Disability Awareness
& Digital Customer Service

  • 2 x 3.5 hour session via Zoom
  • Laptop required
  • Bespoke price on application
  • Max. 60 attendees

A short workshop to understand the digital needs and perspectives of your customers and staff with disabilities through ‘Speed Dating’. Enables your staff to learn how people with disabilities use sites and apps, and the technologies they use them with, by speaking directly with people with those disabilities.

Your email, social media and phone customer service is a critical part of your support for your customers with disabilities – it is the essential first line of defence between yourselves and disability discrimination lawsuits. The confidence of people providing this service in understanding the needs of people with disabilities, and how best to communicate with them, is key to ensuring that issues are captured well. Establishing clear escalation paths for comments and complaints is key to ensuring that they are resolved well.

This workshop is only available bespoke. Please contact us to ask any questions.

You will learn how to...

Provide customer service for your customers or staff with disabilities, through understanding their digital needs and preferences

  • Understanding customer needs: Remotely meeting briefly with a person from each of the most common disabilities to learn about their digital needs and preferences, and ask questions directly
  • Legal considerations: How disability discrimination law impacts on email and phone customer service
  • Identifying customer’s issues: How to put a disabled customer at ease in an interaction, identify the essence of their comment or complaint, and set expectations for how the complaint will be handled
  • Role Play exercises: Practical exercises and follow-up discussions to see how you would handle difficult calls, emails or social media messages

Who is it for?

Suitable for anyone who wants to get a deeper understanding of the digital needs of customers or staff with disabilities, especially those who provide customer service so need to know how best to communicate with all customers

Benefits

To you

  • You will better understand the digital needs and preferences of people with disabilities, in the most authentic and inspiring way
  • You will better understand how best to communicate with people with a range of disabilities, how to understand the issue they may have, and how to escalate it for resolution within your organisation

To your organisation

  • Confidence that your customer service staff can provide best-practice service to people with disabilities that may contact your call centre via phone, email or social media
  • Confidence that issues raised with your customer service staff will be escalated correctly in your organisation, for resolution with minimal legal or reputational damage

Prerequisites

Skills

  • None

Tech

  • Laptop required for Zoom and so you can participate in the key training exercises

Meet one of our trainersAbout Jonathan

Jonathan is one of the world's top digital usability & accessibility thought leaders. He has over 20 years’ experience in identifying new directions and challenges in digital accessibility, finding best practice process and technology solutions, authoring international standards and presenting best practices to conference audiences across the world. He delivered the International Accessibility Standard ISO 30071-1 in 2019, which is based on the British Accessibility Standards BS 8878 that …

Find out more about Jonathan

Jonathan's latest thought leadership

Jonathan Hassell

You might also like these courses

  • A short workshop to help you build the case for, and put inclusion and accessibility right into the heart of your digital products, understand what it takes to embed this across your organisation, and how to use the benefits of digital accessibility to meet your organisation’s business goals.

  • Enables Product Managers, Project Managers and Business Analysts to understand how to play their role in embedding accessibility efficiently throughout the software development lifecycle for sites and apps using ISO 30071-1's activities. Uses case studies of how real projects have got into difficulty in delivering accessibility to explore how to get it right in requirements analysis, test strategy, sprint and launch planning.

  • Leads you through the elements of how to embed accessibility throughout your organisation, to ensure it's implemented consistently well across all of your external sites and apps, and internal digital tools. Covers how to set accessibility policies, get effective training and expert support, and how to govern and measure the Return On Investment of accessibility across your digital product portfolio.