a-day-in-the-life-of-a-gen-z-service-agent:-why-ai-is-causing-a-customer-service-revolution
The workforce is rapidly changing. According to Zurich, Gen Z is expected to make up nearly 30% of the workforce by 2025. As CMO of Kustomer, I have shadowed many customer service agents, doing hundreds of ride-alongs and stakeholder interviews, many of them with individuals from this rising generation.
What I’ve noticed is that Gen Z does things differently, and they expect their work life to be like the rest of their life – supported by technology and AI. The problem is, it’s not.
Work is the one area where customer service agents do not get much support from AI. While this trend is changing, AI in enterprise sales is at a tipping point and it’s a good thing because if you look at the day of a typical Gen Z customer service agent, you’d be shocked at what happens. I know I was.
Let’s look at Jack’s day:
6:30am: When Jack wakes up at 6:30am, his room temperature automatically adjusted to his liking by Nest.
7:00am: As he quickly prepares for his morning run, his Fitbit uses its built-in GPS to show him the best route to run and indicates his friends are already beating him on exercise for the day.
8:00 am: Driving to work, Jack encounters an accident and without touching a button, Google Maps, using satellite technology, proprietary data, and crowdsourced information, presents an alternate route and includes an ig database explanation as to why one is preferred over the other.
8:30 am: As the morning commute is coming to an end, Jack flips on Spotify and activates its DJ feature to receive personalized recommendations based on his music profile.
9:00 am: Work starts and the fun ends; Jack is left to support customers using his gut and intuition. At 9 am, Jack jumps into a shared email queue of tickets from customers who have questions about their latest orders. It seems inefficient to have multiple agents randomly pick and choose which tickets they want to respond to, but his boss tells him it’s the way it is done, so Jack begrudgingly starts his work without complaint.
11:00 am: Jack takes an inbound phone call. He hates taking phone calls because he enters the call with no knowledge about the person on the other side. This call happened to be negative from the start. The customer was angry when Jack asked him to repeat information the customer had already given to a different agent over chat. Jack agrees it’s stupid but it’s not his fault the chat system doesn’t connect with the phone system.
12:00 pm: Jack opens up one his favorite apps: DoorDash, thanks to its quality recommendations and personalizations. Today, he orders Thai food.
1:00 pm: Just before he starts work again, Jack checks his Amazon account for a package he is expecting to receive today. Once done, one of the recommendations catches his eye. Like most of us, Jack is a sucker for those recommendations, so he takes the bait and makes the purchase.