Hotels, restaurants, and other businesses in the service industry often thrive or die depending on whether they provide exemplary customer service, but new research shows that the color of a customer’s skin can determine whether the person receives good service—or any attention at all, for that matter.
Preliminary results from a series of studies of hotel concierge interactions show that front-line service workers often treat customers inequitably, providing better assistance to white customers than Black and Asian customers. Alexandra C. Feldberg, assistant professor of business administration at Harvard Business School, and Tami Kim, assistant professor at University of Virginia-Darden, conducted the research.
The findings come at a time when many companies are taking a hard look at whether their interactions with customers are equitable. Companies are trying to avoid incidents such as the time a Starbucks manager called police to arrest two Black men for loitering, though they were merely waiting for an acquaintance.
“ There are a lot of very negative consequences,” says Feldberg. “At one basic level, companies are not optimizing the experience of all of their customers. In terms of business outcomes, they're not developing the best customer relationships they could.”
Companies that fix disparities in their service delivery are likely to boost customer satisfaction and loyalty, say Feldberg and Kim in the manuscript they’re preparing, which will be called “Combating Discrimination in Customer Service with Foregrounding Interventions.”
White customers receive preferential treatment
In one of three studies conducted between 2016 and 2020, Feldberg and Kim contacted concierges in nearly 6,000 hotels across the United States using fictional email accounts.
Names used on the accounts were chosen to suggest a sender’s gender, race, and education. Examples include LaToya Washington, which was meant to signal a Black sender, Brad Anderson to indicate a white sender, and Mei Chen to represent an Asian sender. Credentials, such as MD or Ph.D., accompanied some names to indicate education levels.
In their emails, the researchers asked the same question: “Do you have local restaurant recommendations?”
It wasn't just whether people responded to the requests that we sent; it’s that the quality of the information that people received varied.
After analyzing responses, the researchers observed a pattern: Hotel employees were more likely to respond to messages that seemed to come from a White sender than those from a Black or Asian sender. Hotel representatives responded to about 43 percent of messages coming from a stereotypically white name, versus 40 percent from a stereotypically Black name, and 36 percent from a stereotypically Asian name.
“We found discrimination in response rates on the basis of race,” says Feldberg. “But what is particularly striking is that it wasn't just whether people responded to the requests that we sent; it’s that the quality of the information that people received varied.”
Concierges provide less information to some customers
Testing each of the return emails for responsiveness, helpfulness, and rapport, the researchers counted the number of restaurants recommended, calculated the number of characters in an email, and tracked whether a hotel concierge attempted to pass the buck by referring the email-sender elsewhere.
_“_Theoretically, there should be no difference in the number of restaurants that people recommend to Mei Chen or Brad Anderson,” says Feldberg. “But what we found is that Mei was told about fewer restaurants than Brad. In other words, there is a disparity in information that people are given, and you can imagine how this would be impactful across a variety of different contexts.”
They also saw that other fundamental aspects of customer service, such as courteousness and politeness, vary according to a customer’s perceived race.
Even if they are responding to everyone, it doesn't mean that everyone is getting treated equally.
For example, Feldberg and Kim discovered that workers were more likely to address people by their first name or with an honorific title, such as Ms. or Dr., when they had a white name. Customers who sounded white were called by name 74 percent of the time, compared to 61 percent of customers assumed to be Black and 57 percent who were presumably Asian.
The data indicates that sometimes managers need to dig a little deeper to determine whether their workers are treating customers equally, the researchers say.
“If hotel managers were only checking response rates, they wouldn’t see any differences in how their service representatives respond to people's emails,” notes Kim. “Then they might think, ‘Oh, my service representatives are doing great. There's nothing to improve here.’ But what our results are showing is that we need to go beyond that because, even if they are responding to everyone, it doesn't mean that everyone is getting treated equally.”
Advice for detecting bias
Discrimination can emerge in subtle ways, and employees may not even realize when underlying biases are creeping into their interactions with customers. Feldberg and Kim have a few suggestions to help organizations identify whether bias is present and reverse the pattern:
Conduct surveys. Reach out to customers from a variety of backgrounds to better understand their experience. Among the questions to ask: How have customers perceived their treatment? Have they received above-and-beyond service and how do they think their experiences compare to those of other customers?
Evaluate existing data. Do service representatives address all customers by first name or honorific titles? Do they end all messages with “best” or other polite language? How are perks, like hotel upgrades and free drinks, distributed?
Run experiments. Conduct email tests similar to the ones Feldberg and Kim used in their studies. Gauge how employees respond to different cultural and socioeconomic cues.
While standardized scripts, automation, and training that emphasizes cultural awareness can go a long way in preventing bias, managers must set the right tone and hold their teams accountable. Managers must also realize, the researchers say, that such bias is often subtle, unconscious, and not deliberate—and therefore not always easy to eliminate.
“ There’s not one silver bullet,” says Feldberg. “In reality, companies need to approach these issues from multiple angles and be persistent in and consistently monitor their efforts.”
Read more about Feldberg’s and Kim’s research in “Fighting Bias on the Front Lines.”
[Image: iStockphoto/AnnaStills]