A Dog Called Diversity
A Dog Called Diversity
Embracing Diversity in Customer Experience.... with Debbie Levitt
Have you ever wondered how much a company truly understands you as a customer? This episode features the candid insights of Debbie Levitt, a customer experience specialist known as the Mary Poppins of CX/UX. In her work at Delta CX, she challenges the status quo of marketing strategies.
Debbie's experiences in diverse cultures have armed her with a unique perspective on the importance of acknowledging the diverse needs and identities of customers.
In this discussion, we dissect the outdated practice of marketing predominantly to a majority demographic standard that is gradually losing relevance in our increasingly diverse society.
Debbie offers valuable insights into how companies can shift their marketing tactics to focus more on providing value to their diverse customer base. Drawing on her wealth of experience, she shares how a customer-centric approach can enhance business performance and foster customer loyalty.
She has written Customers Know You Suck: Actionable CX Strategies to Better Understand, Attract, and Retain Customers
Get in contact with Debbie here
This episode is a call to action for all companies to embrace diversity, and a guide to doing it right. Tune in, you're sure to learn something new about the world of customer experience and diversity!
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Welcome to a dog call diversity. And today I have a different guest, someone who works in a bit of a different space but completely related to diversity and inclusion work, which I love. So welcome to the podcast, debbie Levitt. It's great to have you here, thanks so much. I wondered if you would maybe just tell us a little bit about where you grew up and where you live now, because I'm very jealous and I'm sure some of our listeners will be too Well, if you insist.
Speaker 2:So I grew up in the suburbs of New York City. I never felt like I belonged there, so I couldn't wait to get out. I did university in the Boston area and eventually found my way to some other American cities and eventually completely out of America. I've been living for gosh, how long is it now? Over six years, I think I stopped counting. I'm on the island of Sardinia, which is part of Italy Beautiful beautiful.
Speaker 1:Do you feel like you belong there? Because you said oh, you didn't feel like you belonged in New.
Speaker 2:York? Yeah, definitely. I mean I'm still learning the language, so I don't feel like I am a local, but I definitely feel like it's the right vibe for me. I mean, to me, the people here are humble, friendly, helpful, genuine. That's a community I want to be a part of. So I still need to learn more Italian, but it's definitely a place that feels like home for me.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so nice. Tell us a bit about the work you do, because you do such interesting work, so tell us a bit about that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, sure, my company is called Delta CX, as in Delta for Change and CX for Customer Experiences, and so I do a lot of work in a number of areas. We do projects, we do training, we do consulting, we do some other things as well, and so typically I'm working with companies on either helping them understand their customers and users better so that they can create better strategies, decisions, products and services. Sometimes that means we're doing research with these target audiences to better understand their needs, behaviors, habits, and then sometimes we're doing some design work, but a lot of it ends up being research and strategy and sometimes helping them with their companies, with their processes and teams and product market fit types of things.
Speaker 2:And so, while diversity is not necessarily the first word you're going to read on, my website it's part of that, because I find that a lot of companies, no matter what flag they think they're waiving or what they've put in some of their HR documentation, they're not really following through on DEI promises that we're not including these people, we're not taking the time to understand them. We're still making stereotypes about people by their age, their ethnicity or to me worse skin color, or about where they grew up or what their language is, or if they're LGBTQIA plus or if they have a disability diagnosis or condition. I mean it's lazy buckets and crappy demographics all around, and so usually I've got to come in and, as part of our other work, I'm going to work battle people a bit on convincing them to care about their target audience, who is diverse.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, completely, and I think for certainly for consumer companies. I don't know how they can avoid thinking about their customer base and how diverse they might be. I have a friend who works in Singapore, who's done marketing work with companies that want to market to women and, you know, don't get beyond putting a pink flower on something, as that's what women want. I'm like I don't want pink flowers, I don't want that Me either.
