Well, why would you? Gen Mute purposefully does what you do not!  Maybe you are an executive of a major corporation; you were born before 1964 a ‘Baby Boomer’ and you have a misconception that people use mobile phones for talking to each other. Or maybe you are GenX or (if you have done really well in business so far) a Millennial, and you secretly covet the cool retro design of the Nokia 3310; but if you talk to real people on your phone, you are definitely not a GenZ creating new dances on TikTok. 

Recognising that different demographic Personas use communications totally differently is critical to offering a digital customer experience which is actually appreciated and valued by your end user. The one size fits all approach of a single digital customer touch point is going to be forced to adapt to a Persona centric approach. 

Restricting your systems to address all customers the same way is like going to an ice cream parlour and ordering three scoops of the same flavour. 

To deliver great service you need to have customer touchpoints that recognise and adapt to user Personas. The trouble is that Verbal communication is on the way out, and nowhere more than on the telephone. But for a Baby Boomer ‘exec’ it is hard to recognise, appreciate or embrace it…the phone call is heading the same way as handwritten letters – a pursuit for traditionalists who maybe have too much time on their hands. 

Without many of us really noticing it, the phone call has been slowly fading out over the past few years, and a new survey by Ofcom (the UK the regulator for communications services) shows that only 15% of 16 to 24-year-olds consider it the most important method of communication, compared with 36% who prefer instant messaging. 49% of teenagers happily admitted that they would text or instant message someone when they were in the same room. They’re calling them “Generation Mute”. 

Now, why would members of this huge and increasingly influential customer group ever call your call centre? And if they did, do you expect them to say they had a good experience? Yet compare your investments in call centres to your spend on Persona centric digital customer engagement, the change in investment focus has not kept up with the way the market is changing. Hence the ‘Munch’ like scream of Gen Mute - a huge digital literate, big-data consuming audience that is highly mobile and underserved. It doesn’t have to be this way, and maintaining the status quo is detrimental to your future.