Guest Blog: 5 Proven Retention Strategies for Your Millennial Customers

This week on our Friends on Friday guest blog post, my colleague Boaz Amidor writes about the large impact Millennials are having on the marketplace. He shares five strategies to help keep your Gen Y-ers as customers. – Shep Hyken

Market disruptions can come from anywhere. Today, these disruptions are coming from Millennials — and they’re everywhere. According to Gartner, by 2025, up to 75% of your workforce will be what sociologists call Generation Y-ers, or more popularly called Millennials.

Millennials can be enthusiastic but also tough customers; they have high expectations and won’t hesitate before changing service providers if they aren’t satisfied. They tend to make business decisions devoid of old loyalties to service providers. Millennials in the Western world are looking for the latest and the greatest – all the time. Those who grew up in a world of abundance were, from a very young age, bombarded with many options and offers. As a result, Millennials grew up to be adults that think differently, consume differently and have very different customer service expectations.

This attitude is especially prevalent where software and services are increasingly shifting to the cloud and into a subscription-based business model. And because life-time customer value is so important, you can’t afford a decrease in customer retention. You must strategize how to keep this new breed of customers around in order to keep your business properly aligned.

Five proven strategies to ensure customer retention among Millennials:

1. Provide a Service that is Personal and Contextual

Living in an era of customization and personalization, Millennials want and expect software to be personalized and tailored to their needs. Personalizing the SaaS experience with context-related content and customizable options creates software that goes beyond simply providing functionality, but ensures that the consumer will become attached to your product. Know how to craft messaging to different customer segments based on previous buying habits, age, geographic location, etc. Make an effort to witness first-hand how your product is being used, and see what additional features and benefits the customer can derive from the product.

2. Millennials Love New Technologies – Use That to Capture Their Attention

Millennials have a digital mindset – they are highly dependent on technology, especially smartphones. In fact, according to Nielson, “more than 74 percent of Millennials feel that new technology makes their lives easier. And 54 percent feel new technology helps them be closer to their friends and family.” Leverage this emotional attachment to technology into your customer engagement strategy and continuously introduce new tools and features to your Millennial customer base. They find it enjoyable and are more likely to come asking for more.

3. Perfect Self-Service Tools – Millennials Love Using Tech to Do Things on Their Own

Millennials are known to be independent and relatively impatient. They are used to self-servicing, which means they like to find answers to questions and solve problems on their own. It allows them to get answers in real-time, rather than waiting for an explanation from a Customer Service representative. According to a study in 2013 titled “The Real Self-Service Economy,” 40 percent of customers in a global survey say that they prefer self-service to human contact for their future contact with companies.” Online support is available from a variety of sources. Using these can help eliminate confusion and frustration when operating software. For example, Online Guidance is a great technology for providing automated 24/7 support for customers.

4. Keep Your Finger on the Customer’s Pulse

Because Millennials are much more likely to jump ship than customers from previous generations, make sure you’ve always got your finger on the customer’s pulse. It is imperative to ensure that customers are satisfied well after the initial sale takes place. There are many ways to gauge customer satisfaction that are related to the actual use of a product. These include product usage patterns, volume of support tickets and type of support tickets. There are also other ways to quantify satisfaction, such as frequency of timely vs. late bill payments, engagement with the online community and number of referrals.

5. Do Damage Control…Immediately

Because expectation levels are so high, Millennials are more likely to be disappointed in a product they’ve used. They are also more likely to express this disappointment and share the specifics of their negative experiences with others in public forums on social media. In fact, according to Nielson, Millennials spend approximately 20 hours each month on social media. And I am sure these numbers are only growing.

This can be dangerous because word-of-mouth feedback is the most powerful determining factor in dictating people’s purchasing decisions. As such, when Millennials share negative feedback about a product on social media with all of their friends, the ripple effects can be disastrous. Get ahead of the curve and make sure to respond to customer complaints and grievances in real-time.

Millennials’ technological connectivity has formed the way they think and behave, both in their personal lives and in the workplace. And it needs to change how you behave as well. Make sure that you’re customer service strategy is tailored to Millennial behaviors and leverages them to your advantage.

Boaz Amidor, Head of Corporate and Marketing Communications at WalkMe™ – The Enterprise Class Guidance and Engagement Platform, that instantly simplifies the online user experience.

Read Shep’s latest Forbes Article: Two Ways ‘Giving Back’ Will Benefit Your Business