Messaging Dinosaurs
Not long ago, I was informed by my teenage niece that “email was for dinosaurs”.
Slightly dumbfounded, I thought about it more. Email definitely did not have the same level of immediacy that the patience poor Generation Z desires. This moniker — Generation Z, Gen Z or Zillenial is part of a wider, broad strokes categorisation of the generations.
Born in 1980, I just scrape into the Generation Y (Millenial) category and it got me thinking.
Email has not really evolved from the service it was when I started using it in 1997. Partly because it is so entrenched into the way we work, the number of emails sent and received is actually expected to increase in usage over the next 4 years. Maybe us older generations have some kind of weird nostalgic loyalty to our technological friend: email?
Fickle Gen Z will happily hop from one messaging service to the next latest and greatest services; constantly seeking snack-sized and punchy content and communication methods. That Tik Tok is massively successful is the ultimate manifestation of this. Research by LivePerson shows that a massive 75% of Generations Y and Z would rather text message than talk. Yet more research, this time from Adobe, found two thirds of Generation Z thought a chat bot was better than interacting with a human. Particularly poignant when one considers that these two generations are the biggest spenders now (Gen Y) and soon-ish it will be Gen Z.
Ergo, it is inevitable that the behaviours, attitudes and expectations of the cohorts consuming the most services will shape strategy and approach henceforth. Communication is going to evolve at hitherto unparalleled levels.
As a result of the Coronavirus pandemic remote working has meant the obliteration of the status quo. The “way we’ve always done it” had no place in 2020 and won’t in the cringe inducing ‘new normal’ either.
The pandemic has given a shot in the arm to large corporates, national health services and governments. The risk averse and traditionally slow to change organisations have been forced to change. Helped by apps like Microsoft Teams, Slack and Convo, remote working, co-ordination of meetings, content and communication has become more immediate. Email replaced with instant messages, meetings planned weeks ahead arranged a few hours ahead.
Everything is becoming more instant.
Personally, owing to my close proximity to Gen X, I find elements of the transition to immediacy chaotic. There is an exertion of pressure on the recipient and almost exuberant anticipation of a response from the sender of an instant message. The ellipses animation (the three jumping dots to illustrate a person is responding) give hope to the sender of a response. A lack of them causes bewilderment.
How long, is too long, to reply to an instant message? There is a differentiation in the expectation between the recipient and sender of an instant message versus an email. It’s like an entirely new technological etiquette is required on the part of sender and recipient. Nostalgia of email seeps back into one’s psyche. But the transition is inevitable and will proliferate further over the years to come. With this in mind, how does one ensure that their customer service strategy for Gen Y and Z begins to accommodate them today.
First, one should consider if it is right for the use cases in which it will used and likelihood of success. To help shape thought around this, here are some stats and facts around text message versus email. Astonishingly, text messages have a 98% open rate versus a meagre 20% for email:
Next, in the context of customer service, would be whether the customer satisfaction levels where messaging is the key focus of delivery. Again, messaging apps outdo even the most expensive channel (a phone call) in terms of customer sat:
Second, one needs to look at messaging platform usage to understand how you want to focus your efforts on messaging. Globally, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger lead the way in terms of usage:
Given, the high levels of customer satisfaction and the open rate levels, it makes most sense, in the UK at least, to target these three messaging channels:
- Text Message (SMS)
- Facebook Messenger
Third is to review how, why and when emails are currently being sent so that priority areas can be established and a minimum viable product organised and trialled. Rome wasn’t built in a day and every service and use case doesn’t need a smorgasbord of messaging services to know how engagement levels change.
Example use cases for messaging, in place of email, could be:
- Being sent progress updates (e.g. Test and trace (Coronavirus) support application updates)
- Being asked for information (e.g. request proof of income / identity to support an application)
- Being able to provide information back (e.g. two way communication)
- Being asked to complete a survey (e.g. housing related survey)
- Setting up a secure account (e.g. a citizen/tenant/customer portal)
These use cases are highlighted because they could be used across different markets and hundreds of different service types.
Taking a platform approach to developing the products that will help customer service leaders ensure that each use case can be catered for irrespective of service. To provide some context to this let’s say your business has 30 services; a platform approach ensures all of these could send progress updates through the same repeatable set of widgets and gubbins (functionality). If the scale of the organisation is wider say, in UK local government, where there are over 1000 discreet services provided, the benefits of this approach get exponentially greater.
The evidence shows messaging is more satisfying, more likely to be read, more likely to be responded and most importantly immediate. With the number of people in generations Y and Z consuming services increasing dramatically in the coming years can you afford to be a dinosaur?
Note — IEG4’s OneVu Digital Experience Platform provides support for all of the messaging capabilities mentioned before.
