Last reviewed: February 2024

Introduction

Disability Smart organisations recognise the power of listening and acting on customer feedback to improve their customers’ experience, including those who are disabled or older. By listening, learning and acting, organisations can effectively understand the needs of their customers and create an open dialogue that will help to ensure that customers’ needs and feedback are acted upon.

We know that because everyone experiences disability differently, regular consultation with those who actually use services and products produces better results than just “accessibility experts” alone. What actual customers think of current products and services, and planned changes, can help shape the outcome more positively.

The outcome is that organisations become better at designing and delivering inclusive and accessible products, services and distribution channels. Disabled and / or elderly customers feel valued, welcomed, anticipated and accommodated when using our members’ products and services.

Organisations should ensure they focus not just on the challenges highlighted to them by their customers, but also on the positive feedback. Understanding what is working well enables ongoing and increased investment and a blueprint for other initiatives, while focusing on pain points may provide quick wins.

How to consult with customers

Businesses should think about using a range of tools and methods – some proactive and others reactive – to consult with and obtain feedback from disabled and elderly customers.

The focus should not just be on existing propositions, but also around building new, accessible services.

Below, we highlight some common methods for consulting with customers.

Customer surveys

When designing customer surveys, consider the following:

• Gather a panel of disabled retail customers with a mix of ages and abilities.
• Ensure that the online survey platform itself is as accessible as possible, both in terms of simple user interface and plain English questions, as well as ensuring technical compatibility of the site with assistive technologies.
• Include a range of quantitative and qualitative responses, such as what shopping channels a respondent used, how they rated the people, premises, products and processes, what they found difficult, and any suggested improvements. Cover communication channels, choice and preferences.

You could choose to go down the external route, using a panel of disabled individuals rather than identifying and reaching out to your own disabled customers. This gives you an opportunity to remove any potential bias from solely using your own customers.

Websites

Allow customers to suggest improvements to your services, products and business-as-usual processes on an ongoing basis. Create suggestions route which is easy to find and use on your website (in a sidebar on the homepage, for example). This must conform to your accessibility standards.

If you already have an existing customer complaints process, ensure that your website suggestion route ties in with the existing process. This will provide consistency and standardisation of how suggestions are collated and prioritised from customers.

Think about how you could show outcomes of previous feedback on your site. This demonstrates that customers’ suggestions are listened to and acted on to improve services and encourages others to make their suggestions.

Public commitment / external statement of intent

Make a public statement of your intent to design, implement and promote accessible technology. For example, have you signed up to the Business Disability Forum’s Accessible Technology Charter? This shows to customers that you take accessibility seriously. Customers will be more likely to provide useful feedback on how to improve if they can see your organisation’s commitment clearly.

As a minimum, organisations should have an accessibility statement on their website. This should show what you have done to make your site accessible and how your customers can feed back. Under Public Sector Websites and Mobile Technologies regulations, an accessibility statement is a legal requirement for UK public sector bodies. Customers may begin to expect the same from private sector websites too.

User testing of products and services

There is a range of external access consultants, charity partners and, if you request and support them, disabled user panels that can be drawn on to help test existing services or to assist in the design, build and testing of new products or services.

Have you set up accessibility design standards? Point your designers and product builders at the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines which are the core of most international standards that exist. Use diverse user testing with external experts, especially for material change programmes that will directly impact customers.

Complaints investigations and root cause analysis

Create a formal complaints process for customers who have had a negative experience. If the complaints process is categorised, have an ‘accessibility / disability’ related category.

This is not perfect, as there is still an inherent difficulty of differentiating between a generic complaint from a disabled customer versus an accessibility complaint from a disabled customer. Nevertheless, it is helpful to collate and review these complaints.

Think about setting up meetings with key disability charity partners. This provides an opportunity for the charities to describe their members’ top challenges and suggestions.

Compliments feedback process

Similarly, organisations should also have a process in place for monitoring and reviewing of compliments and positive feedback.

Although these are unfortunately less common, they should be celebrated and will provide a huge benefit to letting you know that you are ‘on the right track.’ Compliments should follow a similar process to complaints and many organisations run these processes within the same systems, if not parallel to each other.

Social media channels

Increasingly, organisations use social media channels such as Twitter and Facebook to publicise accessibility support, services and new enhancements as they are launched.

Social media can be an effective tool in targeting specific customer segments with information and announcements. Organisations can also use social media to collect feedback on customers’ views and experiences of their services.

Social media, whether you intend it or not, will also be used by customers to post feedback on your service. Most of this will be negative – it is human nature to be more likely to complain than praise – and that could impact on public perception of your services. An active social media team monitoring channels can turn that around, or at the least minimise the impact of negative comments.

Responding positively to people who report accessibility issues through social media will not only minimise the negative impression potential customers get, but can provide you with a ready-made cohort of people with accessibility needs willing to take part in your next stage of design and testing.

Focus groups can provide fantastic feedback to your services, as can Mystery Shoppers. Inviting feedback from these groups will allow you to gain insider feedback on how you can improve your services. A big part of this is people want to feel that they can make a difference and help you to improve what you do – but importantly, you need to show that you have taken their suggestions on board and have been proactive in making changes, otherwise they will be reluctant to be involved in the future.

Summary

Customer feedback is essential, but also comes with challenges. By engaging with your customers, including those with disabilities, your outputs are more likely to have a positive impact on your business and lead to more engaged customers.

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