Natalie Hausia-Haugen on the crucial link between DEI and customer experience, centering emerging majorities and advocating for authentic inclusion.
Natalie Hausia-Haugen (she/her) is the Head of Customer Experience DEI with Amazon Grocery. She has 25 years of experience in social justice, organizational effectiveness, and retail strategy. With 17 years leading in Fortune 100 brands like Target, Nike, and Amazon, Natalie's work often demonstrates the topline benefits of merging business and talent processes and centering the marginalized. She believes her role as DEI leader is less about telling business leaders what to do, and more about making sure they are crystal clear about the risks and benefits of their decisions.
Dinal: Your work interestingly sits at the intersection of DEI and customer experience. How does an organization's commitment to DEI impact the customer experience? What examples or case studies can you share that help highlight this correlation?
Natalie: DEI and customer service are the same thing. As long as profit, retention, and market share are your goals, providing excellent customer service means creating ways for your customers to feel seen, served, and connected to your brand, which are the results of an inclusive environment. And while we can easily think of examples to create such results –like products for different skin tones, signing for low vision, or having someone available to translate – it is difficult to identify opportunities to do so if you’re not actively tuned in to dimensions of diversity. It’s one thing to be inclusive to needs that are familiar to us. It is another to seek out, learn about, and change for dimensions of diversity you/your team could easily miss or disregard because it’s not part of your lived experience, or common to the dominant culture. (An important note here is that dominant culture refers to the one with political and financial advantage, not necessarily the biggest in size).
“You’re not going to notice when things are broken if they work for you. And if things aren’t broken, you don’t try to fix them.”
Said more simply, you’re not going to notice when things are broken if they work for you. And if things aren’t broken, you don’t try to fix them. This is the state I think most companies are in – in cruise control customer service based on the same criteria they’ve been using (and often prefer themselves).
An example of the impact a commitment to DEI has on customer service can be found in U.S. physical retailers as they’re making space for, even centering, customers from historically marginalized groups. The beauty industry has modeled the way, giving shelf space, then signage, promotional space, and entire sections to customers from BIPOC and LGBTQ+ communities and profiting as a result. Fenty, the Body Shop, Sephora, and Allure magazine are great examples of being at the front of a movement, by centering the “emerging majority” while they are emerging (and while the rest of the industry is waiting for them to assimilate). In doing so, these beauty companies busted bias-based myths about the profitability of centering customers outside the conventional norm. Indeed, industries stretching from beauty, baby, and fashion to travel, mental health, and real estate are finding that customers will bring their money and loyalty to brands where they are represented and better-served.
Dinal: For leaders early on in their journey, what challenges or barriers might they face when striving to create a more diverse and inclusive customer experience? How can these challenges be effectively addressed?
Natalie: In the early phases of DEI work with an organization, you’ll often have leaders expressing a high degree of support and excitement for DEI. This support might even be the reason there is a DEI role or initiative in the first place. In these situations, DEI practitioners come onto the scene encouraged by the ready support, eager to figure out what to do, only to find out leadership actually needs more work understanding the why; why it’s not as quick, simple, or cheap as they were thinking, based on their understanding of DEI, which often features one or two-step actions to launch a new program or process, like diversity training, hiring slates, and ERGs.
“The whole reason DEI exists is to help shift and change systems – so naturally discomfort and doubt will present.”
So often, DEI practitioners find that leadership support and excitement quickly dampen once you introduce other steps required for meaningful change, like behind the scenes work of research, stakeholder alignment, and systems mapping, or ongoing efforts required for consistent process execution, process improvement, and holding people accountable. At this point, you’re back in the position of teaching, discovering, and proving why DEI is worth investing in to do it right. I’m not saying DEI practitioners should not be prepared to explain the costs, benefits, and reasons for all the parts of their plan, or that we shouldn’t expect challenges or questions. The whole reason DEI exists is to help shift and change systems – so naturally discomfort and doubt will present. What I am saying is that when it comes to DEI, there’s a big difference of time, investment, and leadership support required to do DEI things versus make DEI change. The barrier almost all DEI practitioners face at least once is realizing when you thought you were hired to do one, but are expected to do the other. At this point, you have to figure out if or how to pivot.
Below I offer a few coaching points to help mitigate this challenge.
Coaching point 1: ASAP, figure out what you’re working with in terms of understanding, readiness, and cultural humility amongst key stakeholders and change makers. Do your research on them. Identify them, meet with them, and get deeper into the root of their interest or support for the work.
Coaching point 2: Before or soon after you get into role, meet with partners from enabling functions like communications, legal, PR, human resources, training and development, and data/analytics. Meaningful DEI progress requires integration with these functions. Meet with these teams to learn how they think about DEI, how they think about your role vs. their role in the work, and how they part with business teams. These insights will help better understand the systems you’re working within, including their readiness and level of acumen.
Coaching point 3: which should actually come first and be repeated over time: Get clear about what you need to be true to feel fulfilled and successful in DEI work, at this point in your personal and professional life. This has an impact on what you’ll consider challenges and how or if you’ll respond.
Dinal: What does great look like in this space and how do you measure success?
Natalie: I have so many answers for this. My shortest answer for this is that, if you want me to create an inclusive customer experience, first you have to help me understand who we are centering vs. who are we including. There’s a difference.
The longer, more systemic answer is first things first, great means starting with a business strategy that is clear about who you want your customers to be (which is not always the same as who your customers are today). At a basic business level, the better you understand your customers, the better you can design for, connect with, and retain them. If you want to elevate your results by applying DEI strategy, you need to know who you’re centering vs. who you’re including.
One way to measure success in terms of customer clarity is by checking the consistency of criteria used by teams across your organization to design, test, and assess any part of a customer-facing component. For example, your design team should be working from the same general customer criteria as your marketing team, customer service team, or trade area team. A good first step is making sure you have such criteria in the first place. So often, I find organizations are operating from an assumption that everyone has the same understanding of who their customers are- not only demographics, but also preferences, needs, and goals. In other cases, the assumption might be right, but only at the very highest level (i.e., Nike might say they’re customers are people who are athletes), but not at the degree to which meaningful design, testing, or innovation can happen (i.e., amongst these athlete-customers are a range of goals ranging from recreational to professional, and traits ranging from age and physical ability).
As a CX-DEI professional, I get excited about more focused customer criteria because that’s when we start to challenge and improve on default or biased customer ideas, and new levels of customer service and innovation begin.
Imagine a grocer saying, “One of the customer groups we are centering is the immigrant diaspora, including 1st generation immigrants.” Now, a team focused on customer experience is also thinking about language, cultural differences in quality expectations or shopping behaviors, ingredient substitutions, item sizes, etc. Imagine the ideas and solutions that would flow, inevitably improving the experience for all customers. Imagine the loyalty and retention you create through such an experience compared to other grocers where this customer group is forced to translate, misunderstand, and settle. Great means creating a customer experience in which customers feel safe. Although most customers wouldn’t explain it to you using the word, “safe,” when it comes to spending hard earned money, time, and energy, you’re more willing to do it somewhere you have trust. Trust is rooted in vulnerability, safety, and belonging.