By members of the CXPA Inclusive CX Committee
October is Global Diversity Awareness Month, and in the United States it is also National Disability Employment Awareness Month. For customer experience professionals, it is a chance to talk about what we know best: how experiences get designed, and who they quietly leave behind.
This month, members of CXPA's Inclusive CX Committee answered a set of reflective prompts. Each prompt asked for a real story rather than a principle — a specific journey, a specific customer, a specific thing that was missed and then fixed.
The responses below come from fintech, banking, credit unions, hospitality, quick-service restaurants and destination tourism, across several countries. Different settings, same lesson: when an experience is built around one assumed customer, everyone else pays for it, and so does the business.
Think about a customer journey you have designed, inherited, or simply used yourself. Who did it assume the customer was — and who did that assumption leave out?
I worked with a crypto fintech whose team was young — and it showed in everything they built.
The onboarding, the interface, the language, the support model — all designed for a customer who was digitally fluent, comfortable with self-service, and happy to figure things out alone. For that customer, the experience was great.
But here's what the assumption missed. Plenty of the people interested in crypto weren't the young, tech-native user the journey was built for. Gen X and baby boomers were showing up too — often with real capital to invest and genuine intent to participate — and they hit an experience that quietly assumed they were someone else. No plain-language explanation. No easy path to a human. A design built on the premise that if you needed help, you weren't the target user.
So the assumption did two things at once. It excluded people who wanted in — and it left money on the table. That older cohort may not have been the biggest group, but it was a real one, often with the deepest pockets, and the journey was designed to lose it.
Inclusive design isn't only about fairness, though it is that. When your product can genuinely serve every generation, building only for the youngest, most tech-savvy version of your customer isn't focus — it's leaving revenue behind.
Where in your own journeys does an assumption about who your customer is quietly cost you the customers you actually have?
Several years ago, I had the privilege of working with a couple on an idea for a website they were considering. Their story was inspiring and also infuriating.
As a couple, travel was always important to them. The wife developed MS and, over time, became a wheelchair user. They didn't want this to stop them from traveling, so they set out to travel in an accessible way. They quickly learned that just because something was accessible by building code didn't mean it was accessible in practice. Sinks with no room to wheel a chair underneath. Bathroom mirrors too high to use. "Roll-in" showers that didn't actually let a chair roll in, because there was still a small lip.
Listening to their story made me want to burn the whole hotel industry to the ground. Yet here they were, approaching the problem with grace, wanting to create a site where wheelchair users could share reviews to find the rooms that actually worked.
During Global Diversity Awareness Month, I look back on this story as the moment that solidified it for me: true accessibility means more than complying with the rules as written. The more you include users with different needs, the more of a difference you can make.
Where in your own customer experience are you meeting the standard on paper but missing it in practice, and whose voice would you need to hear to find out?
Open your most recent Voice of the Customer report. Whose voices are missing from it — and what about the way you listen kept them out?
When I worked as a Member Experience Manager at a credit union, one of our challenges was making sure the feedback we collected reflected the different members we were trying to serve.
Our membership tended to be older, and we heard quite a bit from those members. Some were also experiencing challenges as we encouraged greater use of online banking. At the same time, we were trying to attract younger members, with a more modern digital experience as part of that strategy — but we weren't hearing from younger members nearly as much.
That experience left me with a question I still think about: how do we really know whose voice is missing?
Demographic data such as age, gender or ethnicity can help us understand who we're hearing from, but is that enough? Depending on the experience, things like digital confidence, accessibility needs, language or preferred channel may be just as relevant. Yet the more information we ask customers to provide, the more we have to consider privacy, trust and whether customers are comfortable sharing it.
From a business perspective, this mattered. We were investing in digital banking partly to attract younger members while also encouraging existing members to adopt it. If we weren't hearing enough from the members we wanted to attract, were we making the right digital investments? And if we didn't understand the challenges our existing members faced, were we increasing their effort — and our cost to serve them?
Maybe inclusive VoC isn't about trying to hear from everybody. Perhaps it's about understanding who we are hearing from, who we may be missing, and whether those missing voices could change the decisions we're making.
How do we determine what customer data we actually need to know whether we're listening inclusively?
During my time leading a destination tourism authority, I learned that some of the most valuable visitor feedback never appeared in a formal report. It often surfaced through conversations with taxi operators, vendors, hotel employees and other frontline partners who interacted with visitors throughout their journeys.
Visitors do not always report a problem directly to the organization responsible for it. They may mention it casually to a taxi driver, ask a vendor for help, or simply adjust their expectations and leave without completing a survey.
Traditional visitor surveys can also favor travelers who have the time, language ability, confidence and digital access to respond. The voices easiest to collect are not always the voices we most need to hear.
Destinations must therefore listen beyond the survey, combining direct visitor feedback with reviews, complaints, behavioral data and frontline insight. Together, these signals can reveal where the journey breaks down, who may be underserved, and which destination partner must take responsibility for improvement.
