Deliver equity to the customer with ease

Designing equity into service isn't as muddy as one might think.

1. The opportunity

Businesses are now geared and ready for the next big step in the drive for inclusion — delivering inclusion to the people they serve. In doing so, the challenge organizations now face is in articulating what equity and inclusion really mean in context to their business. They will need to decipher what their customer’s equitable needs are and also delineate the specific brand of inclusion the organization will stand for and deliver on. The hurdle is also in finding ways to bridge the business’s strategic value to their customer’s equitable needs. It’s in delineating which service interactions and offerings are ‘equitable’ and whether they satisfactorily meet this urgent & important customer demand of equity. While these challenges might sound complex, the water isn’t as muddy as one might think. Akin to wearing a pair of 3-d glasses; organizations can wear an equitable lens to look at their processes and gain a perspective shift from a fuzzy, flat, undefined view to a sharp, popping, extra-dimensional outlook.

2. The cause— Services can be exclusive, omissive, and inequitable.

The concept of Equity is closely linked to power and its imbalance. We draw power from various aspects of our lives such as education, background, finances, and so on– and that is not a bad thing in itself. However, when power is sitting heavy on one side, people at the other end invariably experience oppression. We all know not to oppress but oppression manifests itself subtly in our unconscious biases, prejudices, silent behaviors, and unsaid expectations. These assumptions can emerge at any stage of the service lifecycle — while envisioning, designing, operating, or delivering services to customers. Hence, we unwittingly can cause an imbalance of power and thus the need for equity and inclusion.

Biases manifest themselves in various service situations a few examples — a person whose name has ‘Mohammad’ in it might be checked a few extra times at the airport, a colored person in an all-white city might be asked for additional id verification just because the service staff might not ‘feel’ safe, you might be treated better/worse because of the clothes you wear or how rich/poor you look, you are easily dismissed and undermined when English is a second language or when you belong to a certain gender group and more. These are all subtle forms of prejudice and oppression that take place in various service interactions, often founded in fear of the unfamiliar or just convenience.

3. An approach to solve

Expectations and assumptions can be unconsciously designed into the service system, interaction, or its interface. To understand a customers' equitable need in the context of service, one would need to explore what (power) is expected of the customer and what actions they are unable to accomplish easily. Consider the actions your service requires the customer to do in order to fulfill an anticipated service journey loop. For example, is it not an assumption that a call to a customer rep would be made by an individual who has no disability? Once connected, if the caller does not say anything in the first few seconds the call might automatically be cut. The service’s system has excluded people with speech impairments, hearing difficulties, language barriers, and even to an extent mental capability to attend/read/write/use technology. Assumptions and moments can easily be picked out and reviewed with the lens of inclusion; depending on who the business’s customer group is and what its strategic equity focus is. When you see that not all your customers have the same capabilities, you might allocate extra resources to help those who need to make it across.

4. Scaling the approach

This inclusive lens can be applied to any step of the service envisioning process. Immersive research (with an equity lens) can enable us to uncover insights about the assumptions, perspectives, and backgrounds of both the service creators and consumers. Connecting both ends would expose mistranslations and gaps between the need of the customer and the delivery of the organization, thus informing opportunities.

Rather than designing one ‘extreme user’ persona, there is merit in distributing diverse needs across all existing or new personas. Persona’s equity attributes can be transferable depending on the situational context. For example, a flustered mother of three who has the predisposition to be stressed is not likely to be calm and rational when traveling during a pandemic. It's understood that the service’s delivery or interaction will accommodate according to the needs she is presenting, rather than expecting her to meet the requirements of the service. The extra ‘adjustment’ to accommodate her needs is a form of delivering equity. More so, this attribute of stress and mental health during a situation is transferable to anyone in duress. So dialing into the equitable need and distributing these into various personas is a step towards delivering equity to the end-user.

5. It’s about business readiness for better customer experience.

Designing for inclusion and knowing the type of inclusion your customer requires enables business readiness and inclusive efforts for a generally smoother service experience. This not just helps the end-user but also positively the business’s growth and goodwill.