Generation Alpha are the future customer of 2030, and businesses need to be ready to cater to their highly digitised and on-demand behaviour.
Gen Alpha is the first, truly digitally immersed generation, having been surrounded by technology from the moment they were born. And with the global health crisis defining their formative years, we’ve seen a higher reliance and integration of technology into their lives much faster than predicted.
Their education and social experiences have had to be connected to a digital world in order to continue, and this digitisation of social and institutional structures is increasingly changing their behaviours to rely on technology first.
How can businesses create simple and effective communication streams to cater for their future customer’s ever-changing digital behaviour?
Assistants and socialising
AI is already fully embedded into Gen Alpha’s every day through the technology that shapes modern homes.
Take AI assistants like Alexa, Google Home, or Siri. Our research showed that Generation Alpha started speaking with smart devices at the age of 6, and in fact, were speaking to AI assistants more than they were even speaking to their own grandparents.
And in the context of socialising, we found that 73 per cent of 11-year old’s surveyed were well-versed on WhatsApp, with 29 per cent of Gen Alpha using SMS, and 33 per cent using FaceTime. Gen Alpha isn’t just growing up with these communication technologies, they’re using them on a daily basis.
When businesses fail to utilise the very applications their target market use to communicate, they miss out on great opportunities to provide positive brand experiences through tailored customer communications.
Behavioural Impact
When thinking about the future customer for your business, it’s critical to understand the impact that technology has on their behaviour. Why? So that you can customise your business to suit their needs and create seamless, simple and instant solutions to keep them loyal and engaged.
What effect does this have on your business? Well, moving forward you can’t just rely on traditional customer service methods to service your customer’s needs.
With an ever-changing global and geopolitical landscape, the reliance on technology for Gen Alpha will only continue to grow, meaning businesses need to be forward-thinking about the types of services that can be offered in the simplest and quickest way while gaining greater metrics and insights into their behaviour.
By analysing customers’ online behaviour and taking a futurist approach to emerging technologies, businesses can improve customer engagement through deploying multi-channel communication solutions in line with customers evolving digital communication needs.
Adjusted thinking
While many businesses worry about the potential lack of a human element in the AI technology used in customer service, its important to remember that the target generation won’t think this way.
Gen Alpha have been surrounded – and interacting with – AI, automation and other emerging technologies from birth, and they perceive this as the norm. Businesses that are not agile enough to adapt to this new mindset and approach to CX will potentially be excluding their largest customer target market by ignoring changed attitudes. Generation Alpha will have higher expectations for CX than previous generations, meaning that without catering to these future needs now, you run the risk of being left behind.
Businesses need to prioritise designing intelligent touchpoints to support a customer’s journey within the business. Embracing the higher demands of your future customer, rather than sticking to tried and true traditional methods, allows greater opportunities to quickly understand what your customer needs and swiftly provide solutions through the very technologies Gen Alpha already use.
Future-proofed
Customer service is undergoing a digital transformation, and it’s no surprise why.
With the future customer base already being digitally literate at very young ages, businesses need to extend their digital transformation actions to include strategies that underpin customer experience.
By applying open and flexible customer service options, businesses can accelerate their customer experience transformation and provide seamless solutions to an on-demand generation.
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