Inclusive by Design: Creating Better CX Outcomes for Everyone with Stine Marsal
Episode #901 Show Notes:
Clare
Welcome to this special edition of the Inspiring Women in CX podcast! A series dedicated to real-talk conversations between women in customer experience and technology.
This season, we’re spotlighting the winners of the Inspiring Women in CX Awards 2025 – trailblazing women transforming customer and employee experience around the globe. Spanning industries, regions, and roles, their stories are powerful proof that when women lead, transformational change happens. You’ll hear firsthand as they share their journeys, insights, and vision for the future of CX.
I’m your host, Clare Muscutt, and today we’re celebrating our Inclusion Award winner and her groundbreaking work making customer experience more equitable, accessible, and human-centred. With a sociology and CX strategy background, she’s driven inclusive initiatives at Tivoli Gardens and Copenhagen Airport, founded InklusioNordic to power community-led learning, and helps organisations turn overlooked barriers into real business impact.
Allow me to introduce you to today’s inspiring guest, Stine Marsal!
Clare
Hey, Stine!
Stine
Hello!
Clare
Welcome to the Inspiring Women in CX Award Winners podcast. How are you doing today?
Stine
I am doing good. I'm in good company.
Clare
Amazing, I love you too. So let's start with a huge congratulations, Stine. How did it feel to win the Women in CX Inclusion Award this year?
Stine
It felt surprising and amazing. Surprising because I'm in a really small country, and who sees me and who cares about what I do? That's kind of the feeling, so yeah, surprising and amazing.
Clare
Well, that's too much self-deprecation for an award-winner's podcast. It's incredible what you're doing. I've obviously been following your journey for some time now, and seeing you open your latest community with InklusioNordic is absolutely incredible. So, please, take more credit for this award. Yes, Denmark might be a small country, but you're having a global impact, lady.
Stine
I know, I will try.
Clare
So, obviously, you're now on our podcast, inspiring other women, but who inspires you personally, and why?
Stine
It's going to sound a little cheesy, maybe, but honestly, what inspires me has been the people that I've interviewed over the past years about the barriers they experience in customer experience. And I've also done interviews on employee experience. So I've interviewed people with a variety of different types of disabilities, LGBT+ people, people who have a different ethnic background, etc, about what barriers they encounter in customer and employee experiences.
Those stories have just been super inspirational and have also kind of twisted my CX career. Because I went from probably working in CX in the very traditional sense to realising the business potential in trying to design for the edges. Because if you can remove friction for the customers who feel the most friction, you make your experience much smoother for everybody. To try and really boil it down, that's kind of the epiphany that I've kept having across all of those different types of conversations. So yeah, it's customers and employees that have inspired me the most.
Clare
I love that. The level of insight you've been able to glean from doing those interviews has been hugely important. And I'm sure we'll talk more about that as we go on. So, thinking about your LinkedIn announcement post that you shared when you won the award, dedicating the win to customers who are never considered in the standard solution. You said, “The ones who have to adjust their voice, their words, their behaviours, just to get the same service that everybody else receives, to those who are misunderstood by self-service systems, core centre or frontline, not because they're difficult, but because the experience was never designed with them in mind.” Can you tell us a bit more about why you made that specific dedication?
Stine
I think way too many companies are designing like they'll work with standard personas with differences, right? But never really looking beyond that. And I think from a business perspective, if you can design your solutions so that it's good for those who encounter most friction, it'll, like I just said, improve for everybody. So that's the one thing. But the flip side is, if we then take not the business perspective, but the customer perspective, is that I have heard so many…So the first time I did these types of interviews was when I was with the Copenhagen airport. I was the Service Excellence Director, and I was developing this disability awareness course. So I mapped the customer experience seen from that perspective. And there wasn't one person that I interviewed who didn't talk about one or another barrier, that would either make them choose not to fly or not to buy stuff in the airport because parts of the experience were too stressful, right?
