“Generation Y” Do their belonging to a generation determine choice of communication tool?

Sammanfattning: This research paper will, based on the frame of references and through a quantitative study, describe how Generation Y prefers to communicate with customer service departments. The purpose is to help companies lower their expenses by focusing on one of the two traditional communication tools, telephone or e-mail. Since more knowledge can arouse new questions this study was executed with an abductive approach. After studying theories regarding Generation Y a hypothesis was created: Customers from Generation Y will choose e-mail rather than telephone, when they are in need of personal customer service from a company. A simulation is used to get a better understanding of social behaviour. In this case two scenarios was simulated to test the research hypothesis. In the first scenario, the customer needs to contact customer service because of an error the company had made. However, in the second scenario is the contact necessary because of a mistake done by the customer. In these scenarios the participants had to make a choice between telephone and e-mail. The reasons for two scenarios are founded on the hypothesis that Generation Y prefers e-mail as communication tool, regardless of the situation. In this quantitative study with Facebook as survey platform, two hundred fifty-nine answers were gathered. Out of these, two hundred twenty-five were respondents belonging to Generation Y. The data collected from this research was analysed and the result showed we could reject our hypothesis in scenario one. In this case it was significantly proved that members from Generation Y prefer telephone instead of e-mail when the company has made an error. In scenario two where the customer had made a mistake there was a slight tendency to choose telephone. However, this could not be significantly proved and therefore we could not reject our hypothesis. To further explore the respondents’ choices a comparison between scenario one and two was made. A cross-tabulation showed that more than fifty per cent of the respondents that chose telephone in scenario one changed their preferred communication tool in scenario two. Our research led to a conclusion that members of Generation Y do not have one communication tool they always prefer to use and their choice of communication tool is not based on the fact that they were brought up during the digital revolution.