If you’re in in your 40s or 50s, Marco Pacelli bets he knows what a typical day consists of for you.

You get up, grab a coffee and a newspaper. You head to the office, make some phone calls, return some emails. Then lunch, maybe a few meetings, then head home for dinner. After that you watch some TV or read a book, then bed.

Sound about right? Sure it does.

And if that were the typical day of every generation of consumer, customer service would be a snap. But that’s not the case.

“Every generation has their own behavior patterns,” says Pacelli. “You go study 10 years before us or 10 years after us, it’s different.”

The key to engaging new generations of customers, Pacelli said, is analyzing the mountains of data they create to understand how they live, work and consume.

Pacelli is CEO of ClickFox. ClickFox makes customer experience analytics software applications that help companies track how customers interact with them both online and off. “We bring data together to get a 360 degree view of the consumer [and]product experience across the data,” Pacelli said.

Through his work at ClickFox and by observing his own kids, Pacelli’s learned a thing or two about the way the younger generation of consumers operate.

“They want the freedom …. They don’t want to be controlled,” Pacelli says. “They don’t want to be told what to do, when to do it, or how to do it.”

Pacelli, who started programming in Pascal on a Sinclair computer at age 12, also said younger consumers rely much more heavily on social media to inform their buying decisions and have shorter attention spans than their older counterparts.

Companies that want to attract and retain the new generation of consumer need to start tapping into that concept, Pacelli said. “Otherwise they’re going to lose the game.”

“This generation is creating more data than ever before and the tracking of that data has become more critical than ever,” Pacelli said. But tracking user-generated data and applying historical analytics to it is not enough.

“Do [companies] just count data to do statistical analytics around how much of something happens or do they really look at it to try to improve your life,” Pacelli said.

Young consumers want to do more and more in less and less time and with fewer and fewer resources, according to Pacelli. Those companies that tap user-generated data to create faster, more dynamic ways of selling to help people do more with less are the ones that will come out on top.