Fine-Tuning Customer Service to Attract Millennial Customers

[Originally published in Forbes.com. Written by Micah Solomon, an author, keynote speaker, and consultant on customer service, customer experience, and company culture. Reach Micah by email or phone, 484-343-5881, or visit his website.] 

Customers today are on the lookout for great customer service. But what customers aren’t looking for is formality and artificiality. Today's customers, including the important millennial generation, are quickly repelled by anything stilted, overly formal, or obviously scripted. Any sense of phoniness in the way that customer service is delivered will turn today’s customers off quicker than you can imagine.

In other words, even if your customer service is excellent as far as content and results, if the style of your service delivery rings false, today’s customers are not going to respond positively. (How did millennials in particular–the large generation of consumers born circa 1980-2000–come to be uncomfortable with formality? Remember that millennials’ parents are, by and large, baby boomers, and most baby boomers have made a point of not talking down to their children, whether this meant avoiding baby talk when the children were young or, later, including older children in family discussions and decisions. Millennials’ teachers in school, and even the hosts of the shows they watched growing up–"Blue's Clues," "Bob The Builder"–similarly took an eye to eye, inclusive approach to communication. [Paraphrased from my Forbes Media e-Book on the subject, Your Customer Is The Star: How to Make Millennials, Boomers and Everyone in Between Fall in Love With Your Business.])

Here are seven pointers for how you should be looking at your style of customer service delivery, and how, if necessary, you should be re-imagining that delivery style to suite the desires and expectations of today’s customers.

1. Consider doing away with any word-for-word scripts you’ve been using, and instead develop a “punch list” of points that need to be covered in the course of a particular conversation. (Exceptions: Certain situations involve security, safety, legal, or privacy-related concerns that may require verbatim scripting.)

2. The most fundamental alternative to scripting is to give employees the tools to recognize guest behaviors and situations and to respond appropriately and effectively. This isn’t easy, but it is essential, and can be developed through training, role-playing, and modeling by more senior staff.

3. You can further improve employee performance with an approach I call “Language engineering.” This means suggesting particular phrases and words to employees and discouraging the use of other words and phrases. This approach is more low key than scripting, yet allows an organization to take talented but verbally uninformed employees and convert them into employees with the skills needed to talk to customers in a way that is unlikely to offend, confuse, or irritate.

4. To create a successful style of service for today’s customers, it works to encourage your employees to act more like peers of their customers and less like servants. (Caveat! The customer service relationship is never one of true equals at the moment of service. One is paying, and the other is being paid. However, the idea that you are a human being serving another human being, and should bring your full humanity to bear on the interaction, is an important one.)

5. Customer-facing employees, in most industries, should dress in a manner that’s similar to, or at least on the continuum of, how guests themselves dress. This puts both employees and guests at ease. This effect is further enhanced if you let employees have a choice in what they wear.

6. Customers today project their own style through their clothing choices, tattoos, and hairstyles, and by and large they’re fine with your employees doing the same.

7. Employees with the potential to be great all share certain key personality traits, but what they don’t share is a particular look. By being restrictive in how employees dress, how they style their hair, the tattoos and piercings they can display, and the jewelry they wear, you may be eliminating your chance to employ the greatest talent available today, for reasons that are literally only skin deep. It is for this reason that a wide variety of excellent customer service-oriented organizations have done away with or dramatically toned down with their decades-old prohibitions on visible tattoos, facial hair, and piercings.

Micah Solomon is a customer service consultant and thought leader, customer experience consultant, keynote speaker, trainer, and bestselling author. Click for two free chapters from Micah's latest book, The Heart of Hospitality, or click here to email him directly, for an immediate response.