Speaker 2:No, it's amazing how often I am boiled down to one chromosome because the stuff that I see as a you know, as we're recording this, I'm a 51 year old woman and the amount of garbage that I get advertised and marketed to me because of the demographic buckets I fall into, it's just infuriating and nonsensical and ultimately it's a loser for the company because they're losing money on poorly targeted advertising.
Speaker 2:They're losing money by alienating me and making me shout out New York style four letter words Like who's really winning here? I recently wrote a book called customers know you suck, and chapter five is this interview with a guy named Craig Sullivan who's just like an S kind of a experimentation and UX genius, and he talked about how Facebook and Google want you to target ads badly. They want you to have the BS that I'm experiencing because if your ads were more effective, their revenue would go down. So it's really ultimately in in that sneaky best interest for you to target your ads poorly. So you know, when I see these things on Instagram, like I think in one day I actually saw an ad that clearly assumed I was menopausal, followed not too long later by an ad that clearly assumed I was menstruating, and I was like heads up peeps only one of these is true, and I don't need either of these products. So you know, imagine me waving some middle fingers around. I'm so over this, I know.
Speaker 1:I absolutely love tick tock, but the stuff that gets pushed to me and it's the same thing. I'm 50s, I'm wearing the same demographic, apparently, and I've been pushed some things and I'm just like like what? No, no, please leave me alone.
Speaker 2:It always. You know I want to tell a silly story and you're welcome to get this out, but many years ago, many you know, the night in the 1990s, I was, unfortunately, for a number of reasons, married to an unfortunately awful guy and one of his his less awful habits was listening to sports, talk radio, and you know they just talk sports all freaking day, and this was New York area sports. And so they had all of these commercials these guys had to read. And I remember thinking in the 90s I want to imagine this target person. Who is this person who needs all of these things that this radio station is advertising?
Speaker 2:Because it was cigars, it was a burn center like a burr, it was like it was always these like first person commercials who were like, after I was burned over 90% of my body, I went to the Staten Island burn center. They really helped me a lot and I was like, okay, they, so you've been severely burned over most of your body and you smoke cigars. Maybe that's how that happened. And then there'd be commercials for, like you have an elderly person living with you who you have to take care of, and like I just started building this fake person in my head, who had all of these things happening to them at the same time and I was like, who is this disastrous person?
Speaker 2:And I and I feel like we could do that now with the ads we get and we get this image of this is who this is. I think I am. This company at mean. Evidently, instagram thinks I am a high fashion, extremely feminine person who is both menopausal and menstruating, smells pretty terrible and a couple of other things, I guess, and you know, being severely burned and smoking cigars. So I look at go, really that's who they think I am. That's, you know. So unfortunate, because I think of myself as someone who is a musician and needs to ride my motorcycle a little bit more than I do and is a mom to dogs and you know, newsflash, I'm not thinking about uterus at all.
Speaker 1:As you were talking and you know you were thinking about that radio and what kind of profile they were advertising to. I have noticed in business so I started my business in full time in June last year and so I'm in a couple of different kind of business networking sort of groups and there's this thing that in marketing if you want to market you've got to define the person you're marketing to. But it's very narrow, right Like it's like when you're thinking about you know who is my product for it's, you sort of ask to define it in a narrow way and I'm wondering is that what you're seeing with organizations that they've got this, this ideal person, and they're white and they're between the ages of 32 and 45. And you know they're men?
Speaker 2:and they like Starbucks.
Speaker 1:And they like Starbucks. Yeah, is that what's happening? Is that what you're seeing in your work?
Speaker 2:I think that people are still clinging very hard to demographics, and I've written an article. Maybe by the time this podcast comes out, the article will come out. I'm still working on it. But basically my perspective is that demographics and this is just my opinion demographics are left over from a time when we marketed I wasn't there, but somebody was marketing just to white men, because who had the money, who made the decisions, and so so then, okay, how do we, how do we market to white men?
Speaker 2:Gee, some of them seem to have more money than others, some of them seem to live in a city and some of them live in a country, some of them have children, and you know, and so they made these buckets, but the buckets were still for white guys, and if you think back to 1950s and before, these were times of great conformity.
