Avaya Event Explores How Millennials Will Alter the Workplace

People in the millennial generation have grown up as connected citizens of the world, and they’re going to challenge us to work in new and more collaborative ways. That was the message at the Avaya (News - Alert) Technology on Tap event Monday.
 The confab, which took place on the eve of the opening of ITEXPO in Austin, drew inspiration from a comment by Andrew McAfee (News - Alert) of MIT. He was recently quoted as saying, “Conventional thinking has always been that younger workers adapt to the tools and systems an organization already has in place. But this business model no longer applies.

The rules are being rewritten on the fly.” Chris Lynk, senior software engineer for Avaya web.alive, mentioned that, on average, by age of 21, millienials spent 10,000 hours playing video games. Avaya leverages that generation’s experience with avatars in its web.alive offering, which also uses spatial audio, to create an immersive collaboration experience. Avaya says the offering, which is available for $49 a month, is perfect for hosting meetings or leading training sessions. It also allows for file sharing, presentations, desktop sharing, co-browsing, avatar customization, web integration, self administration, and more.

The Avaya event’s keynote speaker was Stuart Beame, assistant director of revenue cycle, education and customer service at Novant Health. Beame has more than 20 years of contact center and training experience in a wide variety of activities such as launching Orbitz.com, leading the training and quality assurance programs for DirecTV (News - Alert), opening sites in India and the Philippines, and as director of training and QA for the Census 2000 project.

Beame spoke about the defining characteristics of various generations, especially millennials. Millennials, defined as people born between 1982 and 2002, are civic-minded, optimistic, long-term planners, high achievers, and used to getting a lot of positive feedback from their hovering parents, among others, said Beame. Because they are used to being connected, and have been able to interact with others around the world at all hours through multiplayer gaming, they want 24/7 access, he added.

As a result, he said, companies need to develop policies and practices that address the millennial expectations of accessibility, independence and quick response. David Huber, consulting systems engineer for Avaya Contact Center, discussed the rise of social networking, which ties in closely with the above themes. He mentioned that Avaya got about 100,000 company mentions on social network sites last year. Of that, he said, about 30,000 were useless, an industry average.
However, he said, 10 percent required some action. Noting that social networking now allows customers to make even a small complaint get a lot of attention, Huber talked about the need for companies to monitor, filter and quickly respond to social network mentions. A contact center solution that has social media integrated as one of its components is the best way to do that, he said, adding that also opens the door for businesses to use social media to build revenues and increase customer satisfaction. “Social media, it’s another channel,” he said. “It needs to be integrated into the workflow.”
By Paula Bernier, Executive Editor, IP Communications Magazines