Is your Company Friendly to Digital Natives?
Digital natives1 — children born since the early 1970s — have the distinction of growing up in the era of silicon chip proliferation. Digital technologies such as the Internet, MP3 players and mobile phones existed when they were born. Their toys had electronics, they received early education with Leapsters and played games with Game Boy and Playstations. In contrast, Digital immigrants were born before this time and had to learn the digital technologies — much like learning a new language.
In this discussion, the focus is on digital natives as customers — how they think and behave. Natives learned technologies without the encumbrances of previous experience. You see this commonly in children. A child picks up an electronic toy game and learns it quickly without reading the instructions. They almost never ask an adult.
Companies and organizations make the mistake of assuming that simply having a web presence is good enough to attract digital natives. But ask yourself these questions:
- Do you let customers know about the new ways they can digitally interact or do business with your company?
- What interaction will improve the customer’s satisfaction and overall experience with the company?
- What interaction on your web site will increase revenue?
Even though traditional processes or procedures exist, having a digital process will save expenses. More importantly, it will reduce the time needed to perform a task that the customer wants. For digital natives, they don’t want to waste time — their attention span is short and delivered in chunks. Twitter is popular with these individuals because it is fast and brief. The sender is not allowed to drone on because the message has a pre-determined length.
Doing business with customers the way they want to do business is key to attracting new ones and keeping existing customers. The challenge is to make it easy for your customer to be a good customer.
Those who want to help themselves (aka self-serve) are the ones who cost less and are happy getting the results they want without the help of another person. Self-service most often requires that the customer be served electronically via the internet or a machine.
This will increasingly mean more non-personal interaction in the initial stages of becoming a customer, however a live person must be available when needed to support the electronic transactions. If the personal aspect (such as a customer service representative) is not readily available, the entire transaction and possibly the relationship with the organization is at risk. In this context, personal means a human answering the phone. It is not the box on the screen that says “Ask Frank.” The answers in these cases are usually a key word search of a database. This type of support does not resolve anything more than the simplest problems. For customers who are facile with online transactions, this type of help is worse than no help because it wastes time.
Amazon is a good example of providing personal customer service at the point of need even though the site is set up completely as selfserve. Their web site is easy to use and allows customers to do more complex transactions that other online web sites don’t allow such as putting many things in the shopping cart, and then entering multiple shipping addresses upon checkout. But sometimes there are glitches. I was buying a wedding gift of wine glasses and the system was splitting the order into multiple shipments, which made the shipping costs excessive. I called Amazon’s customer service and the representative was able to adjust the order on the phone. If Amazon had not been able to do it right then, I would have given up and ordered from another store online. The key to Amazon’s service is that they empower their customer service representatives by providing them with information about the customer including purchase history in order to take action to resolve the issue.
While it is certainly good business to cater to existing customers who accept the procedures and processes in place, do you know what percentage of your customer base wants more and expects more? If you don’t give them what they expect, they will flee to other companies.
One example of an industry that is struggling to exist because they were slow to incorporate online access is the print media – magazines and newspapers. There are countless magazines that no longer publish today because they believed that people would not stop reading print.
They failed to understand that people — especially younger ones — were looking for content on their computers and phones — not in their mailbox. Any magazine today that does not provide an online version of itself is headed toward extinction. Newspapers have already met that reality.
Attract digital natives. Not all natives are adept with technology or like it. Not all digital immigrants are technophobes. In fact, let’s not forget that the digital immigrants created the digital toys, tools and devices for today’s natives. Enhancing your relationship with digital natives will also bring in the immigrants.
How do you attract this digital customer base?
- Adapt your web site so that it can be clearly read on smart phones. Many people make use of otherwise dead time by trying to look information, buy products, make appointments, read the news, etc. on their phones.
- Provide enough information to encourage a customer to perform self-serve transactions.
- Support online actions by having responsive and empowered customer service agents available if the customer runs into a problem.
- Acknowledge in an email back to the customer that a transaction has been performed online.
- Respond to email queries within 24 hours.
- Make sure that all customers know the different types of transactions they can perform online.
Adding digital natives will grow your customer base and keep the digital immigrants happy. Go native!
1 There are varying definitions of when digital natives were born. The broader definition of those born as early as 1970 is used here. Narrower definitions include those born from 2000.