How the Workforce of 2020 is like the Customers of today!

What is the simplest way to get customers and then more customers? Call them (or rather notify them) and give them what they want at the best prices. Something like Santa Claus does for Christmas. But even that isn’t easy.

What is the mantra of business on the Web? Let customers buy a product at a cheaper price while making the process easier and more enjoyable than usually is. Pretty simple, eh? The customer isn’t demanding by nature, he or she is moulded to be such by the Web environment.



In fact, customers can be equated to employees today. Interestingly, findings of a research of the workforce by Oxford Economics and SAP mirror the persona of customers. According to the research, the workforce of 2020 will be increasingly flexible, diverse and mobile. Exactly how customers are already. Customers too are flexible, shop on their phones and come from different backgrounds.

HR departments at enterprises often lacks insights into employees to be strategic in the sense that they don’t know what their employees truly want and expect from them. Same goes for businesses too. Many companies are found wanting in terms of insight into true requirements of customers which is so vital to serve them. The Oxford Economics and SAP research also points out, “Millennials need to be managed differently in terms of feedback and development.” The same applies to millennial customers too. Businesses need to segment them and manage them differently.

There are two points here that businesses need to keenly follow: One, customers are increasingly becoming mobile and flexible meaning they are not going to use just one computer terminal or one account to interact with your business but will most likely use multiple devices from multiple locations through different accounts each represented by a different dataset. As a business, your job is to unify these datasets to provide a unified customer profile most probably through the use of Web Single Sign-On. Single Sign-On is a key tool in Customer Identity and Access Management that helps users access multiple web properties after logging in just once. Unfortunately, Single Sign-On is publicized as a tool for customers to beat password fatigue. Of course, it is a brilliant solution to password fatigue but it has many other critical benefits foremost among which is the ability to help create a unified view of the customer and identify him or her as a single person. A unified view helps create this single picture of the customer and more importantly, helps the customer pick from he or she left off irrespective of the device or channel being used to interact or transact with the business.

Second, brands must establish trust relationships with customers also termed brand relationships and this stems directly from the first because brands can no longer use a generic relationship strategy for all segments of customers. Millennials employees need to be managed differently and so do millennial customers. And there is no better time to focus on this than 2016 because it is predicted to be the year of the millennial customers. Winning over the millennial customer is not easy by any means but it is not the most difficult task either if you have the right strategy.