Generation Y is socially fluid, highly connected, mentally fickle, creative and emotionally searching for identities. How’s the enterprise supposed to interact with these individuals – and maybe even oldsters as younger people's attitudes and actions become more mainstream? Maybe semantic and related technologies can help.

“GenY is a different beast and you will have to change the ways you interact with them to meet their needs and communicate in a way that resonates with them,” Bruce Temkin, vice president and principal analyst with Forrester Research, recently commented on a webinar focused on how these millennials are changing the face of customer experiences.

The generation, according to a recent Forrester survey, is typified by such factors as:

● They say technology is important to them (45 percent) and they like it (51 percent), putting them well ahead of Gen Xers, younger and older baby boomers, and seniors in both categories.
● They use mobile phones, a lot – 8.9 hours a week, beating even GenXers by a good three hours;
● They have social media savviness, with more than half using IM and 42 percent using social networks;

“Part of this communication Is a brand new language--emoticons. acronyms, modified spelling, slang,” said Temkin. “They need to have it because they need to move quickly.” So too do the companies that hope to make -- or keep -- as customers these individuals who skim information quickly and get bored easily. “We need to understand all these elements about their mentality,” Temkin noted.

Whether the world should encourage the GenY mentality is a question for philosophers. Businesses just want to know what they should do about it, and that includes dealing with getting the data these individuals tend to supply in unstructured formats. That includes the freeform and often unsolicited text posts to their social networks on product or service experiences (posts that in all likelihood would send a spell checker into a tailspin). “We have to tap into that,” Temkin said – and be ready to act on its feedback, as GenY is equally marked by impatience.

The Internet can be a treasure trove of customer, product, competitive, marketing and research information, said Catherine van Zuylen, vice president of product marketing for Attensity Group, which hosted the webinar. Its software is designed to help companies process and analyze free-form text using natural language processing (NLP), machine learning, artificial intelligence, and semantics. The tally of information on the web includes 15,000 tweets every minute, with over 20 percent of them noting products or brands; more than 100,000 suggestions, tips and tricks posted to tens of thousands of expert forums daily; more than 110 million blogs; and over 20,000 online mainstream news sites, just to name a few.

Attensity’s take is that businesses need a new way of organizing and using ubiquitous information across lots of channels to deliver immediacy, and individual and social interactivity, and therefore fulfill customer expectations. “Next-generation customer experience applications must be information-driven and near real-time, using information inside and outside the company,” she said. Search on its own isn’t sufficient to drive these applications, as it can’t keep up with the volume of social media, never mind the modified spelling and twitter-speak that defines it and which serves mostly to augment the truly sentiments that advanced text analytics can help an organization decipher.

”We need barcoding for text” to organize these worlds of information and make them accessible and useful for the enterprise, van Zuylen said. With advanced text analytics, she explained, sense can be made out of sentences by breaking them up into actors, objects and information clauses – reading the text and extracting automated knowledge about what is really being said so that an action can be taken. That might be, for example, understanding that someone is asking about a fraud policy (not asking how to commit fraud), so that an email can be generated that provides them the data they need. Or it might be routing a tweet from someone looking for a certain model car in blue to a salesperson at an auto comapny who can respond that it will be out in that color in a month’s time.

“Companies need to go further than just having a presence on social sites,” she said. What they need to enable is an integrated response to customers based on an intelligent reading of that unstructured text.

Also, “you want to leverage what’s out there on social media and enhance your support pieces to add to your own self-service portal or knowledge base,” she added about the opportunity to use text analytics to find user-generated content that can power a company’s own service base. “You want to keep people at your own self-service site to leverage up- and cross-selling opportunities.”