I am happy to say that this problem has been resolved to my satisfaction, basically within one day–and on a weekend, too. I am a full-blown, fully licensed user of this service again and glad to still have access to those tools.
Today I am writing as a woman customer of a technical service.
I use an account with Gravity Forms (for a school website) and it comes with a default avatar of this:
It is a picture of a man wearing a tee shirt with the Gravity Forms logo on it, right? So I’m a user, but not a man, and this graphic doesn’t reflect me, so I decide to drop them a note on their customer contact form. My note says this:
I am a member of Gravity Forms for my school organization but I have a personal comment to make, so I am using my regular name. I am disappointed that under my member profile picture space/avatar the default setting is of a man. Men and women are users of this technology, and it’s off-putting to be excluded from the outside by something so easy to change and so visible.
Maybe instead of an icon of a man you could put something a little rocket like the rocket in your logo? Or even just a yellow smiley face? An image along those lines would be much more inclusive, and would send the message that you appreciate the business of the women in the community as much as the business of the men.
Thank you for your consideration.
One day later (today), I get a reply from Kevin at Gravity Forms. He took umbrage with my note. Let’s read his reply together! (Bold and caps text in original.)
Karen,
Thanks for your feedback. I’ll be very frank, I found it somewhat entertaining and then mildly offensive.
I don’t know why you would ASSUME that we appreciate our male customers more than our female customers. You don’t really know us, our beliefs or how we do business so I’m not sure where you came up with that idea but you couldn’t be more wrong.
I personally feel that THIS kind of thinking is what helps to propogate and sustain the notion that women are somehow unequal to men. I’m certain you would disagree but that’s to be expected.
This is the first time ever in several years of business that anyone has ever expressed anything even remotely related to this. We have literally thousands of customers and I would bet most have never even considered the gender of the default user avatar. Many of our users have very generic usernames/email addresses (very much like your own school organization ) and we have absolutely no way to tell their gender. EVERYONE gets equal treatment regardless of their gender, sexual orientation, age, race or nationality. We simply don’t care about those things. If you’ve paid for our product, we will gladly assist you, love and appreciate you as a customer.
Now, The default user avatar you refer to is an intentionally generic, faceless, genderless icon that’s almost globally associated with a “user” or a user profile. Do a quick google search for “user icon” and you’ll see what I mean ( http://bit.ly/XsjwT2 ) Using a rocket or smiley face as you suggest wouldn’t have the same connotation and wouldn’t follow well established user interaction guidelines.
Since you obviously don’t care for the avatar, you’ll be happy to know that’s easy enough to fix. We use the “Gravatar” service to provide custom user avatars in our forums. You can sign up for one for free and then have the new avatar reflected on our site automatically when viewing your profile or posts. Easy peasy.
https://en.gravatar.com/site/signup
I’m sure that my reply hasn’t changed your way of thinking, but please be assured that all of our customers are COMPLETELY EQUAL in our eyes and in terms of how we support our products.
Best Regards,
Kevin
So, I just want to make some points.
1. That’s a genderless icon, my ass.
2. A customer service rep told a customer he was offended by her suggestion.
3. I didn’t ASSUME men were more valued than women–I said I felt excluded and that they could send the message better that they valued everyone.
4. Following the link to the icons brings up women icons, too, which they could have picked from but didn’t.
5. A customer asking for visible representation is what makes women seem lesser, but excluding women from images and chastising them does not. No way.
6. They are officially gender blind and so not causing problems.
7. Despite all this, Gravity Forms loves me as a customer.
8. “Easy peasy” is pretty condescending in this context.
9. He’s correct that my reply hasn’t changed my thinking. It has, however, magnified it, and pissed me off. I can think of so many canned customer service responses that would have indicated a lack of interest in changing the icon without blaming me for the disparity of men and women in technology.
Wow.
So where’s my Likert scale, Gravity Forms? Where’s my Likert scale?
UPDATE: A few hours later, I get an email from Kevin:
Hi Karen,
We’ve chosen to refund your Gravity Forms purchase of $39 USD and cancel your account/license key.
You’re obviously unhappy and you’ve been encouraging people to spam our customer support email address. This would create slow-downs as we try to actually help our clients who have real problems.
I hope you have better luck with other solutions.
