Customer Experience During Pride Month: Was Yours All-Inclusive, Or Exceptionally Exclusionary?

In 2022, many companies know better than ever that if you don’t stand for something, you might as well stand for nothing in the eyes of consumers. Silence in the face of injustice is a calculated, risky, and financially precarious choice to make. Especially when it comes to supporting members of the LGBTQIA+ community, all eyes are on companies big and small to see when—and how—they’ll show support for the gay community in the month of June and beyond.

The throwing of the first brick at New York City’s Stonewall Inn ushered in a new wave of change-making for the gay community, one that has evolved in a global and multi-faceted movement. We've learned over the past decades that there are many ways individuals and public entities can show their support for marginalized communities. You can protest, you can donate time, money and resources, you can even educate. And in the case of the customer experience, you can even look towards people and technology to create an experience that allows for each client to be uniquely and fully themselves. 

Customers want to put their money where their mouth is, and spend their money on products that align with their personal beliefs, lived experience, and moral compass. They also want the companies they work with to do the same. Not only that, but consumers want to know that the brands they align themselves with are not insular, and are actively engaged in developing their business product beyond the heteronormative status quo. Even if a customer isn’t gay, trans or gender nonbinary, they want to know (and see) that their friends, family members and even stangers can also utilize your company’s resources with as much ease as themselves.

Now, it’s one thing to refuse service to a member of the LGBTQIA+ community (another risky, polarizing and financially faulty business move). But it’s a completely different thing to offer your product to this community, or even market to them directly, and then unintentionally (or intentionally) alienate them through the use of customer service communication and technology that cannot understand nor account for a diversity of people and experiences. No matter your industry, your product, or the size of your workforce, each and every company is faced with a customer service challenge: 

How do you get computerized technology to reflect the human experience? And should you?

Whether you’re using:

• an online survey to collect customer feedback
  a chatbot in order for consumers to self-service
  or
• an automated phone system to connect callers to agents,

if a tool designed specifically to help customers misgenders them, is unable to use the correct pronouns, or even discounts the identifying information they are sharing with your organization, then you are creating an exclusionary customer experience shrouded in high-tech microaggression. And although this example might feel like a hypothetical to some, it’s an uncomfortable customer service reality for members of the LGBTQIA+ community.

In fact, for trans athlete Cal Calamia, it’s a reality they cannot outrun. Last year, 25-year-old Calamia had registered for the 2022 San Franciso Bay to Breakers 12K race, and of course chose “non-binary” among the options in the dropdown menu of the online sign-up form. But after submitting their information to the race, Calamia realized that despite their being a nonbinary option for runners, there would only be awards for men’s and women’s categories. Upon that realization, they contacted the Bay to Breakers organizers in October 2021, urging the addition of an award for nonbinary race winners.

“I saw the categories and I was confused about why you could register under a gender they weren’t acknowledging for the awards part of it,” they told U.K. based outlet PinkNews. “It was never about me wanting to win an award, it was about the fact that it seemed like one plus one is two and they weren’t recognising that.”

Fast forward to May of 2022, after months worth of follow-up from Calamia, organizers replied just days before the race to let them know Bay to Breakers would consider the change in awards for 2023. Calamia, who is an organizer and activist in the San Francisco area, then rallied their community around the issue in the days preceding the race. The mounting pressure ultimately resulted in the addition of a Bay to Breakers award for nonbinary runners, but not in the way Calamia was hoping.

​​“The award they gave me when I won the race was a piece of plastic and they said they were going to mail me my actual gold medal,” they told PinkNews. “But they haven’t reached out yet and I haven’t heard anything.” 

Nonbinary atheletes continue to face discrimination around the world, and being put under the impression that they are welcome to showcase their skills, only to have their ability to be recognized as full human ripped away, adds insult to injury. And in the case of Cal Calamia, it is not just a human error on the part of organizers, but a technological customer experience error facing the online form industry, says Laura Wronski, director of research at Momentive, one of the leading companies in online surveys and data aggregation. 

“How do we make sure that we are capturing the full range of people that we want to capture in a survey,” she asks.” How do we not dissuade people from participating in a survey or providing their feedback?” Over the past years, her company has analyzed how members of the LGBTQIA+ community respond to and share information on feedback and data forms, with the goal of making sure all people feel included and know their voices are being heard, not misrepresented.

“The idea of misgendering…that is a personal affront to the individual,” says Wronski. “They don't feel like they are able to be their full selves, their true selves.” This poses a danger to the LGBTQIA+ community, as LGBT adults experience gender-based microaggressions at much higher rates than their cisgender counterparts, she notes. “These are things that are not even a factor in the lives of cisgender adults—things like deciding which bathroom to use, or which pronouns people use when referring to someone.” 

