Telstra tells banks to tap technology to capture Gen Y customers

Stuart Corner
Monday, 20 July 2009 14:24

IT Industry - Strategy

Telstra has published a white paper detailing how it believes ICT can help financial services organisations win over Gen Y customers, saying that those able to adopt its recommendations will enjoy considerable first mover advantage.

Generation Y (those born between 1980 and 1994 according to one classification) today account for 18 percent of the Australian workforce and 22 percent of financial services customers but will account for 42 percent of the workforce by 2020, so represent an increasingly important segment of the Australian market - especially as their income levels are likely to rise with age and seniority in coming years.

The white paper describes Gen Y, among other things, as the most connected generation ever, accustomed to interaction with the world and with their peers through a wide range of inter-related communications channels and technologies and as such presenting considerable challenges to large organisations that will have to adapt their existing customer interaction channels to meet the demands of this generation.

According to social researcher, Hugh Mackay, who contribute to the white paper, "Gen Y is the most highly educated, over-stimulated and media saturated generation in our history. Members of this generation will account for an increasing share of our customer and employee base, so financial institutions will need to understand them intimately and engage with them sensitively."

The white paper concludes that "financial institutions will be faced with rapidly growing channel diversity and channel complexity," that they will need to adopt new customer service styles enabling "synchronous conversational interactions...which [will] challenge the way institutions assign customer service resources and the technologies they use to conduct the service experience."

It suggests that institutions can meet the challenges of Gen-Y by "developing a comprehensive integrated multi-channel strategy using a unified communications framework to include these capabilities."

Launching the white paper, Nerida Caesar, head of Telstra Enterprise & Government, said: "We believe there is distinct first mover advantage to capture market share in this segment...The proposition we have put to financial services organisation is that multichannel is the way Gen-Y want to interact.



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