Best Regards,
Kevin
I didn’t ask to cancel my account and didn’t actually want to cancel my account, but canceled it was. I did manage to save my data, which maybe I wouldn’t have lost. So that was fun.
What to look for here: The exclusion of sexism from the realm of “real problems.” This is just one in a long line of examples of this separation of sexism from problems that matter. Also, complaining about me from Twitter accounts that identify you as a representatives of the company still count as bad customer service.
This is pretty funny shit. Seriously. A textbook example of Quixotism. Thanks for making my day.
Isn’t it a bit biased of you to assume that because the icon has no breast and short hair that it is male? My trainer has a buzz cut, so I would assume her faceless avatar would look very manly…just saying. HOWEVER…I am OUTRAGED she/he is white…black people like computers, too…and asians (maybe even more than white people)…
Cat, you just associated short hair and a flat chest with manliness, so, no, I don’t think I’m particularly biased thinking the icon is male. As for outrage that the default avatar is also white… yes, the default person being white is another issue along the same lines. If you read the “About” page or the tagline of this blog, you’ll see I focus on sexism instead of racism here (because I have to focus on something), but I do make the point that many of the arguments I make could be applied to questions of race, too.
If you think it is a poor choice of avatars and an example of everyday racism, you should write to the company. I give the link to their contact form at the top of the post.
Yeah, that is pretty much a customer service fail right there. And Kevin Flauhaut, you sir, are a dick. And hopefully this little example will show up when potential customers Google you or RocketGenius.
Wow.. that is what I call customer service. Clearly Kevin runs the show and is in no way in fear of being reprimanded for speaking to a customer in a condescending manner.
I wonder why he choose to attack the critique instead of reassuring his customer that he and his and his company valued all its clients. Perhaps, he had his Wheaties pee’d on today or may have a ragging bout of hemorrhoids.
To Kevin, dude…may I call you “dude”? All you had to do was thank Karen for her letter/concern and direct her to the custom Avatar site. Thats it. There was no need for written histrionics. … and certainly no need to come onto her blog, use profanity, and further damage your company reputation.
Karen…didn’t you associate short hair and a flat chest with manliness to begin with in your initial email to the company?
Oh, boy! You got me good!
Kevin won’t last long as a customer service rep as he clearly doesn’t know the definition, never mind his defensiveness over issues of gender and sex. Why is masculinity so easily affronted?
I believe Kevin is one of the developers/partners of the company.
Tweeted and Facebook posted to personal page and groups. Hi Kevin.
Ah, a developer. What could that mean?
I’m not sure if you are speaking philosophically or asking for information, so I will give you information first: He is one of the product software developers. Answering “What could that mean?” philosophically someone else will have to do.
Developer = Borderline Aspie who should be kept away from anything customer facing.
I don’t know that you need to bring Asperger’s into this!
I bet he uses a Mac too, and thinks Lite beer is less filling.
Macs! Pah!
Me thinks that Mr. Kevin doth protest too much. You obviously hit a nerve, and I’m guessing that complaints in this vein occur with much more frequency than Mr. Kevin is copping to. That is one of the worst examples of customer service I’ve ever been witness to…and in this day and age, that is quite an accomplishment.
By the way–collette77 is me–Anne. Didn’t want you to think you had a stalker!
Hello, Anne! You’re a long way from home. 🙂 Thanks for dropping by.
Absolutely! I couldn’t pass up getting behind you on this. (that sounds a little naughty, but you get the gist…)
Worst. Customer. Service. Ever. I posted links to this on my personal Facebook page and to the Feminist Alliance at my college. And one of my friends shared it. Methinks you will be getting the last laugh.
Kevin is one of the co-founders of the company along th myself and another partner. He is not customer service.
I’ll reply here with what I said to Karen.
In a nutshell, Kevin took offense to being accused of somehow being gender biased because of a simple placeholder avatar. The commenter above is correct, it hit a nerve. But not because this issue has been raised before, this is a first for us. It hit a nerve because he (like many) are sick of how politically correct everything must be and the idea that because our placeholder avatar could be seen as being male that we are somehow sexist male chauvinists. His email response to Karen explained his opinion on the matter.
He could have easily replied to Karen with a canned “Thanks for your request…” response but instead chose to give a more honest, detailed response on the matter.
