What Inclusive Design Can Teach Us About Customer Experience

As an independent telecoms industry analyst, I always love the opportunity to change focus and stand in the shoes of different stakeholders. The space that Genesys occupies around building a more intelligent customer experience platform gives me that opportunity.

Being Technology-Centric

Analysis of the contact center industry has typically focused on the building block technologies underlying the customer interaction. This has evolved dramatically in the last couple of decades, but now faces a similar challenge to other ecosystem partners in that the emphasis is now more clearly on understanding the customers' intentions and the business outcome.

We have traditionally built customer interactions based on a mythical core profile. By doing this, we exclude many categories of customers, including those with disabilities that mean they cannot use IVRs, websites, bots and the increasing number of apps on our smart devices.

In addition to the traditional disability categories (vision-impaired, hearing-impaired, physically impaired) come the plethora of cognitive and learning impairments. Furthermore, the elderly customer segment may well gradually have to cope with an increasing combination of these impairments. I focus on the telecoms industry, but the same customer-centric emphasis is true in pretty much every industry sector I encounter.

Shifting Design Cycles

We've gone through the mobile-first shift and are now in the digital-first phase. What I believe is critical is that we do not lose sight of the human element in the commercial interactions that we're aiming to support.

Forcing people into a particular channel of communication and interaction is dangerous; it can easily ostracize people who find the preferred channel of the vendor difficult. Accessibility of contact centers, websites and applications must be built to support those customer preferences.

If websites are inaccessible (which is the case for 95%), if apps are inaccessible and if the contact center routing tries to push people toward bots rather than human agents, we stand a major risk of pushing away many customer types.

Build in Inclusive Design from Scratch

The notion of inclusive design, also known as universal design, addresses this challenge. Previously, we've designed for the center of the market where we find our preferred target customer.

In this scenario, we ignore the peripheral cases outlined above where an impairment requires more specific additional design. Developing solutions along the lines of each disability is expensive and lacks scale given how fragmented third-sector organizations, which have traditionally driven this work, are globally.

By designing these peripheral cases into the products and services from scratch, we cover all possible use cases and have the traditional market covered. As the Royal College of Art, Helen Hamlyn School of Design, stated almost 30 years ago, "Design for the edge and you get the centre for free!" This requires companies to address accessibility from the outset and not as an add-on.

The inclusive design mantra needs to be built into all elements of design for an organization from base components through to products and service design. This can be facilitated through specialist accessibility groups, but ultimately, it must be permeated throughout the organization. By making everyone aware of the need to design inclusively, it gradually becomes part of the core design process and is refreshed with every product cycle.

An Expanded Addressable Market

In this way, we are bringing a wide-ranging group of formerly excluded customers into the addressable market. If our customer interaction embraces the fact that someone in their 70s would prefer to talk to a knowledgeable customer agent rather than use a website, bot or app, then that customer is likely to remain loyal to the business.

If customers are given the choice of how to interact with a business, then they'll feel as though the business is listening and adapting around their needs.

The Identity Challenge

Identity plays a major role in delivering this hyper-personalized service. This raises the question of how people identify themselves.

Speaking from personal experience, I denied my vision impairment for several decades. Building up the picture of how a customer is interacting with the business can get some way to approximating a profile - and help deliver a more focused service where the individual is unwilling to declare their limitations.

AI to the Rescue

Artificial intelligence (AI) has hit the hype curve at just the right time to help build this focused customer experience. Assuming the right information is in place about the customer, we can offer a personalized interaction.

AI gives us the ability to help render this service to the individual through the most appropriate channel. This will include fully accessible websites, apps and bots where appropriate. It will also allow the business to introduce specialist translation services, such as sign language, lip reading, captioning and simplified interfaces to avoid over-stressing individuals.

Additionally, it can include actual translation into other languages to make the customer feel more comfortable. Furthermore, voice can play a major role whether this is via generative AI interpretation of the spoken word, voice notes or actually speaking to a person.

A Cleaner, Simpler Interface

One thing is clear: Designing the interfaces and interactions of the future must start with the customer and build as clean and simple an interface as possible.

We live in a world of digital clutter with so much information and means of communication forced upon us. Having a clearer sight of the end goal will expedite these simpler and more appropriate designs.

Fostering a More Diverse Workforce

AI also has a major role to play in the internal organizational aspects of the contact center and telecom industries. By building more accessible systems, applications and interfaces, it will allow a more diverse range of employees to work for the business.

The perceived wisdom when I entered the vision-impaired education system in the 1960s was that people might be piano tuners, basket weavers or telephone exchange operators - shifting physical plugs between different slots on the Strowger exchanges. Well, with fully accessible systems, it's now possible to have vision-impaired people working in complex contact centers, with access to vast arrays of customer information and the ability to function on par with fully sighted peers. A great example of this is Florida-based Lighthouse Works, a business solutions outsourcer who employs around 500 remote and 100 onsite workers, with more than 300 of the contact center agents having varying degrees of visual impairment.

In other companies, employees who are living with autism and who struggle with person-to-person interactions work in emerging chatbot environments as well as in code creation to support application development.

We often talk about bringing the right talent into the business - and these approaches leverage talent from a wider pool and builds a more diverse workforce. And a more diverse workforce also represents a key testing ground for more inclusive design while the more inclusive customer interaction will, in my opinion, drive customer loyalty.

Something that was previously seen as being "the right thing to do" as part of a Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) strategy is now emerging as the right thing to do for business reasons, including increasing customer interaction.

Increasing the TAM

According to my research, there are an estimated 1 billion people in the world with disabilities, representing spending power of over $4 trillion. Enabling and encouraging them to engage in the emerging digital marketplace will expand the addressable market for businesses.

And this more flexible customer experience will benefit everyone.

A truly inclusive design will result in simplified interactions that build on past experiences of those customers and short-circuit the interaction to the channel of choice.

A Call to Arms for All of Us

The pieces are in place to deliver a customer experience that reflects the way we prefer to communicate as human beings - rather than force-fitting ourselves into a system designed around technology. And, since this needs to permeate throughout an organization, everyone can play their role in ensuring that things are designed inclusively, making people feel comfortable communicating with a business. In short, building inclusive design into your business will drive significantly better customer interaction, diversify your workforce and drive better business outcomes.

To learn more about incorporating inclusive design into your business strategy, visit Lewis Insight online today.

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