Speaker 2:So your average white guy might have behaved quite similar to your average not white guy or your other average white guy. They weren't thinking about the not white guys. But especially when you think about behaviors, you know, we think about all the TV shows and movies and school films that made it seem like anyone who didn't fit the following mold is some sort of society, sorry, degenerate. And so I think that demographics are left over from a time of high conformity where we just wanted to market and advertise to white guys, so we broke them up into these little buckets and then we assumed they all generally behave the same and shop the same and decide the same, because if you didn't, you were societies degenerate. And now we're in this world of intersectionality and diversity and disability and personal identities and fluidities, and I think a lot of companies aren't ready to speak that language.
Speaker 1:No, I think you're right. Tell me about some of the work you've done with different brands and, I guess, some of the challenges you've come up with.
Speaker 2:Yeah, again, my work isn't usually in the diversity space, but sometimes the conversations go there. But some of the work that I've done has been like, for example, I worked last year with a large European company. They want or at least they claimed they wanted to be more customer centric. They had a sense that they could be more customer centric, so I got brought in as a consultant to try to help with some of that. I was working there six months and also trying to help them improve their CX and UX practice, but along the way I befriended the lone DEI person.
Speaker 1:You're only allowed to have one in any company.
Speaker 2:I don't get it. I really don't. And you might be driving me towards a story. I think I might have told you when we talked before we were recording this, about how the company had this big all hands meeting to show the new advertising they were going to be launching and they had a billboard they were showing all of us. Now these were and they had a TV ad. These were not only approved, these had already gone out into the world and the billboard said it doesn't matter if you love men or women.
Speaker 2:And I pretty much fell out of my chair as you look like you were about to there and I said I think you just alienated the people you were trying to win over. And then their TV commercial. I think they felt they were doing some sort of hat tip to diversity because they had cast a black man as the main character in the commercial. Except that the main character in the commercial was kind of inept and couldn't get something done themselves and needed the help of a white woman. And I struggled with that one and I was like, are these really out there? Because does anybody understand that? It's about a lot more than did you put a black man in your commercial. It's about how did you? This is representation, like it's representation is more than look, this human exists. It's like well, how did we represent them? Well, you represented them as a fool and that.
Speaker 2:So I'm back channeling the DEI woman. I'm like what happened here? And she goes nobody came to me about these, nobody showed them to me. I've never seen these. And I was just like, okay, I've got more fights to wage around here and so, even when my work isn't directly about this stuff hey, I'm supposed to be here to help you be more customer centric and do more research and better understand your customers and build better products and services that serve them and make them happier. I'm usually ending up in this space. In fact, I had this at. I just sent my research report at my job I'm doing now, and I had a slide where I said I think your system is dead, naming your users.
Speaker 1:Right Now. Can you explain what dead naming is, Because this was the first time I'd learned it?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so, so, and again, I'm no expert in this, I'm not in the LGBTQIA plus community, other than I can only hope to be called in An ally but from my understanding, dead naming is when somebody accidentally or on purpose uses an incorrect name for a non-binary or transgender person, using what might have been a previous name or a name assigned at birth and not the name that the person uses now, and this system had some ones. I'll just call it their birth name, which is technically their dead name. They gave us a different name. Their email address matched the not preferred name and I've been trying to send out some emails saying this might not be okay. And it might not be okay for a large group than you imagine, because who might be other people who might want to use a different name than what is legal or on an ID or whatever you know.
Speaker 2:I hate that these, these names people don't want are on their IDs, but let's just say sometimes they're on your ID and you have to show them to people. Like the whole of Italy thinks my name is Deborah Gale because I have to go by what's on my passport and everywhere I go, even though I'm Debbie, everyone calls me Deborah Gale in Italy here, because that that is evidently my name, but like that's, that's a bit much, it's too formal. So I you know this could work against people who are immigrants, refugees, who want to assimilate more, who don't want to assimilate more, who want to shorten a name or use a nickname for whatever reason. So this is an example of, and in I think it was chapter 14 in my customers know you suck book, I interviewed someone who works in DEI and is transgender and talked about is it easy for me to change my name in your system?