His response to her blog post to “deactivate” her account was in response to a blog post he felt was unnecessary and an attempt at using cyber bullying to force a company to bend to a users will simply because they didn’t like something. Attempting to incite a mob by trying to organize people to contact us and email us to complain, yell and scream? That wasn’t acceptable to him.
We aren’t some corporate behemoth. We have a longstanding reputation for providing great customer service. But we also don’t like being bullied by users and feel that the business relationship is a two way street. Treat us good and we’ll treat you good. Using the court of public opinion to force an agenda on a company is in my opinion a form of cyber bullying. It’s no different than a bunch of high schoolers doing the same to a teenager on Facebook. The consequences can be dire.
In fact, we’re a small business of 9 people so when you wield the power of the curt of public opinion, think about how that can negatively impact the livelihood of 9 people working hard to provide for the families.
Is a default placeholder avatar that can be easily changed by configuring your Gravatar really important enough to jeopardize the livelihood of 9 hardworking people trying to make a small business a success?
You tell me.
The power of a blog post and the ability to so easily sway and wield the court of public opinion is a powerful thing. The impact it can have on a company is immense. Unfortunately it’s used far too irresponsibly in today’s Internet world.
It’s a default placeholder cartoon icon that can easily be changed by configuring your own avatar using the Gravatar service. It doesn’t make us sexist or gender biased in anyway and I’m sorry you feel somehow that it does.
There are a lot of good comments here the author should take into consideration. If having a default male avatar is sexist, then having a default caucasian avatar is racist. Having short hair would be discriminatory against people with mullets. Having a thin avatar is discriminatory against obese people. Where does the stupidity end if you go down this road?
Wouldn’t the world would be better served if you focus your energy on actual sexism?
I wouldn’t have believed this post existed except I read it with my own eyes. You should write for The Onion.
I couldn’t agree with Carl and John more. This is indeed the epitome of trivial. I showed this to my wife and simply asked – “what do you think of this?” To which she responded: “Sounds like someone has too much free time on their hands.” You really should be championing on issues that do matter and stop letting things like this hold you back in life.
Do you realize it took me all of two minutes to send the first note, and then all of five minutes to post to the blog? I spent a trivial amount of time addressing this trivial matter. It was the epitome of minimum effort. I probably actually spent no more time on it than you spent finding and following the link to this blog, reading this blog, showing it to another person, and then commenting on it. You could spend your time less trivially, too.
I don’t have a dog in this fight, but I found this little snippet from Carl Hancock verrrrry interesting:
“Is a default placeholder avatar that can be easily changed….really important enough to jeopardize the livelihood of 9 hardworking people trying to make a small business a success?”
Seems like that’s more a question for your company to consider, Mr. Hancock.
This issue was resolved amicably and i’d like to say thanks to Karen for understanding our viewpoint and putting it behind us so everyone can move forward.
I think everyone can agree that there are more important things to stress over and causes to champion than this in the grand scheme of things.
I’m looking forward to getting Karen’s feedback on the Survey Add-On for Gravity Forms that will introduce the Likert field she has been wanting as a feature.
This avatar business is way off topic. People need to stop fussing over the avatar. I handled my issue with the avatar with five or six sentences in a suggestion box. I didn’t sit down and make a blog post about an avatar. Other things prompted that.
Commenters on the first day understood that it wasn’t about the avatar. Commenters today, not so much. Harping on the significance of an avatar is completely missing the point.
Although I do appreciate the traffic and thank everyone for dropping by.
Thanks Karen. I’ll be surto drop you a line as soon as the Survey Add-On is ready so you can put the Likert (and other new fields) to good use.
Actually, Karen, more than a third of your post deals with ‘this avatar business’ and was the impetus behind your complaint, so you made it relevant. I appreciate you implying that I don’t have the capacity for understanding the customer service issue(s) behind your exchange with this company, however.
I wasn’t harping on anything. I was remarking on a point of interest in the counter-argument.
You obviously don’t appreciate the traffic, or you wouldn’t be so imperious to a first time visitor/commenter to your site who said nothing out of line. Noted. However, I’d like to politely suggest that if you don’t want to invite public commentary, don’t do any public flouncing.
