accessibility

NickB

How much do you really understand your customers’ needs?

When it comes to customers with any form of impairment the answer is most likely not enough

As my previous articles on accessibility have shown, the experience for a customer who doesn’t fit the “norm” of being a walking, intelligent person in possession of all five senses is typically a lot worse than it is for those who do. A conversation the other day made me realise that businesses don’t make sufficient effort to understand the needs of all their customers and therefore there is a significant business opportunity for those who do.

Say again?

The World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates that around 466 million people worldwide have disabling hearing loss and that by 2050 over 900 million people will have disabling hearing loss – one in ten of the world’s population. That’s a cause for concern, particularly as much of it is preventable but, whatever the cause, it doesn’t take away the fact that this is going to be an increasing challenge for up to 10% of any business’s customers.

I was pleased to discover that one specialist company – SigncodeUK – has developed a simple-to-use product that has the potential to make life easier for the profoundly deaf. With Signcode, messages can be conveyed via video: all the customer has to do is scan a QR code showing the SigncodeUK logo and a video appears on the customer’s phone with the message relayed in British Sign Language (BSL).

Courtesy of SigncodeUK

Now you may be thinking “that’s all well and good, but surely most people can read the information anyway?” – good question but missing the point. For people who are profoundly deaf, BSL is their first language – not surprising if you think about how a young deaf child will learn to communicate (they won’t learn to read English first).

When Signcode’s Jeff Earl told me this I was surprised – but then I had a flashback to a scene from years back where I noticed two teenage girls on the street laughing like mad with each other but not saying anything. I then noticed they were rapidly signing to each other, and I remember thinking that it of course was obvious that that’s how deaf people would tell each other jokes – it was something that I’d never had to think about.

You may now be thinking “that’s never occurred to me either, but how many people do you think this affects?” The answer is that, in the UK around 50,000 people have BSL as their first language – less than 0.1% of population, although about the same number who speak Gaelic and not much less than the c130,000 who speak Welsh as a first language at home. In fact, as Jeff Earl points out, the number of deaf people may be under-recorded  as health organisations (hospitals, GPs and Adult Services etc) did not have to register deaf people unless they ticked the disabled box. This has led to the numbers looking on the low side as the majority of deaf people (culturally and linguistically deaf ) do not consider themselves disabled.

A tiny percentage of anyone’s customer base then. So why bother?

Health warning: the following section may be offensive to statisticians

Whether we succeeded at mastering maths at school or still remain baffled by the simplest equation, we are bombarded with statistics every day, typically to tell us things like, flying is incredibly safe or that you are more likely to die from a collapsing sandcastle than a shark attack.

We’re conditioned to accept the idea of “the norm”, the middle of the Bell Curve (“normal distribution” for the statisticians amongst us) and I think this permeates our idea of customer service and customer experience where we tend to design around an idealised view of the customer – how we would like them to be rather than how they actually are.

Now, I’m not arguing that anyone’s customer base doesn’t have a normal or typical customer – it makes sense to design your products and services around what most people would do – but I’m more interested in what you do for those in the margins, as that’s where competitive advantage lies.

The bell curve below shows, conveniently, that 0.1% of your customer population lies 3 standard deviations from the norm so in a customer population measured for hearing ability, that’s where you would find your BSL first language population. So why cater for such a small sample?

Source: Chris53516 at English Wikipedia [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
The answer is that what you do for a small percentage has a knock-on effect on the whole customer population because it shows the 99.9% of your customers that don’t use BSL that you want to be inclusive, that you’re taking pains to customise your offering to those customers who do.

Extra miles (or inches)

I don’t much care for the expression “going the extra mile” in relation to customer service – sometimes an extra inch or two may be enough – but providing inclusive services will distinguish your business from the competition.

The good news is that there’s plenty of opportunity to do this and cater for people who lie closer to the centre of the bell curve – the 2% of the population with some form of dementia for example.

In my experience of implementing strategies to improve services for these “vulnerable” customers, the key to success is to embed the level of awareness in the organisation’s culture. You don’t need to dig too deep in any group of people to find individuals who – often with a passion born of personal experience – want to step up and lead the way in spreading awareness and improving services to all customers.

Very often those people aren’t in senior roles but they’re the ones who, day in and day out, make great service happen. Allowing those people to flourish is the hallmark of great customer service leaders.

NickB

OmniServ: customer care in action

Treat customers as humans and operational challenges will reduce

When BBC correspondent Frank Gardner recently publicised his 100-minute wait for his wheelchair to arrive from the hold to the gate at Heathrow Airport he illustrated a fact not often discussed in the mainstream media: travel – of any kind – when your mobility is restricted can be a massive challenge.

I was glad, therefore, to meet with Samantha Berry who is a passionate advocate of better customer experience in general and accessibility solutions in particular. In her day job as the Heathrow-based Head of Innovation and Regulatory Compliance at airport services company OmniServ, she is responsible for ensuring that people like Frank Gardner get the assistance they need to get through an airport which, she describes as potentially disabling given its sheer size and scale.

