Businesses don’t go out of their way to be inaccessible to customers – it can have a negative impact on businesses and customers alike. When dealing with matters face-to-face, neglecting physical accessibility needs was impossible: ramp access, grab rails, elevators.
Contact centres have grown in recent years and unfortunately, it has had an impact on people with disabilities. Though technology has made many lives easier, it hasn’t made every life easier. In many instances, there are limitations and drawbacks that technology and technological means of communicating have brought. Plus, things like Interactive Voice Response (IVR), which is quite impersonal in nature, makes the access requirements of customers hard to determine.
There are those at home who suffer from impaired vision or blindness, deaf and loss of hearing, learning or speech disabilities, and neurological or mobility limitations. These at-home customers need the same level of accessibility that in-person customers are becoming accustomed to. Any communication channel your business has should be accessible for all who access it.
What Is A Virtual Contact Centre?
Virtual Contact Centres (VCC) are digital hubs that allows contact centre agents to work remotely from several geographical locations. Customer support is provided on multiple communication channels where the most appropriate agent will be matched with a customer depending on their reason for contacting.
Rather than dealing with calls alone, contact centres also have agents responding to queries from customers on multiple mediums like social media and via emails.
How Virtual Contact Centres Can Support Customers with Disabilities
Customers with disabilities may have additional support or tools to help them, and they might communicate differently but they are still just customers. And with certain adjustments on the business side of things, you can accommodate them just as naturally as you can accommodate anyone else. Even if that is doing something as simple as just giving them a bit more of your time and attention.
At the end of the day, your job is to help your customers. And this is how you can do that.
Having A Corporate Policy On Accessibility
The term corporate policy can seem both daunting and stressful but the whole point of policies is that they’re like guiding principles. They lay out the basic rules you should be implementing. It also sends a message to every employee that the business regards accessibility something of great importance. That’s not to say that you think otherwise if you don’t have one.
Applying the principles of an accessibility policy consistently across your business can be essential when it comes to including new technologies and processes.
Enhancing Customer Experience
The use of technology in your business can have both a positive and negative impact depending on how it’s used and how your customers interact with it. Technology can be used to enhance the customer experience (CX) when it comes to accessibility. For example, it can be used to:
- Improve telephone menus – making them well-articulated, spoken clearly and at an easy-to-follow pace.
- Consider voice-text analytics – such analytics that can be used to determine accessibility needs in real time.
- Install number recognition software – automatically re-routing those with disabilities to a live agent can be incredibly helpful. Sometimes it’s easier to discern challenges live in the moment.
There are CX technologies that help to improve vulnerable customers’ experiences.
- An Omnichannel Contact Centre-as-a-Service (CCaaS) platform can connect every contact channel for your agent to view in a single place.
- Visual IVR can exchange an IVR menu into something visual, displaying text on screens for those who are hard of hearing, deaf, or have any speech disabilities.
Encourage Customers to Give Feeback
The holy grail to knowing your areas of improvement… Customer feedback. Seriously, encouraging customers to give you feedback on your services and the support of the agents can help you find areas for improvement. Problems that need to be fixed to ensure success next time.
There are many different ways you can go about this, such as a customer satisfaction survey, but you have to inclusive towards them. Not everyone has the ability to read a customer survey. Maybe it could be replaced by an audible option. It’s important that customers are properly allowed to express their opinions and freely comment on their experience with you. It’ll only serve to help you when it comes to enhancing you services or technologies.
Share your feedback across the business so everyone’s aware on the areas that need bettering. And get feedback from those within the business, too. Were there any problems they faced that they found an appropriate solution for?
Choosing Daktela
Making services more accessible to disabled customers is something focal to ensure that all customers feel included and supported. It’s become so much more important to have more accessible services because at least 19% of the population in the UK has a disability. That is 1 in 5 people.
Seeing the significance of providing a service that is accessible to all has altered the way many businesses think.
With Daktela, you can create connections with your customers that are effective; always ensuring that their experience is a positive one. Let your customers choose the communication channel that is most suitable to them. Our intellectual tools, integrated solutions, and pay-as-you-go options all help to optimise the resources your business has, improving CX and accelerating growth.
We have multiple plans available for businesses – just choose the one that’s best for your needs and aims. You can compare the features of the services we offer. Or book a demo with us today if you’d rather see how it works before you dive in the deep end.
Thousands of businesses are delivering five-star rated customer service with our solutions. Why shouldn’t yours be one of them?