I've heard the same type of story across all sectors. I've interviewed people about their experience with insurance companies, where maybe you're dyslexic, “I don't understand what they write to me.” And I have to say, a lot of insurance companies, I have a master's degree in sociology and an IQ that is well above the average. And I don't always understand the letters I get from my insurance company. So, if you could design that communication to target someone who needs text to be simple and who needs to get straight to the point and not legalised language, etc. If you can twist your mind to design with that, you create better accessibility for your customers, a better service. And maybe you'll even catch more customers, if that makes sense.
Clare
Well, I say plain English, obviously plain Danish in your sense, but plain English is good for everybody, right? And there's been so much research about, the simpler something is to understand, the better the response from the customer, no matter if they've got dyslexia or not. So if you write something for someone who's dyslexic, you're going to make it easier for everybody to understand. I was thinking about my experience in my Sainsbury's days. I was in charge of customer experience design. And initially, we started with, I think just a set of assumptions that nobody had any barriers.
Stine
Yeah.
Clare
So we created this whole kind of CX design program in mind with personas, all the usual stuff. And then I built this inclusive design toolkit that we layered on top of our standard “normie” one. So we were able to think about visual impairment – and there's a massive scale – so, from being completely blind through to you're out shopping and you've just forgotten your reading glasses.
Stine
Exactly, like me, with the 50-year-old eyes.
Clare
That's it, exactly. Or mobility; somebody who's significantly physically disabled through to women when they're pregnant, actually, they begin to really struggle with mobility, the later the stages they get into it. So for me, it really struck a chord around, well, if you broke your leg, or I don't know, like you're temporarily experiencing a disability.
Stine
Yeah, or chronic pain.
Clare
Yeah. It really kind of hit home being able to talk to our stakeholders about inclusion from that perspective that, if you can design for everybody, then no matter what your customers go through at any stage in their life, because the other reality was this ageing population thing. So people, as they age, increasingly experience more of these barriers and because of the ageing population across the world. We're going to need to design more inclusive experiences to keep up with the pace of the ageing population as well. Yeah, it's really great to see, just like brilliant examples like yours, Stine, of how you're bringing this to life.
Stine
And I think if I can just put an extra little twist on what I said, I think the concept of doing universal design for some feels foreign. And that's why I just like to frame it in a way where you think about which customers would have the hardest time going through this challenge, map their barriers, because then you're already a step closer to universal design. And the other thing that I think is important is that with AI, you know…I don't know how to say that in English, like rolling out over everything. There are a lot of companies that then say, "How can we use this technology to be more effective, be more something?" But how about “How can we use this technology to make our company more accessible to more?” So yeah, you can have a chat button, you can have this, and you can have that. However, if you're a company that, for instance, deliberately chooses not to have a phone number, an email, or a chat option, it's not just about preferences. Sometimes people can have significant barriers to calling a stranger, or they can have significant barriers to writing. When you don't provide a variety of channels to contact you, you are essentially shutting some people out, for whom it isn't just a preference, but a need, in order to actually contact you, ask you questions, or buy from you.
Clare
I remember a similar situation back in my supermarket days, and they wanted to phase out telephone ordering for online groceries. But when they looked at who was actually using it, it was elderly people who weren't digitally capable. So if they were to remove that part of the service altogether, they wouldn't be able to get their groceries. They couldn't come into the stores anymore because of significant physical impairments.
But being proactive about inclusion is the difference, isn't it? Rather than making a decision and then seeing the knock-on impact and excluding a whole load of customers, being able to intentionally design for everybody means you've got the greatest access to the widest customer base, no matter what, haven't you? So, thinking about how your work has helped make customer experience more inclusive. We've heard some great examples already today, but what drives your commitment to equity and representation, and what progress would you like to see happening across the industry next?
