Decoding CX bias: Be an ally for diverse customers

Last month I put my foot in my mouth.

I’m fiercely proud of my indigenous American ancestry. But, while attending a gathering – and despite looking across a room at a multitude of attendees from India – I blurted out “Indian tribe” when put on the spot to tell my personal story. My face burns every time I think of that moment. I’m committed to being an ally in supporting diversity in every facet of my life. I listen, study, and act intentionally to unlearn what society instilled in me decades ago. But I make mistakes.

Overcoming decades of systemic bias takes work — and a commitment to constantly improve, especially when it comes to my diverse customers at TCS. ?Now is the time for everyone to apply the ally mentality to customer experience. But how?

The challenge: bias in our CX technologies

Software may seem bias and emotion-free with its endless zeros and ones. It’s not. Technology was created and configured by people with unconscious preferences automating processes focused on privileged audiences. Reports and dashboards were then built based on skewed data.

You’re working against decades of bias literally coded into marketing, sales, and service technology. CRM systems aren’t inherently designed for diversity, which contradicts today’s focus on micro-segmentation and hyper-personalization. A prime example is the advent of lead-scoring Artificial Intelligence, which can help automatically qualify sales pipeline. To train this AI you need hundreds of datasets. Let’s say you use a minimum of a thousand rows of historical leads and scores. Historically (and unfortunately), lead-scoring models highly rate prospects who access video and audio assets. That means people who are hearing or visually impaired were never scored high.

?As leaders, we do not have the insights and tools we need to succeed with differently-abled, non-cis, multi-generational, culturally diverse customers.

Despite the rise of sustainability goals and ESG efforts, our CX databases, software tools, and algorithms lag behind good intentions to serve diverse audiences. Entire groups of customers aren’t represented in most marketing databases. Messages misfire. And, at the front line, customer service does a disservice. These gaps cascade throughout the entire customer journey.

Marketers: have you tried analyzing your campaigns or sales pipeline on diversity parameters beyond age and gender? Those reports aren’t available “out-of-the-box.” Most times they can’t even be created. Companies spend billions each year on analytics to prove they know what customers want and what drives business growth. But that giant spend doesn’t tell you if your end-to-end customer experience effectively speaks to and supports all segments of a diverse customer base equitably.

For organizations to reach diverse customers and tap into their FULL economic potential, leaders must create a truly inclusive end-to-end customer experience. We do this by first identifying the diversity parameters of our target markets, assessing the data, and filling gaps. For example, if 49% of small and medium-sized businesses in your Atlanta market are owned by people of color, does your Atlanta SME database represent them?

Second, unpack the bias in your scoring, analytics, and AI. A representative database will go deep into solving this problem but checks and balances to ensure ethical/equitable insights should be implemented. In the lead scoring AI example, a quick assessment of how the audio/video scoring preferences affected each diversity parameter would have shown specific groups were excluded.

Finally, use innovation to solve for those diversity gaps in customer experience. For example, Augmented Reality (AR) might seem the purview of teen gamers, but it shows great promise in helping us better serve an aging population. In our AR for ElderCare: Pharmacy Proof of Concept, we found that the simple camera-style interface of AR was intuitively understood by all ages. AR also comes with native features that accommodate user needs such as auto-zooming if a user moves the mobile phone back and forth trying to focus, and auto-stabilizing the view if the user is moving or shaking. These features can reduce the time it takes patients to refill prescriptions, help eliminate prescription errors, and improve the call center customer experience.

CX innovation offers early and continuous bias detection

Bias is a substantial business risk – and a sustainability concern. At every step of the customer journey — from marketing and sales to service — bias can erode customer trust, damage reputation, undermine campaigns, and impact revenue. But hidden bias in front-office technologies can be corrected. My innovation team is focused on resolving these problems by giving companies the tools and intelligence to monitor and identify issues and engage overlooked customers.