Crafting the Customer Experience For People Not Like You: How to Delight and Engage the Customers Your Competitors Don't Understand

WHY I DISLIKE THE “D” WORD

This is a good place for me to define what I mean by “diverse” customers. I’m not a big fan of the word diversity these days, for two reasons: First, I think many people have what I call diversity fatigue. They’re tired of hearing about how important diversity is. They’ve heard the “diversity lecture” at work for years now and are burned out on it. They see or hear the word and automatically tune out. It’s not that they don’t respect different cultures, races, ethnicities, and norms; it’s just that there has been so much focus on diversity that people are tired of the subject, even though it’s an important one.

The second reason I tend to shy away from using the word diversity is that, in my experience, most people automatically default to thinking of diversity in terms of racial and ethnic differences. And although that’s very important and we’ll tackle customer service for some key racial and ethnic groups in this book, I don’t think that even begins to cover the breadth of meaning of the word diversity.