Stine
What drives me is...when I did those interviews I talked about, for Copenhagen Airport, which was about how [people] with different types of disabilities, visible and invisible, experienced that customer journey. Something that struck a chord that went across all of those was the burden of having to explain yourself because you're different and you behave or you have needs in a way that people don't expect. That struck a chord with me personally, and it's a different subject, but being LGBT+, I'm married to a woman. Having to explain yourself and the burden of experiencing that. Also, sometimes in customer experiences, a waiter assumed that my wife was my Mum even though she's just four years older than me. It's probably not business critical, but it did make us not want to get dessert that day, you know? So it struck a chord with me in a personal way, that there is something that goes…like the ‘othering’ that goes across anybody who is minoritised, is pretty much the same.
I've recently done interviews with neurodivergent professionals, with professionals who have a different ethnic background and with people who are neurodivergent. And there are threads that go across the employee experience and the customer experience. So it's not like you have to design your experience for 18 different parameters, and how can we serve everyone if we have to specialise? But the one thing I think that I've found and that I just think is such an important point is that, for instance, let's take an example. If you can design an experience that doesn't give cognitive overload to neurodivergent [people] who often experience cognitive overload – I have ADHD myself.
Clare
Me too.
Stine
Yeah. And so if you can design an experience that makes me go through it without stress, the days when somebody else goes through stress – it can be because of grief, divorce, losing a job, dealing with a difficult diagnosis you just learned about – your cognitive overload is also closer to kind of the top. Right? So your ability to navigate with ease or understand things that aren't maybe set up in a logical order disappears a little bit when you're overloaded. If I can get a stress-free experience any day, and honestly, I think that's why I've been such a great customer experience manager, is because the bumps that are small for other people, they feel larger for me, so I spot them. If you can smooth them out for me, you smooth them out for everybody. And the same in employee experience. If your employee experience can be stress-free for those coming to work every day with elevated stress levels, because the world wasn't designed for our brains, on any day where everybody else goes through something that's difficult, it can even just be you just gave birth and you're not sleeping so much, that those accommodations become enablers, not just for us, but for anybody, right?
Clare
Yeah. And I suppose that's just one top tip, isn't it? If you were to look at your customer journey, take those lenses of different disabilities. That neurodivergent one's a great example. Listen to the voices of customers who are different. There are going to be so many opportunities to improve your customer experience that you might not have spotted.
Stine
Yeah, it's a great design principle.
Clare
It is a great design principle, but think that's the point. Inclusive design has to be intentional, and you need those principles to be able to design better. But being able to…where we would start with this could be, let's look at our customer journey through the lenses of the different disabilities. Could it be a great starting point for how we could make it better?
So the judges were particularly impressed by the way that you link inclusion to positive business outcomes for companies that take the time to learn about hidden disabilities. “This is a very clever way to engage others”, they said, and to show them how it will benefit the company rather than just saying, 'embracing DEI is the right thing to do for society.' And this is really close to my heart as well, because I'm always getting challenged with, “Why women in CX, why women in leadership, why women in tech, why is it so important?” There's a clear demonstrable value that has been proven, that if you have greater diversity in your leadership, in your teams, the business outcomes are clear. But can you tell us a bit more about how you do that and how much of a difference it's made?
Stine
I'm going to link back to the interviews I did for the airport, right? So someone said to me in an interview, "I would never go and buy a cup of coffee because I have a deaf accent. Being treated like I'm an idiot every time I open my mouth, because I sound different, has created such huge anxiety for me. So I skip it.” And like I said before, there wasn't one of the people I interviewed who didn't, in one shape or form, say I don't fly or I don't buy.
Obviously that you can transfer to many other business-to-consumer businesses, right? And then I started. At the time, I felt I had my career under control, and the airport won great prizes for parts of what I was involved in. So, I felt I was really good at delivering business results from designing great customer experiences. And then I realised, maybe not so much, but I was still feeling quite full of myself because ‘it's not that many’. And then I spoke with a knowledge centre on disabilities, which is like, “Well, one in four has a hidden disability.” One in four. Okay. So it's not all of them that might have accommodation needs or might need us to think about things differently, to have a great journey. Right. So if we're just conservative and say, if we could get 25% of the 25% to buy a £3 coffee – and now it's probably more expensive – if we could get 25% of the 25% to just buy that £3 coffee because we reduced some friction in the journey. That's a lot of money when you have 30 million passengers per year. That's a lot of money.
