A lot of publicity has been focused on racial bias and prejudice following an incident at a Philadelphia Starbucks recently. In that incident, a pair of African-American men were arrested after sitting in a Starbucks restaurant while waiting for a meeting to begin.
A pair of university professors have published an article in The New York Times that indicates how far companies, and individuals, still have to go in being racially sensitive when dealing with customers and consumers.
The researchers cited a study where they used 12 fictitious email accounts to send messages to 6,000 hotels looking for restaurant recommendations. The names of the senders of the messages were varied to reflect different ethnicities, genders, and races.
From the researchers:
Overall, hotel employees were significantly more likely to respond to inquiries from people who had typically white names than from those who had typically black and Asian names. But racial bias did not end there. Discrimination also happened in many subtle ways.
Hotel employees provided 20% more restaurant recommendations to white than to black or Asian people. Employees’ politeness also varied by race. When responding to white people, employees were more likely to address them by name and to end their emails with a complimentary close (e.g., “Best,” “Sincerely”) than they were when responding to black or Asian people. And employees were more likely to go “above and beyond” in their service: They were three times as likely to provide extra information — even when the initial inquiry was just about restaurants — to white than to black or Asian people.
For collection agencies, this is an interesting concept to discuss inside of an office. How are agents dealing with individuals of different races or genders? What preconceived notions are being implanted in an agent’s head after they see the name of an individual before a call is made? How are they varying their tone of voice or their word choices, depending on the type of person they are contacting? One of the conclusions made by the researchers is that servicer workers do not see every person as a potential customer.
Do your collectors see every individual as a potential payment?