Speaker 2:Is it easy for me to change my my name, my Slack name or chat name, my email address? If your system doesn't make that easy for me, I don't care how many rainbow flags you're waving and I don't care what. Whatever your promises were, your, your technology and your follow through on that isn't there. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And stufflike. Name is so closely aligned with identity and it is so important for people to be able to change their name, whether they're transgender and they need to change their name, whether they're an immigrant and want to pick a different name or they want to keep their original name or go back to an original name. I've learned that I'm married. I don't take my husband's name. I think that's a patriarchal construct that I seriously don't agree with.
Speaker 2:I didn't take my husband's name. By the way, Italy women do not take their husband's names generally, so my husband's mother uses what we would call her maiden name, but to her it's just her name.
Speaker 1:It's her name because it's her identity, right. So I get really pissed off when people call me using my husband's name yeah and so, yeah, I think, yeah, there's a lot of work to do in organisations. I want to learn more about your book. Oh sure, yeah, so why did you write it? What was important for you? Oh, customers know you suck. This looks like a really cool book.
Speaker 2:Yeah, sorry, it's being green screened out.
Speaker 1:Sorry, audio only people. Yes, I can see it.
Speaker 2:Well, how did it come about? Yeah, thanks for asking. I started writing it because I had written a workshop. I had been invited to deliver a workshop at an early 2022 conference and I was like, okay, I'll write a workshop called Transforming Toward Customer Centricity, because that's what I tend to help companies do and I'll help people do it through a groovy workshop. And so I said, oh, I'll write a companion book and we'll use some of the content from the workshop.
Speaker 2:I'm writing a book called Transforming Toward Customer Centricity and I was just writing and writing and writing and I don't totally remember the day, but there's so many negative stories and wacky stories in the book and links to wacky news articles and such, and I think I just sat here one day and I said, can I call this? Customers know you suck. Because I just feel like that is just the overarching vibe that I think what really struck me was companies aren't fooling us, but at least not for long. When we're doing business with a company that just sees us as a dollar sign or currency symbol or as a pawn they can push around the chessboard, we get it, we know it, we feel it, and they're not fooling us and we know they suck. And when we think about all the companies who we deal with day in, day out, week, month, whatever it might be, it's so hard to think of a company we love.
Speaker 2:The food sucked, the airline sucks, the hotel was terrible, the rental car was not what was promised. The phone app sucks. I'm uninstalling it. The website was ridiculous. I couldn't make my way through it. I couldn't order your thing, I couldn't find your thing, I couldn't pay your thing. It's just like. It just feels like it's nonstop.
Speaker 1:Yep, and I think it feels like it's gotten worse.
Speaker 2:I feel like it's gotten worse.
Speaker 1:I mean, I think the pandemic has contributed to that, but I'm like now is the time to get your customers back and love them.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:And we're not seeing it.
Speaker 2:I don't think so, and I think that the core of all of this to me is accountability. I rarely see companies holding people accountable anymore, and so if there's no accountability, there's no incentive to do or be better. I've seen people a single individual at a company get a half million dollar Euro insert, currency symbol, you know get a half million squiggles to blow on absolute BS. They made all kinds of bad decisions, the thing failed. They had nothing to show for it. That person was in no trouble at all. That person got a budget next time they asked. That person got no oversight. That person wasn't reprimanded, that person wasn't that. That person wasn't fired, that person was promoted. So it's like if we, if we don't have standards, if we don't care about quality, if we don't hold people accountable not okay, everyone makes mistakes but if we don't hold people accountable, especially for walking, marching us straight into risk and waste and breaking customer trust and doing unethical things, then it's clearly anything goes and we can, as the customers, we can tell you suck.
Speaker 1:It's the best name for the book. I wouldn't have bought the first name. Exactly this name, yeah, I think a lot of people would buy.