OmniServ provides a number of services to airports throughout the UK, including PRM (Persons with Restricted Mobility) assistance which, in essence, means ensuring that anyone who needs additional support to get from one part of the airport to another gets the assistance they need. Airports have a legal obligation to provide this service – some do it in-house and others outsource to OmniServ or one of the other three main providers in the UK marketplace. It’s a pressurised environment: airlines run on a tight schedule and turnaround time is critical so any hold-up in a departure, arrival or flight transfer for a passenger who is slow to board, disembark or connect can have negative consequences for on-time performance.

But behind the sterile acronym and the tight schedules lies a great experience for the customer, according to Samantha, OmniServ’s staff will potentially be spending more 1:1 time with the customer than the airline staff do. Getting the right kind of person in the job is critical and the old adage “recruit for attitude, train for skill” very much applies. Samantha sees the job as a vocation:

“I don’t use the term lightly – we have people whose purpose is to make their passengers journey as smooth as possible. We provide training – accredited by Disability Rights UK – which has moved away from talking about the process to focusing on caring as you assist the passenger, so behaviours are important. A large element of training covers the importance of listening to the customer. For example, sometimes it’s obvious that a customer will need a wheelchair, but only the customer is able to explain how they want to be lifted into the seat.

There’s much about the job that motivates people – “The airport is an exciting environment to be in and no day is the same. Everyone’s very operationally focused and they are driven by delivering a good on-time performance. No-one likes to be faced with a delay, but they like the challenge of a time constraint. Also, your job has a lot of time when you’re talking to the customer and building a relationship.”

End-to-end

As I found out in my recent experience with picking up my in-laws from a rail station, getting the various elements of the journey to link up is a constant challenge (in my case the seamless planning fell apart when the train arrived at a different platform from the one the mobility assistance service was expecting, leaving two people stranded for 20 minutes). Although serious complaints are rare, the loading and unloading of mobility equipment is outside of OmniServ’s control. Sam recalled an incident where she watched helplessly as an electric chair for a customer with motor neurone disease fell to the ramp. Such incidents, again, thankfully rare, can severely affect a passenger’s quality of life – in this case the passenger was bed-ridden for two weeks while the electric chair was repaired.

Balancing airlines’ demands for efficiency versus the cost of assisting less mobile customers is something Samantha sets about with a passion. She recalled a discussion with the head of planning for one airline where she pointed out that flights from some destinations – Malaga for example – would have a much higher proportion of PRM passengers than other more business-focused destinations such as Frankfurt and therefore scheduling should allow for the additional turnaround time required. Eventually the planner changed the schedule to reduce the pressure.

She spends a lot of time talking to the various groups across Heathrow and works with the OmniServ Disability Advocate who provides additional insight into customer needs and how issues can be resolved.

Although the tension between cost and service provision will never go away, Samantha made the point that if you get it right for the customer the challenge will solve itself as more people will choose to use an airport/airline who get accessibility right.

With the number of passengers requiring assistance is growing at a rate of 7% as opposed to 5% for those who don’t, it’s a demand that’s only going to increase.

Innovation

OmniServ is constantly seeking opportunities to improve the experience through new technology. In celebration of International Wheelchair in March they showcased the WHILL, a high-tech solution which has been dubbed “the world’s most futuristic-looking wheelchair“. Designed by a start-up company created by a team of engineers from Japanese companies Sony, Toyota, Olympus and Panasonic and when used in conjunction with beacon technology, mobile devices and other systems, these can be controlled using smartphones, can travel in convoy through an airport and, eventually, will be able to be programmed to move themselves to where they are needed, without passengers or attendants.

Reaction from representatives of disability charities and wheelchair users was positive and the device also attracted attention from able-bodied millennials who saw it as a cool way to move through the airport.

Such facilities will give customers increasing independence and have the potential to drive efficiencies, but the human touch is still very important. Samantha’s aim is to have people whose level of intuition is so great that they will be able to understand customers’ needs and simply ask “how can I make your journey better?”

The airline industry is a high-volume business, with considerable competition for the lower end of the market where margins are tight. In such a world it’s theoretically easier if passengers can all be treated as uniform entities conforming to a standard set of behaviours. In Samantha Berry’s world such a “one size fits all” approach is highly inappropriate and, in the long-term, counterproductive. She recognises that the foundation of a great customer experience is to treat customers like the unique human beings that they are and to provide a service accordingly.

 

NickB

Travelling hopefully: the problems of accessibility

When customer journeys are actual journeys it’s hard to get a joined-up solution

I love a challenge and this one seemed quite straightforward: two elderly people – my in-laws – are travelling by train this weekend to Paddington station in London. I need to get them from there to my home with a minimum of walking.

Little do I realise that planning this simple piece of travel will send me on an information hunt lasting well over an hour and requiring almost Sherlock Holmes-like detection skills.

I start with mobility assistance at Paddington. I call the accessibility helpline shown for Paddington on the National Rail website. I’m put through to Ruth, who suggests a buggy to pick them up from the train, although they’ll need to phone the booking line to arrange this “owing to data protection”.

