Behavior and Expectations of Digital Natives (generation Y) – Do Companies Need to Adapt in the Customer Service?

Cologne Business School

Behaviour and Expectations of Digital Natives (Generation Y) – Do  Companies need to adapt in the customer service?  

Term paper for “Applied Market Research”

Summer Semester 2015

Lecturer: Prof. Dr. Klemens Skibicki

BA 14 in International Business/ International Trade

Table of contents

1. Introduction        

2. Steps of the Market Research process        

3. Problems occurred in the Market Research Process        

4. Analysis of main findings        

5. Implications for the future        

6. Reference List        

7. Affidavit        

1. Introduction

The Generation Y, people born in the early 1980s and the late 1990s, have revolutionarily changed the world due their extensive use of technology or internet, e.g. using social media like Facebook or Twitter to communicate than doing phone calls or using Google to search for the studies than reading in books and dictionaries. As a result the Generation Y is called the Digital Natives.

Digital Natives, a term characterizing human beings born in the era of the digital world,

have gained immense importance in the last few years as they are influencing many business activities in the various industries and units e.g. the Human Resources department, the customer service department, The automotive industry, etc. It will continue to do so immensely in the future.

In this document I will focus on presenting the behavioral pattern of the Generation Y and its influence in the future development of the customer service department.  Therefore an important question needs to be answered: How can companies prepare for this new challenging environment?

2. Steps of the Market Research process

First of all, one the one hand the problem of the Generation Y needs to be specified and consequently on the other hand a goal statement has to be defined.

Most of the companies are facing the problems of failing to adapt to the service expectations of the Generation Y.  Therefore the customer service expectations of the Generation Y need to be analyzed and compared to the type of services companies are offering at the moment.

Secondly, an approach to research the problem has to be developed. Analyzing expectations of customers is often done in marketing processes, that is why one can rule out using the exploratory research design due to the fact that in an exploratory research design we do not know much about a phenomenon and to get first impressions and insights.  Moreover a causal research design will also not be able to analyze the expectations of the Generation Y as in casual research designs we examine the relationship between two variables that is done in an experiment.

Thirdly, it is necessary to select and set up a research design. Based on the line of reasoning presented in the second step one has to opt for a descriptive research design, which is conducting quantitative research. The reason to choose this research design is that there is already some kind of information on the general expectations of the Generation Y but more detailed descriptive knowledge is required to find out about the customer service expectations of the Generation Y. An appropriate method is to design a questionnaire with different item formats, such as multiple choice or dichotomous, including questions like:

• Do you use social media?
• For what kind of purposes do you use social media?
• Which channels do you use for contacting the customer service?

Fourthly, after setting up a questionnaire it is obvious that data needs to be collected. Therefore it is necessary to offer different types of channels to provide data that can be online or in a face-to face interview. For conducting the online interviews the group was provided with an online survey tool called “Lime Survey”, which helped filling out surveys in English or German. The main channels to address people for taking part in the survey are going to be the social media networks due to the easy and efficient contacting process. Our target audience are as mentioned the Generation Y, thus people aged 15-30, who have different kinds of occupation. Most of them will be student or pupil. It is still important to include data from people of the Generation Y who are an employee or even self-employed. This will facilitate at least a wide variety of data. Places where the target audience is to be found are high schools, universities and start-up companies. For diversity in the surveys, people from other countries than Germany also need to be included.

Fifthly the collected data has to be pre-processed and analyzed. In order to illustrate the data, descriptive statistics such as bar charts, pie charts need to be used. The Lime Survey tools helps to analyze the data accurately. This will provide a better visualization and analysis of the findings.

Lastly the report needs to be prepared and the results need to be presented to the C.E.O Prof. Dr. Klemens Skibicki.

3. Problems occurred in the Market Research Process

Generally one always has to face some kind of problems during a market research process. There were not any problems in first three steps of the process. Problems started to increase in the process of collecting data. When given the task to do 35 online surveys and 15 offline ones, it seemed to be an easy task having 563 Facebook friends and a large family with more than 25 cousins.

The first idea was to post the link of the survey online on Twitter and Facebook and the task will be completed within maximum one day. This was not the case as after one day I only had three completed surveys and four incomplete. It turned out to be a difficult task due to the fact that people were not reacting to the post and did not had the time to answer 40 questions. This was indirectly seen as a waste of their own time according to some people as the questionnaire was “long”. The problem needed to be solved as fast as possible as I did not have time due to deadline pressure. I came up with the idea to personally write to my friends and kindly ask them to fill out the survey. This idea was very effective which could be seen in the outcome of the completed surveys. Within one day I had 30 online surveys completed.