Speaker 2:I think it's definitely a universal vibe and so obviously the book talks about like how did we get here and then what do we do about it? So, you know, part of the book is how did we get here and what are all the warning signs we should have done something about, and then where can we take action? And so, yeah, and if people want, if people check out my customer experience, customer centricity YouTube channel, I've put the audio book up for free. It's in a playlist. So, yeah, so this is not, like you know, super book plug, cash grab. I would just love people to read it or listen to it. It is definitely not about the money I self published and so you know I get a few squiggles for it. But, yeah, I would just love people to check it out and and give it a try and see if they can make a difference where they work and leave a leave an appropriate Amazon review.
Speaker 1:I like it. I like it. Where can people find you and where can they buy your book?
Speaker 2:Yeah, the link to all of the book links would be CXCC dot. To slash CKYS, like customers know, you suck. That's my, and CXCC dot to is my URL shortener That'll dump you on a page that has all the links to Amazon and audible and buying the, the EPUB for me, and which is name your own price with a, you know, minimum price of one US dollar so you can get it cheap. Links to links to the YouTube channel with the book, the me doing the narration. If you can, if you've enjoyed this voice, please come listen to 16 and a half more hours of it so people can find it there. You can also catch up with me through my websites. You can start on delta CX dot com. It might send you over to some of my other websites.
Speaker 2:People can find me on LinkedIn. If you find me on LinkedIn, debbie Levy dispelled D e, b, b, I, e, l E, v I T T. If you do try to add me as a connection, please let me know. You heard me on this on this podcast because, honestly, I don't add people very much anymore, but those are some definitely key ways to track me down YouTube, linkedin, delta CX website and, of course, the book and and if you have people of questions, please reach out to me. You can probably tell I love to talk, I love to hear what's going on for you, I love to try to help and you know, who knows, maybe there's a project or relationship in there for us.
Speaker 1:Amazing. I wanted to finish with the question, I guess, about your book, because I think people who write books are super cool. How, how has the book changed? This sounds very grand, but how has it changed your life? Or how has it changed your business? Like what's been the impact?
Speaker 2:Hmm, I think the main impact for me would be the personal reward of the people who write to me and say hey, you know that thing. You said in chapter 18 that I should try. Well, I went into work and I tried it and it worked. Like that's for me when I start, you know, getting, as my husband would say, the sweaty eyes you know, I start tearing up a little bit and I go oh my God, I helped someone.
Speaker 2:So I would, I would say, because it's not my first book. It's it's my third and so, like you know, I've written some stuff before and I'll write more. But but to me the change is really the people who said I read this book and it didn't just inspire me. I, I tried the techniques and some or all of them are working at my job. And how can I thank you? And so that to me is worth everything.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I so relate to that. I sometimes get people telling me about an episode on this podcast and how it changed something for them. And it's the absolute best, because my podcast is a labor of love. I don't make money out of it. In fact, it costs me money. So when people say that, it's like, oh yeah.
Speaker 2:It's great. Totally same thing. I mean, I think I have 900 hours of YouTube videos up by now. Between the channels that I have, I've the Delta CX channel and the newer customer experience, customer centricity, very long name channel. And I do get messages from people sometimes who say I feel like I learned everything I know from you and and you helped me get a job. And then I'm like okay, I'm going to cry a little bit.
Speaker 1:Gonna get sweaty.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly. Someone came to my live show yesterday and they said you're so helpful, you're like a mom and you know I'm a mom to dogs and so I don't have a total frame of reference on that. One Catch earlier conversation about demographics, but it was, I assume that was meant as beautifully as it sounded and so like that to me is is the change. I'm not going to tell you like Whoa, I now have a squillion dollar business. You know that that would be great, but the personal reward of knowing that I'm helping people, that's. That's where it is for me.
Speaker 1:Nice. Thank you so much for coming and speaking with me, debbie, it's been such a delight.
Speaker 2:Back at you. Thank you again for our previous conversation and the actual recorded one, and and good luck to everybody listening. I hope that we can keep fighting the fight and help companies care more about humans. Yeah.