Why do ethnic minority people have such different experiences of customer service?
Our Insights Director, Marie-Claude Gervais, explores the differences between ethnicities when it comes to perceptions of CX, and the potential reasons behind them
If someone asked if you thought customers from ethnic minority backgrounds were more or less satisfied with their customer experience than White customers, what would you say? What educated guesses would you take? What assumptions would you make? Would you believe ethnic minority customers feel that the situation has gotten better, or worse, in the past five years? It’s worth pausing for a minute to try to answer these questions before looking at the facts. I, for one, guessed wrong in many ways.
The Foundation carried out a survey with a nationally representation sample of 2,000 adults in January 2023, to assess how customer experience has changed over time and what aspects of customer experience are seen as positive or negative.
Generally, there are deep and widespread problems with customer experience across all groups in the UK: regardless of their sex, socio-economic group, region, household structure, employment sector, etc, most customers are unhappy with how businesses treat them. With one exception: age. Young customers are a lot more satisfied than older ones. Despite all the technological advances, the promises of a ‘personalised’ and ‘seamless’ experience, the constant requests for feedback supposed to improve products and services, the huge investment in complex functionalities and algorithms, dissatisfaction is high and growing. Things are not looking good.
What interests me here, though, is how the experiences and perceptions of ethnic minority customers differ from those of White people. I took a closer look at the experiences reported by the 257 non-White ethnic minority respondents in the sample, to examine how they compare.
In relation to almost all dimensions considered, customers from ethnic minority backgrounds are significantly less dissatisfied with their customer experience than White customers. For instance:
86% of White customers agree that companies ‘often feel impersonal and lost their 'human' touch’, compared to 74% of ethnic minority customers;
84% of White customers think that companies ‘take customers for granted’, compared to 79% of ethnic minority customers;
82% of White customers agree that companies are ‘more interested in cutting costs than giving a good experience’, compared to 77% of ethnic minority customers;
79% of White customers agree that companies ‘send too many emails and requests asking for feedback’, compared to 74% of ethnic minority customers;
42% of White customers agree that companies ‘respect their customers and employees’, while 54% of ethnic minority customer agree;
36% of White customers think that companies are ‘straightforward to deal with’, while 47% of ethnic minority customers find them so; and
34% of White customers agree that companies ‘take ownership of problems’, but nearly half (49%) of ethnic minority customers agree that they do.
It's also fascinating to observe just how different perceptions of change are. When asked whether they think their experiences as customers ‘have gotten better or worse in the past five years’, 12% of White customers believe things got better and 47% believe they got worse. Among ethnic minority customers, 29% believe things got better and 31% believe they got worse.
Why might that be? I don’t know but I would venture some educated guesses.
I believe that much of the difference is accounted for by age. At a national level, Census data shows that people from ethnic minority groups are 12 years younger than their White British counterparts. As a result, it may well be that they are much less phased by the shift of much of retail to online, an environment where they are totally at ease. That might help explain why they are more likely to find companies straight-forward to deal with. Having said that, the respondents in this survey must all be somewhat digitally savvy because this was an online survey.
It may be that shopping online significantly reduces personal interactions and, with that, the risk that assumptions are made about you as a customer - and a person - because of your skin colour, accent or dress.
It may also be that these diverse young people have little recollection of a world when bank managers met customers face-to-face and delivered personalised advice or when people booked holidays after a visit to travel agents on their high street. They do not bemoan a past they have never known.
Importantly, the vast majority (97%) of people from ethnic minority groups live in cities – often large multicultural inner cities. London, where about half of all people from ethnic minority groups in Britain live, has the most positive perceptions of customer experience: 21% of Londoners agree that things got better and 39% agreeing that they got worse. This is a lot more positive than any other UK regions.
In these urban spaces, it is reasonable to assume that the frontline colleagues who serve customers will themselves be diverse. That matters a great deal to ethnic minority customers, both because it is often taken as a short-cut to indicate that the whole company is inclusive, and because it increases the likelihood that the interactions will be more open, human and empathetic. Having a multicultural population also means that the products and services on offer in the local area will probably cater to diverse needs. Perhaps having a wide range of options as a consumer also means that, where bad customer experiences do occur, a remedy or alternatives can be found quickly and the consequences are less severe.
It is highly probable that the response to #BlackLivesMatter helped change ethnic minority – especially Black – consumers’ sense that they don’t matter to businesses. In the year following the murder of George Floyd, 37% of all adverts on TV featured a Black person. That is a significant over-representation, given that only 2.5% of the UK population is Black. Black people were suddenly visible on our screens and often portrayed in a positive light. This must go some way towards explaining why ethnic minority customers are less likely to feel that companies take customers for granted, or that they have lost their human touch, and why they also feel that the situation has improved over the past years.
Why are customers from ethnic minority backgrounds less annoyed by requests for feedback? My hunch is that it is because people from minority groups rarely feel heard or that their voices matter. The opportunity to give feedback probably feels more valuable in that context.
I confess that I don’t understand why ethnic minority customers are more likely to think companies ‘respect their customers and employees’ than their White peers, given the wealth of evidence about the workplace discrimination. Could it be a matter of having lower expectations in the first place? Maybe. Could it be a matter of different cultural attitudes to (reporting perceptions of) customer service? Maybe. Could it be that companies, on the whole, treat individuals better in their roles as ‘customers’ than the same individuals are treated in other roles, such as when they are ‘public service users’, ‘charity beneficiaries’, ‘victims of crime’, ‘students’ or plain ‘citizens’? Maybe.
We just don’t know. Even where I made educated guesses, these could be off. Given that White British people are the minority in London and Birmingham, the UK's two largest cities, and that the number of people from ethnic minority groups keeps increasing generally, brands should seek to find out what is driving these very different perceptions between customers based on their ethnicity. In the absence of proper qualitative research and insights about these issues, valuable lessons about what leads to satisfaction with customer experience are wasted, and opportunities are left untapped.