Non-response is data too. We should not assume that silence means satisfaction. Sometimes it means our listening methods were not designed to reach everyone.
Whose voice might be missing from your customer data — and where else could you listen for it?
What is one small, repeatable practice that makes inclusive design a habit on your team rather than a project with an end date?
One practice I would make standard in every Voice of the Customer programme is to ensure that customers with accessibility needs are deliberately represented in the survey sample, rather than included only by chance.
Their feedback should also be captured in the way that is most convenient and accessible to them — whether through an accessible digital survey, assisted telephone feedback or another suitable channel.
I would make this a mandatory survey-design checkpoint: "Have we heard from customers whose experience may be different from the majority?"
Frontline employees, contact-centre teams, and colleagues who have accessibility needs or regularly support customers who do should also be involved when the findings are reviewed. They often see barriers that headline NPS or CSAT scores do not reveal.
One lesson: simply making a survey available does not guarantee representation. If participation depends entirely on the standard survey channel, some voices will remain unheard.
Making accessibility representation a standard requirement helps uncover hidden friction, improve journey design, reduce avoidable complaints and rework, and ensure inclusive listening becomes part of normal CX practice rather than a separate initiative.
If you looked at who actually responded to your last Voice of the Customer survey, could you say with confidence that customers with accessibility needs were in that sample, or would you just be assuming they were?
You have ninety seconds with an executive who treats inclusive CX as a nice-to-have. What do you say — without leaning on "it is the right thing to do"?
If I had ninety seconds with an executive who viewed inclusive CX as a nice-to-have, I would ask: What is it costing us when a journey works for the average customer but creates extra effort for others?
In one banking journey, customers had to visit a physical branch to complete an End-of-Service Benefit (EOSB) request. For a customer with a physical disability, that could mean significantly more effort, dependence on others, and delay.
We redesigned the journey so customers could submit requests digitally, eliminating the need for a branch visit.
The business benefits were clear: less manual handling, fewer employee touchpoints, reduced rework, lower cost-to-serve and faster turnaround times.
Inclusive CX is not only about doing the right thing. It is also about removing friction that creates avoidable cost for both customers and the organisation.
When you make the business case for a journey redesign, do you count the extra effort it takes for customers who don’t fit the average?
Under my leadership, a tourism destination was rebranded around a stronger visitor promise. That experience reinforced an important lesson: a brand promise cannot be delivered through marketing alone. It must be experienced consistently across every touchpoint.
A difficult booking process, unclear arrival instructions, inaccessible transportation, or information available through only one channel does not remain an isolated problem. It creates additional calls, complaints, rework and frustration. It can also lead to abandonment, negative reviews, lost loyalty and damage to the destination's reputation.
I would ask the executive to examine three things:
Destination improvement cannot focus only on hotels, attractions or marketing. Taxi operators, vendors, residents, frontline employees and other local partners all influence whether the visitor promise is fulfilled. When their perspectives are excluded from planning and decision-making, destinations overlook valuable insight.
Inclusive CX expands the reachable market, reduces avoidable effort, strengthens the brand promise, and creates greater value for visitors, residents and local businesses. It is part of sustainable destination strategy and measurable performance — not a separate initiative or a nice-to-have.
Which business measure would make the strongest case for inclusive CX in your organization?
Global Diversity Awareness Month is a good reminder of something simple: diversity is not a slogan. It is a business reality. Employees are different. Investors are different. Customers are different. They come from different backgrounds, cultures, languages, abilities, experiences and expectations.
In 2019, I had a discussion with the CEO of a large quick-service restaurant business in Riyadh about customer experience. One of my recommendations was to upgrade the capabilities of frontline employees — especially their interpersonal skills and their ability to communicate in English.
My point was not that every employee needed perfect English. The goal was practical: if a customer did not speak Arabic, the employee should still be able to understand what they needed, answer basic questions, explain the menu, support an order, and make the interaction easy and welcoming.
At the time, I believed this would become increasingly important as Saudi Arabia welcomed more international visitors, residents and business travelers. A few months ago, I met the same CEO again. He told me I was right in 2019 about upgrading the capabilities of their frontline employees. That stayed with me.
For me, inclusive CX is about understanding how your customer base is changing and making sure your frontline team can serve more of the people walking through the door.
Are your frontline teams ready to serve the diversity of customers you have today — and the customers you expect tomorrow?
Across these stories, the pattern is consistent. Exclusion rarely comes from bad intent. It comes from defaults: a journey built for the youngest user, a hotel room that meets code but not reality, a survey that only reaches people with the time and confidence to answer, a process that assumes everyone can get to a branch.
The fixes are just as concrete. Sample deliberately. Listen beyond the survey. Bring frontline colleagues into the room. Measure the extra effort some customers carry and put a number on what it costs. As these members show, inclusive CX is not a side project — it is how you reach more customers, reduce avoidable costs and keep the promises your brand makes.
Global Diversity Awareness Month is a good moment to start, but the goal is to make this instinct rather than initiative. Pick one journey this month and ask: who breaks here?
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