It’s Not a Generation Gap. It’s a Chasm.
Don Peppers
Customer experience expert, keynote speaker, business author, Founder of Peppers & Rogers Group
No, it's not your imagination. Things really are moving faster today.
And this means that your kids are much more different from you than you were from your own parents at their age.
Every year digital technologies become another 50% faster and better. We’ve all heard the breathless statistics. The world generates ten times more data every two years. Three hundred hours of new video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. A single smartphone has more memory and computing power than was available to all of NASA when they put a man on the moon.
Adapting to this constant acceleration of technology can be taxing, because every new technology also changes how we observe and deal with what’s going on around us. After just a few years of exposure you can easily find yourself disoriented, undecided whether to use the newest social media tool, say, or puzzled at why all those younger than you seem to like it so much.
After decades of exposure to this frenetic pace of change, your disorientation is likely to turn into something more pronounced. If you’re a Baby Boomer, you had no trouble mastering Facebook but you may still be wrestling with how to stream your television programs, or whether you should really take a chance on giving up your landline phone altogether. If you’re the aging parent of a Baby Boomer, on the other hand, then your technological disorientation can be nearly debilitating. You wait for your kids (or grandkids, or great-grandkids) to set up the Skype or FaceTime connection for you, or to fix the settings on your TV remote, or to show you how to search the web to determine whether the latest email offer you received is legitimate or just a scam. (And scammers target older people for precisely this reason!)
Accelerating technology has widened the generation gap into a generation chasm. Your son or daughter is far more different from you than you were from your own parents at their age, not just in terms of technology savvy, but in social goals and values, as well. Every new device or bot has the potential to open doorways into new thinking, new social relationships, or new cultural mores. And the next generation, exposed to even faster change, will experience this gap even more dramatically.
Technology disorientation occurs today for two reasons:
- The velocity of change has increased to the point that it is plainly visible from year to year; and
- We are living longer, so we are exposed to even more of it.
Significant increases in average life expectancy, coupled with lower birth rates, is rapidly changing the age mix of the US population (indeed, the whole world's population). In 2000, 12% of Americans were 65 or older, but by 2030, 20% of us will be. And the fastest growing age segment is the 85+ group, increasing at twice the rate of the 65+ segment. By 2050, nearly 20 million Americans will be 85 or older!
For a business, there is opportunity here. If you look at it through the customer experience lens, what is actually happening is that older consumers experience much more friction when dealing with new technologies. What might be intuitive for someone who has grown up with a smartphone can be packed with friction for their parent or grandparent who hasn’t.
And profit can be made by eliminating friction. Rather than simply focusing on technology improvements, savvy marketers should work to humanize their customer experience, in order to ease the older consumer’s burden of friction. Introduce seamless connections with real people who can explain, coach, simplify, or just empathize with older customers.
A great example of this is the Mayday button for Amazon’s Kindle. If you’re experienced and already comfortable using tablets and Kindle-like devices, then you’ll probably never have a problem that warrants a video chat with a helper. But if this is only your first or second tablet or touch-screen device, or if swiping up or down isn’t a familiar move, or you don't really know Wi-Fi from Bluetooth, then actual human contact will be very reassuring.
There is a bright business future in putting human connections to work to assist a rapidly growing population of technologically disoriented people – older people, like your parents. (And like you yourself, sooner than you think!)
Professor of Dental Public Health | Associate Dean, Academic Affairs at International Medical University | Certified Coach | EdTech Enthusiast
7 年Great post, I think just like road safety we should teach early on in the school how much Internet is enough. And highlight the importance of face to face communication and outdoors. Smartphones and technology is way of life for the younger generation. And it is our responsibility to teach them how to use it properly something like we are trained and tested before we drive a car on the road.
Customer Experience, Business Excellence and Improvement Leader
8 年Excellent post Don!
General Management , Operations and Customer Service
8 年Don, thanks very much. Do you think that perhaps we are about to see technology getting more and more user friendly? The Millennials might have the smarts but the Boomers have the cash. If I were selling technology I think I would be taking that into account.
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8 年As a student who belongs to the millennial generation who have experienced the transition of traditional media to the new media. Truly the new media has stand alone and combined the vitals factors that the traditional media has, it is amazing to think that how the new media changed the behavior, perception and culture of people when it comes to being progressive everyday. The main point of this "transition" is for the betterment of everyone and this change must not be taken into negative, we as humans have this innate instinct with in us that we tend to forget when shadowed with earthly things–new media, gadgets, Internet and everything in the cyber world, our human instinct to live as a true human must not be hindered with these changes we must not forget that these changes can be helpful in building relationship and solve the endless problems in the world. Generation gap will be a gap if let our human instinct be shadowed with human things there is really no generation gap and change is not the one to be fault but us humans who made the new media if we let this gap be a gap and not help everyone then sadly this world will be full of people who are walking faced down and checking on their gadgets and living in their own world.