And you can flip it around and say if you have a call centre, if your customer experience is not where people are walking through your spaces, so let's take an insurance company. How many repeat calls do you get because your communication isn't clear or because somebody has a hard time maybe voicing what they need over the phone, or isn't able to write to you in the chatbot or whatever? You can think of it in that way, where if you attune yourself to these needs and tendencies, then you will see increased efficiency, and you will see lower levels of frustration. If you have frontline employees, that amounts to conflicts, which amounts to dissatisfied employees who are not being retained and leave. So there's a whole…plethora, do you say that in English?
Clare
Yeah, plethora. I love that word. That's a great word.
Stine
A plethora of different types of benefits. Now to say like, "Oh, there's this and that specific benefit", would be arrogant of me because I would have to know your business and what it is and where the exact barriers are, right? But if you start to look at this, you will see so many different types of benefits apart from just ‘we're doing the right thing.’ Yes, you are. But I mean, it's logic, right? Better accessibility makes more customers walk in your door. So it's almost…sometimes when people ask, what is the business case with accessibility? And you say, "Well, you know, one in four has a hidden disability." Then there are all of the people who have some kind of mobility challenges. It can be a specific disability, but it can also be, you know, I've had back pain for some time, where going to the supermarket for a length amount of time - I can't necessarily. So if you start designing for that, the business results are there. And it's also great to actually do something that makes the world a more accessible and welcoming place for more people.
Clare
Yes, totally agree. That's definitely a theme coming through here. Kind of shifting the focus from what people perceive to be edge cases, as a small proportion of people with disabilities, to actually one in four with hidden disabilities at some point in everybody's life. You are likely to experience something that puts a barrier in your way, whether that's back pain, pregnancy, or forgetting your glasses. So, yeah, that kind of widens the scope in terms of how many people does this actually affect? It goes from being edges to being actually a significant population.
Stine
Yeah, I have this phrase that I use a lot where I say, “If you design for the edges, you can win the whole market”, because if you're accessible for those who experience the most challenges with the experience that you provide, if your door is actually open and the journey is smooth for them, more people can come in.
Clare
Yeah, widening that door. I like that.
Stine
And if you think about it, one in four has a hidden disability, but 20% are neurodivergent, and 7% to 10% are LGBT+. In Scandinavia, 15% to 20% of the population is of non-Scandinavian descent. Some speak fluently, but others have arrived, and you know, other people are arriving from…so if you start to think about what the common traits are among those groups and start there to improve, your experience is going to be so much better for so many more people.
Clare
Yeah, that's kind of like all these overlapping, intersecting circles that cover a significant proportion of the population. So you've recently launched InklusioNordic, a community-powered platform co-created with Nordic NGOs. Can you tell us a little bit more about how you developed this and share your vision for where you hope to take it in the future?
Stine
Yeah. The idea for this originated after I was involved with the Hidden Disability Sunflower initiative for three years, rolling it out across Denmark. And I could just see so many overlaps with the LGBTQ experience, etc, when I spoke with people who had different hidden disabilities, etc. And, I really wanted to…it started from a desire to make training videos targeted at companies where inclusion was seen in a broader spectrum.
So many companies want to do the right thing, but there are so many different offers out there that are specialised in one specific thing, so organisations that are specialising in LGBT+ or in ethnic minority, etc. And I was like, “What if we could bring it all to one platform where we make training videos that give just a basic understanding of what the major barriers are? And then also use this platform as a way to amplify the voices of the NGOs?” So, really showcase some of the great work they're doing and how companies can benefit from it in different ways.