“That’s great” I say, “now where can the buggy take them?”

“I’ll just check” says Ruth – a few seconds pass then “there’s a drop-off at the taxi rank above platform 12.”

“OK, is that a pick-up point as well?”

“I’ll just check”.

At this point it dawns on me that she is looking at the same information that I am which, as it wasn’t much help, is why I called the helpline in the first place. We draw a blank.

“I’ll try putting you through to customer relations at Paddington.”

I’m then put through to Carl at GWR. Carl is also willing to be helpful but after describing the situation we seem to be treading much the same ground as before.

“I don’t have a physical view of the station” he says. “I’ll tell you what, why don’t you phone the helpline.”

He then gives me the same National Rail helpline that I dialled to start with.

Loopy

After a fruitless Google search to see if there is a way of breaking out of this loop I dial the accessibility line again.

This time Jamie at National Rail confirms that if my in-laws ask to be taken to the taxi drop-off area I can pick them up. We then conduct a joint mission to decode the information available on the website and Google satellite view and deduce that the drop-off point is signposted from the access road in Praed Street. I decide that I’m not going to get any further and thank him for his efforts.

Image (c) Google Maps

A quick check on Google StreetView suggests that the Praed Street access road might not be that accessible, but I am now in the frame of mind that this whole exercise will be an adventure or quest that I will have to get some fun out of. The prize is clearly going to be some valuable and scarce information.

But this is too high-risk. Knowing the routes around the station, I know that a wrong turning could leave my in-laws standing around while I navigate the various one-way and no-right-turn roads in the area.

I have a brainwave – call the station and ask the simple question “how do you reach the drop-off point?” I type “paddington station number” into Google and dial the 0345 number that comes up. My heart sinks somewhat to discover that it’s another Network Rail number with an options menu. I repeat the question to the helpful woman but as I suspect, she’s in a Network Rail call centre so doesn’t have the information – but she does have the actual number of Paddington Station.

I speak to someone at Paddington Station reception, who confirms that the drop-off point can be accessed from Bishop’s Bridge Road – this is at the other end of the station from Praed Street – but crucially advises me not to go into the taxi queue on the left but to go into the right-hand lane, then turn in. This is the crucial piece of information that I have been after, so I can now plan the pick-up with almost-military precision.

Problem solved for now, but why does it have to be so difficult?

Silo thinking

The various actors in this journey are all operating in silos and, to make matters worse, they are remote silos: all the people I spoke to were operating in a remote call centre providing only the same information that I had already got on Google. They were all professional, courteous and helpful but their help couldn’t reach as far as joining up the bits of my customer journey: in other words, they weren’t outcome focused, since my outcome is “get my in-laws to my house with the minimum amount of walking”. I only managed to piece together the information because I’ve had many years’ experience of picking up and dropping off at Paddington as its been through several improvements and modifications. Anyone without that level of knowledge – or access to Google Maps – would have most likely been given the wrong information.

It could have been worse

This lack of joining up and thinking end to end was highlighted in a more high-profile case at the weekend when BBC defence correspondent Frank Gardner who uses a wheelchair since being shot in 2004 was stranded on a BA flight for 100 minutes on arrival at Heathrow. It’s common practice to stow wheelchairs in the hold and clearly mark them with a label to take them to plane door on landing. Clearly this didn’t happen and according to Gardner it’s not the first time either.

Coincidentally, a couple of days earlier I had met with Samantha Berry, a passionate advocate of customer experience and accessibility for Omniserv, who provide mobility assistance at Heathrow. There will be more on that meeting in a future article, but my take-away from the Paddington experience – and the Frank Gardner incident – is that you need the following conditions in place to provide a joined-up solution:

  • An understanding of customer outcomes
  • Access to detailed local knowledge
  • The ability to act on that knowledge to deliver those outcomes.

It’s easy to state, but apparently quite hard to do.

Postscript – on the day

Here’s what actually happened…

Armed with the essential knowledge about the entrance to the drop off area, I set off in time to arrive about 3 minutes after the train was due in to the platform. Perfect timing but no sign off the in-laws. I wait 5 minutes. No in-laws. I try calling. No response. I repeat this process over the next 10-15 minutes. Eventually I notice a poster with a number to call.

I speak to a helpful person at Paddington station reception. He informs me that the mobility buggy didn’t pick up my in-laws because they weren’t there on Platform 1. Had they actually travelled on that train? Yes, because my mother-in-law had called me. I make one final attempt to locate the errant in-laws and get through to my mother-in-law who was wondering where the buggy was when the train had arrived at Platform 10. I call the reception number again with their precise whereabouts and the same helpful person jumped into a buggy and picked them up.

One small error of coordination cost me 20 minutes wait time (not a big problem) and two rather confused in-laws (slightly bigger problem). Clearly getting these elements to join up continues to be a challenge…

The return journey was all fine however: the buggy arrived at the drop-off point and off they went, happily seated on a GWR train although as there had been a number of cancellations they were in a minority. GWR’s lamentable performance however is another story.