By Chris Bucholtz

Yesterday’s announcement by RightNow of its expanded feedback functionality brought up an interesting point, and one that most people of my age often overlook: there’s a generational difference in the way we want to interact with companies.

To teens, that’s obvious: they’ve never known a world without instant messaging, mobile phones and text messaging, but their parents still insist on voice calls for many things, or if they’re more technologically inclined, e-mails. People slightly older than their parents often don’t use e-mail and are devotees of the phone.

That means that your contact center must be prepared to integrate newer communications technology if it plans to service the younger members of your target market. You need to communicate with them the way they want to communicate with you (which is why the RightNow update is so clever), and, going forward, you’ll need to be able to quickly integrate new methods of communication as they become viable and accepted. We went many years with the phone as the only way to reach a company in a timely manner; the means of communicating have begun to multiply rapidly, and it would be foolish to think that other means of rapid communication aren’t coming our way soon.

Put yourself in the place of a 20-year-old with a question about a product. If that young person uses text messaging all day to talk to friends, what does it suggest when a company insists on a phone call, or has no ability to respond to a text message? Simply by disregarding this mode of communication, that contact center has effectively drawn a line between itself and the customer – in this case, a young customer who’s still forming opinions about the companies he or she is doing business with.

Of course, there are some things that can only be cleared up with a phone call or, in fewer cases, an email. But shifting the media is much easier and leaves a better impression when the initial contact comes in a form of the consumer’s choosing.

If contact center management insists on keeping itself static and fixed in its ways, I have little doubt that its users – and the company’s customers – will slowly “age out” and the next generation of customers will look elsewhere for a company more eager to talk to them in a manner they’re comfortable with.