That's how the idea originated. I kind of wanted to take my customer experience background, think of the companies wanting to do right in their customer and employee experience in terms of inclusion, and create one space where the people…It's all about the ones making the content because there is a lot of in the inclusion space, at least in this country, there are a lot of people doing a lot of work about those people – speaking about people instead of speaking as those people – and having that more inclusive take on inclusion. I wanted to really create this learning platform where it's the people that it's all about who are teaching you and telling you about what would be great things to consider and what would be great things to do. I'm doing monthly webinars with different themes, and sometimes it'll be one of the NGOs speaking about some of the stuff they're doing and how they can help companies solve problems in particular ways.
So that's how it originated. And where I want to take it is right now, I'm producing those training videos. My first ones are coming out in November, so they will be focused on employee experience first, because every company has employees, right? It'll be like short training videos where it is people that I've interviewed will say what barriers they encounter. And then there are obviously solutions attached. And so when they come out, what I want to do is offer a free membership that will always be free. Because if it's expensive to do inclusion, it's not very inclusive.
Clare
Yes.
Stine
A lot of companies want to do it, but they don't have a DEI department. There will always be a free membership tier where everyone can come in and get inspired and get access to free learning. Then there's the next tier, which is that you subscribe to these training videos and you get some tools and solutions on top. Did I answer your question? I thought that was a very long rant…
Clare
Nice. No, not at all. No, it's just asking you how you developed the platform and your vision for where you hope to take it.
Stine
Yeah. I haven't onboarded all of the NGOs right now. We've been in a pre-launch phase. So right now I have three Danish NGOs that I work with and have dialogues with, but I'm expanding it – throughout the next year I'll be onboarding Finnish and Norwegian and Swedish NGOs as well to really kind of…
Clare
Yeah, make it truly Nordic.
Stine
Yeah. And also because we can learn so much from each other across sectors. What if all of those different organisations got together in the bus and drove it together? We would go faster than we do sitting in each of our little vehicles.
Clare
I love that.
Stine
I think it was also a little bit of a rebellion thing in terms of where the world winds are blowing right now with everything that's coming out of the States. I've been like, “I’ve got to secure the puddle that I have here where we have probably one of the areas of the world where LGBT+ people have the most rights, where there's a bigger spotlight on those types of issues.” And I was like, “We’ve got to get together on this bus and show the world how to do it right.” And that this is business, and that being inclusive takes us to results. So that was my kind of, you know, I'm getting back on my activist horse here.
Clare
Yeah, and it's so important, isn't it? I think, Women in CX, we felt it massively, this rollback on DEI, this kind of actually anti-woke rhetoric that basically if you're not a white middle-aged straight man, all of that work that was done over the years to equal the playing field is gradually being taken away. The kind of Christian nationalist movement that's happening over there that's having such a terrible impact on, as you mentioned already, women, LGBTQ+ people, people with disabilities, people who are socioeconomically already hampered, taking away a lot of the support that keeps people that are already on a lower playing field economically even further down, is terrifying. We felt it at Women in CX with [companies] pulling funding for memberships, sponsors who'd advocated for DEI while it was a popular topic, now saying, “Actually, that's no longer something that we wish to visibly support because actually, the way that the movement is happening over there is that being perceived as potentially negative.”
I felt the same. I was like, “What do we do? Do we pivot or do we double down?” And, as you said, securing your own part of the world where you can influence and continue to do something. I think it's become a bit of a rebellious thing for me as well. That we're not going to step back. We're going to push even harder because that is what the world needs right now: people who continue to stand up for what they believe in, stand up for marginalised groups, and I'm just so proud to be seeing you here today winning this award because you're absolutely doing that. And yes, sorry, I got on my little high horse. I'm not going to apologise for it but definitely that was a moment of reflection on how messed up the world is right now.
Stine
It was a good reflection. But if I can just…obviously, you should never do statistics based on just your own experience here, but I'm going to do it a little bit anyway. I think what has happened with the winds blowing is that it's given more energy to some of the people who maybe kept some of their viewpoints to themselves before talking about it in social media comments, etc. I mean, it's never been great, but it's not better now. But, I have personally felt I have never been as busy in my career as this past year because I feel companies are like, “No, we're going to stick by this, we really want to do.” So I feel there are also companies that have had the opposite reaction to it, being like, "No, no, no. We're not absorbing that here." Obviously, it's complex for global companies because if you have a lot of business in the States, there are different things that can make it difficult if you're very loud on your…especially your LGBT+ drum, right? But I felt a lot of companies have been even more adamant to be like, "No, no, no, we're going to show that we stand by this."
