Generation Dissatisfied - Is Gen Y Really Gen D?
Published January 29th, 2010 in Customer ExperienceForrester recently published a report that rates customer service experiences across industries. Bruce Temkin has shared a few highlights from the report on his blog. What really jumped out at me was how dissatisfied Gen Yers are with customer service experiences (you’ll have to read/purchase the actual report to see the breakdown by generation).
I took a look at other Forrester research about which consumers care about customer service and for whatever reason, Gen Yers care less about customer service when compared to their older cohorts. Is it that Gen Y is more concerned with low price than customer service? Or maybe they just have higher expectations than everyone else?
Are Gen Yers bad customers? Is Gen Y really Gen D? Generation Dissatisfied?
Would love to hear some hypotheses on root causes.
Search
Subscribe to Experience Planner's RSS Feed
Subscribe to this blog's RSS feed
From what I understand, Gen Y are generally dissatisfied because they suffer from middle child syndrome. They’ve entered an environment like the workplace, where the boomers (or first-born in this metaphor) are still in management positions, setting the rules according to how they see the world, and not always leveraging new technologies and ways of doing things.
Gen Yers know how good things could be, but they still respect the boomers for what they have achieved. The millennials or Gen Z (youngest child) have grown up as digital natives who know nothing other than a user-centric, 24/7 world. They have no problem coming into the workplace or anywhere else and just being themselves. They believe it is their right.
I’m not sure if that has any relation to customer experience, but I imagine the principles are the same.
I spent the last 15 years working in higher education and my solid opinion is that they have unrealistically high expectations, resulting from upbringings marked by intense attention from their parents on making sure they only had the best, because they were the best. “Nothing is too good for my child” is where is starts with their parents, and often it blends into “Nothing could be ever good enough for my child” or “My child deserves much better than this.”
Of course, this is an over-generalization, as any generational construct will be. Society pays attention to extremes and books package perspectives into easy sound-bites. There is some truth to this, but I’d be interested to see how off the mark their expectations are, in comparison to other generations.
I’ll check out the links. Thanks for a good post.
Sean Cook
As a friend of mine reminded me, “everything’s amazing and nobody’s happy”.
By the way, two great comments. Thanks, guys.
Being in an industry that thrives on client satisfaction to ensure repeated sales and good word-of-mouth referrals, customer satisfaction has always been the most important aspect for us. If you ask Lorne (the owner), he’d probably say it’s the single most significant factor for his company’s 26 years in the business and relatively large client base.
In my daily grind doing sales I’m finding more often that new contact people who’ve replaced our older loyal clients(boomers), are over-looking the many years of service entirely in exchange for the cheapest deal. It’s happening more and more often lately, and it’s my opinion that your social comment of generation dissatisfied is scarily on the mark, but isn’t limited to these youth cultures of today as mentioned in the previous comments. I’m talking about peers and mid-30’s people that are displaying these “entitled” attitudes. In truth, the phenomenon itself has actually rampaged throughout the last century (and likely all of history in some forms). Industry that once thrived on personal touches like local grocers, bookstores, specialty shops, etc… have all gone to the side replaced by big box stores that offer the lowest possible price. I believe the trend will never cease in a capitalistic society, as it’s ingrained in almost all consumers that every penny saved is a penny earned.