As a result, considering the LGBTQIA+ experience when it comes to customer service is often an afterthought, which Wronski thinks could be the case in regards to Cal Calamia’s experience with Bay to Breakers. “Maybe the organization is trying to do their best to collect that data, but then that next step of, ‘Okay, what do we do with this,’ is a big problem,” she says. “Because even if as an organization you are collecting data and allowing someone to say, ‘Okay, I'm neither male nor female…that next step of ‘What do we do with this data?’ is the tricky point.” 

Of course, data is a key metric in understanding and improving the customer experience for any company, regardless of what technology or systems you may have in place. Access to data quantifies not only how we as users talk to technology, but how the technology talks to us. Ideally, we want for our customer experience to be gender-inclusive: for our automated call system to understand that someone may be nonbinary, for our chatbot to be able to remember or identify pronouns, or for the data from a customer contact form to reaffirm a client’s gender identity. When the technology we develop or invest in does not do that, companies fail to make good on their promise of allyship.

If your customers’ lived experience can not be understood by the technology you use, you will lose client loyalty and risk retention. So if your organization is looking to affirm, support and increase the visibility of its LGBTQIA+ customers, you’ll want to have the right tools at your disposal to collect the data you need. And in order to optimize your client experience, you must be able to apply those findings to the improvement of products moving forward. But if Bay to Breakers was unable to do so in May 2022, who’s to say that companies didn’t make similar missteps in June 2022, and won't in the months that follow?

The ability to analyze data and apply it to real-life scenarios may be difficult for some corporate entities, but to Justin Edwards, a Human-Computer Interaction PhD candidate at University College Dublin, it’s common sense. The 4th year PhD candidate researches how we talk to virtual agents and how we'd like them to talk to us, and recently published a peer-reviewed article exploring expressions of gender and sexual orientation in chatbots.

“Self-expression online has certain benefits over face-to-face interaction, such as allowing people to selectively present aspects of themselves, editing and tailoring communication to present themselves in a way they’re comfortable with,” Edwards and his research team note in the study. “This work aims to understand the way chatbots do the same thing. We seek to explore chatbots’ own expressions of gender and sexual orientation, expanding our understanding of the ways chatbots reflect the humans who design them and who interact act with them as well as the ways in which they differ from humans.”

For example, if a chatbot comes into contact with a customer named “Chris” and the bot automatically assumes this individual is male gendered and uses he/him pronouns, the chatbot is effectively excluding and disregarding the experience of a gender nonbinary or trans invidiual who could be on the other side of the keyboard named “Chris,” who uses she/her and/or they/them pronouns. Maybe such an incident occurs because the chatbot technology does not have a feature that allows users to specify their gender identity and pronouns. Or perhaps the chatbot does have that feature, but the technology itself is not developed enough to learn from customer interactions and remember this information for future use. 

If Chris can share that they use they/them pronouns at the beginning of the conversation, but the chatbot reverts to using he/him pronouns when referring to Chris by then end of the conversation, then the product and even the brand itself, regardless of how inclusive marketing may appear, are in fact trans exclusionary. When choosing, building, or investing in technology that you hope will improve your brand's customer experience, you must consider the ability of that tool or technology to understand a multitude of consumer identities and experiences. Ideally, the external communication tools you use will bring your company closer to its goal of allyship and inclusivity.

However, creating or choosing to invest in customer experience technology that accounts for diverse experiences is “a fine line,” Edwards explains: “On the one hand as a designer and a consumer, you want bots in general to be more inclusive, to represent more different types of people.” But on the other hand, he says, “the idea of these bots pretending and mimicking and parroting these experiences that might have been hard for you, or at least really felt by you in an emotional way that weren’t felt by a bot, can diminish the experience that you had.” 

And in today’s world, where companies are being clocked for how genuine—or disingenuous— their activism, diversity and inclusion efforts are, using technology that uses data to mirror clients, as oppose to engage and empathize with them, can be dangerous, Edwards warns: “It’s like your experience is being reduced to the types of words you use to describe it, rather than the way you actually felt and experienced it.” 

The United Nations has even investigated how technologies integrate with diverse peoples, noting that the judgements, prejudices and misconceptions some of us may have about the LGBTQIA+ experience will show up in the products we create and sell. Therefore, just as an online survey can exhibit performative allyship and be exclusionary of a trans runner, so can your bots, your A.I. and your automated CX systems. 

With that in mind, take a moment this month to take stock of your marketing strategy and your DE&I efforts when it comes to CX:

• Did you change your company logo to rainbow, and then struggle to help a LGBTQAI+ customer find the service or solution they needed?
• Does the technology you have in place make room for varied gender expression and identification?
• What did you do this past June to support the LGBTQIA+ community that you’ve already left behind in July? And what have you kept?

Members of this community deserve to be out, proud, and have a personalized CX experience. So let’s do what we can to give it to them. 

Photo by Kenny Eliason via Unsplash