So that has, for me, been honestly quite uplifting because I have felt the dread of watching the news and seeing what's going on. And I just hope that we can keep the, what do you call it? The thing that the tents are stuck with in the ground?
Clare
Poles?
Stine
Yeah. I hope we can keep the pole down during the storm and stay our ground. Sometimes, translating when you say things in images, it doesn't go through so great when it's from Danish to English, but I hope you know what I mean.
Clare
I do know what you mean, and I absolutely love it when we're having a Danish-English translation moment. So, the final question, really from me, is, if you could give any words of advice to any of our listeners who want to make inclusion part of their CX strategy. What would that be?
Stine
Listen. Listen to the people you want to include. I mean, obviously, you can research a lot of stuff about what an experience barrier would be in this type of business, etc. But when you map a customer journey, depending on what type of business you are, different types of diagnoses or disabilities would be interesting to look at. But if you can design your customer journey for someone who's autistic with ADHD, has a visual impairment and who's dyslexic, then you're already quite far in reaching anybody who's just about 40 in terms of visual impairment, anybody who might be cognitively overloaded and not being able to read complex text, anybody who needs stuff in a logical order because they are overloaded. I think there's nothing special to it. It uses the same tools, but look at it through a different prism. And I usually say, looking through the lens of neurodiversity isn't bad because some of the barriers they encounter are encountered by many different types of diagnoses and disabilities. But also just people that are generally overloaded from, like I said, grief or whatever. So it's not bad to start there if you want to know what prisms I should look through? There are like 80,000 different things, but that's not bad. Depending on what…do you have much written communication, or depending on your business, that would vary. So give that a thought, scramble all your personas and make one who is a combination of all of the things that might encounter the worst barriers in your business. And then you're well on your way.
Clare
Yeah, I love that. And I think just to bring that point home, just when you start research ensuring you have representation is critical, isn't it? And like you said, I remember so vividly thinking everything's great in our customer journey, but when we pass those prisms over, those lenses, it was just a radically different experience. Depending on what you're measuring your experience on and who you're asking, it can look incredibly different if you're not including or if you are including people who have barriers.
Stine
Yeah. And we're really at the core of what I feel is how to deliver business results with customer experience: you eliminate the friction. Every bad experience you deliver, you look at it, and you figure out how to improve that. So that's the core. So if you really seek out when it does go wrong, then you're just continuously improving, and you will end at the excellence level. But far too many companies are thinking in, “We need to delight our customers or we want to create magic moments.” No. You’ve got to clean up, and you've got to start from the furthest down, where it's most dirty, and improve it a little.
Clare
Build up.
Stine
Yeah, build it up and improve it from there.
Clare
Yeah, my summary or takeaway from this conversation is just that reminder that intentional inclusive CX is just great CX, and as CX professionals or people leading that, if we could be conscious of that fact, we're going to improve everything for everybody. And not just it's the right thing to do, but it is. It's also the right thing to deliver better business outcomes.
So that's it, Stine. It's been a pleasure to have you on the Inspiring Women in CX Award Winners podcast. I'm so proud of you. You know, we've been in tandem on our journeys of community, haven't we, over the years, and just seeing you going on to apply all of your learnings into this new program with InklusioNordic. I'm just so proud of you. So very well done. Congratulations. And I can't wait to see you in Berlin!
Stine
Yeah, I look forward to it. Thank you so much for inviting me, and also thank you so much for doing the UnConference in Berlin. Can't wait. I think you made me blush. I'm going to drink a little now.
Clare
Big love. Take care, see you next time. Bye! Bye everyone!
Stine
See ya. Bye.
Clare
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