The defacto is the mobile phone. The bigger the screen the better. My daughter, a millennial, will sacrifice free time buying clothes, ordering food, listening to podcasts, and more on her mobile phone and a pair of headphones.

Mobile phones are more important than feeding oneself. The fear of being left out of a hyperconnected generation is greater than pangs of hunger. So organizations should design mobile-first to cater to the millennial generation. Studies estimate more than half of the internet traffic in 2017 was driven by the mobile phone. Until someone comes up with a universal personal communications and entertainment device, the mobile phone is it.

How do I interact?

Studies of millennial pattern behavior point to some important conclusions on online behavior:

39% of time is spent online is on social media apps

10% of time is spent on communications apps

Out of the 39% time spent on social medial a substantial amount is feed-based and ad-hoc messaging traffic, or chat traffic. Chat traffic is classified as one of 3 following forms:

• One-on-One chats
• Group chats
• My chat with the world

The 3rd aspect is important, where days are counted with the number of likes and views I collect on my posts. So half the time online besides searching for products, services, reading news, and following my passions is spent absorbing and interacting with what my social circle is up to.

Brands are also part of this social circle, with online ad-based behemoths of today like Google and Facebook. It is this pattern and behavior online that has driven revenues of these giants by inserting algorithmic driven messages into social streams and feeds.

The future will continue to be driven by personalization, so millennials will either reduce their time keeping up with traffic or increase their quality of interactions so more can be consumed in less time. Increasing conversational, query, and question based interactions and chat traffic significantly will be the trend to track in the coming years.

Dump the menu

What does this mean for organizations as our online behavior and patterns change? Companies will need to dump the menu. The menu-driven approach to get to choices and information has been the de facto for the last couple of decades. Interactions will need to be more fluid. In a crowded market place, this means providing interactions based on specific queries. Interactions will be more natural and conversational. Chatbots will rule as search and retrieval becomes more pinpoint rather than listing-based.

If you don’t have a chatbot, then you should seriously consider having one since our hyperconnected world wants to interact with your business in a conversational manner.

To be continued in Engagement Essentials 4.

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