Jett, I wasn’t referring to you. I thought your question was interesting. I’m passive-aggressively addressing the people crabbing at me for having an opinion about the avatar in the first place. You obviously have the capacity for understanding the customer service issue because you basically brought it up in your first post.
And I wasn’t flouncing. 😦
You made a polite and reasonable suggestion. As you know, I work in customer service, and a response like Kevin’s would be totally unacceptable. In fact, people have been fired at my place of employment for being condescending to customers in this way. It is a simple matter to reply to a customer in a polite and non-judgmental manner, especially when the customer is being as reasonable as you.
Here’s a tip for people in customer service positions: If you can’t refrain from condescending to your customers and sharing your baseless biases and assumptions about them – EVEN if they are angry and trying to push your buttons (which Karen was clearly not doing) – then maybe customer service isn’t the right fit for you.
I work in customer service, on the phones, as the first point of call for a company. Some customers love us and our products and processes, and some customers hate us. You take feedback on the chin and you make both compliments and complaints known to the relevant parties – and the people of the company respond to complaints as helpfully as we can. Learn how to take feedback, dudes of Gravity Forms.
Even more disgustingly, representatives of Gravity Forms, you complained that one of your customers was cyber bullying you by using a public forum as a means of providing feedback. Your response, including part of Carl Hancock’s “amicable” response (“I think everyone can agree that there are more important things to stress over and causes to champion than this in the grand scheme of things”), has been absolutely horrendous overall. If you want your business to be successful, then hold yourselves accountable for your business processes and your customer service. I sincerely hope that this has been a learning experience for Gravity Forms and for all of its representatives, and that you have improved your processes for responding to customer feedback.
Jett Superior, your first comment was a good one, and I don’t think that Karen directed her next comment at you.
People are oppositionally getting into the nitty-gritty of the details about the avatar because they want to derail from the original point, and to dismiss Karen’s complaint about something subtle that this company is doing to exclude females. Some of the commenters are absolutely correct to note that the avatar is also white, however this detail is, of course, an add-on to Karen’s critique, and should never operate as a dismissal of it. Karen was apt in spotting that the avatar represents the “default human”, which is a white male, and she was well within her rights to point out that this necessarily excludes people who don’t fall into that category. No, it’s not just the short hair or the flat chest. These plus the broad shoulders and the entire structure of the person represented in the avatar work together to create a representation of a male person, and not of a female person.
These seemingly small things, like this avatar being the pre-selected option for users of Gravity Forms, are important. They operate in conjunction with a myriad of other “small things” to make up an entire system that champions maleness, whiteness, heterosexuality and class privilege, and that diminishes, excludes and marginalises females, people of colour, gays and lesbians, and poverty class and working class people. This might sound abstract and unreal, especially to people who fall into the dominant category(ies) or to people who feel they have faced no consequences from it, but real people face real and serious consequences from such a system. Feeling consistently excluded or under-represented is just one of those.
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I can’t help thinking “poor guy”, even if he’s kind of a moron. Of course your mail was perfectly written, he probably had this kind of discussion for the billionth time -I’m sure he has noted “don’t vent your problems on a customer” somewhere. The matter is subtle, anyway; it’s about a thoughtful approach to design that recognizes how “little things” actually express and enforce the passive acceptance of ideologies. Now, even stating the matter is slightly complex -I wouldn’t expect all my engineering classmates to understand it spontaneously. I work with designers on a daily basis; defining every detail of a corporate image taking every possible nuance into account, is very professional territory. When you’re launching something with minimal resources and design has been done by, well, “someone there” on Friday afternoon, you inevitably resort to standard shapes and very likely some of them are stereotypical (in the bad sense, which is the only one). If I were him, I’d have sworn at your family first, then replied “Thank you for your suggestion, we’ll take it into account, expect it to take some time” while thinking “Why don’t you draw the perfectly understandable generic not-gendered not-colored not-fat-or-slim-or-anything avatar and send it to my e-mail, jerk”. Just to decompress =P
@ LL
But what she suggested *was* a sexless, raceless default – how hard is a smiley face, really? Or a simple/mini version of the company logo?
@Zhana,
Sometime over the summer or in late spring, they changed over to a default avatar that is a version of their logo. I wasn’t paying much attention to it, and then one day I logged on to my account, and there it was.
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