How the telecommunications industry is meeting the needs of the hearing aid wearer
Fixed line communication
Fiona Miller, National Manager, BT Age and Disability
It gives me very great pleasure to be here today and to have been able to sponsor this event.
I am glad to have the opportunity to tell you something more about what the Age & Disability Action Team does and BT's approach to product development. In particular, I hope that I can cover some of the consumer issues, particularly in relation to information and finding the right phone.
Fig.1 BT Age and Disability Action Team structure
So, who are we? The Age & Disability Action Team is a customer-facing team of about 30 people. We are spread all round the country. We have the largest numbers of people in our regional teams from Aberdeen in the North down to Bournemouth in the South, and we have a smaller communications team looking at guides, websites and accessibility issues. There is also a parallel customer service team in Northern Ireland, who are doing a similar sort of role to our regional team.
It is our 20th year of operation. We are very proud of that. We think we have proved it is not the case that BT would ignore the needs of all of its customers when it became privatised, and that the inclusive approach is actually good for business.
We think, also, that not just amongst telecommunications companies, but amongst businesses generally, we are a unique team. I do not believe that there is anyone else who does anything in the same way that we do.
So what do we do? While we do generate sales for the company, obviously we want people to buy our phones and services; our key role is not about generating revenue. It is about enhancing the reputation of the company, and making sure people understand that we have an inclusive approach; that we have a long tradition of developing products and services that are accessible for people, and that we will continue to do it.
On the one hand, we go out and raise awareness of what BT has to offer in the form of customers, the ambassadors for BT. I will tell you more about that later. We also regularly consult about issues and services.
The other half of what we do is looking at the awareness of disability issues within BT as a whole, raising awareness so that customers can take advantage of our services. We produce guidelines for inclusion and accessibility, so that we can include people, everyone, when we are developing a service.
We are involved in developing training packages, both from the point of view of BT people as a whole in terms of raising disability awareness, and more specifically for community engineers, who may go out and fit a free-of-charge tone caller for a hard-of-hearing customer.
What I would say is that we are not about developing special services, in the same way as David said. We are not about looking at a particular service for a particular group of people. What we are about is ensuring that anyone who wants to access our services is able to access those services.
When a new service or product is being developed, we ask ourselves, "Is that product going to be of particular interest to a particular group of people?" and can we help support it in that way.
BT is a service provider. Nokia is a manufacturer. You will have heard lots of discussions about, "Is it the responsibility of the service provider or the manufacturer to instigate the development of a product?" It really is a chicken-and-egg situation. There is not a perfect answer to this one. There is, I will admit, a lot of buck-passing in this area, but BT has products which are branded BT. As such, it is key that they are developed to the quality and the specification that we actually want, because our reputation can stand or fall by the products that we sell.
Therefore, we do work very closely with the manufacturers who make the telephones for us. Within my team, we have people who act as product representatives. They work closely with our product managers to develop the specifications in order to produce phones that are inclusively designed. We are also able to highlight particular customer requirements to identify particular customer groups, as I said before, and help with the marketing of those products.
As well as being involved with the design and development, we also support product testing. In the early stages, before we want people to actually play with the phones for us, we use them ourselves and test them out. In that way, we can iron out some of the early problems that there might be on a new product. Once the initial concerns have been overcome, we will then involve members of our customer base in helping us with the testing. I think some people have done so in this room.
We also have a Payphones Disability Forum, and we are aiming for 100% of amplification in our street payphones. It's currently running at about 70%, but the aim is to increase that to 100%.
We have also recently established a panel of people from amongst our own employees to help us with looking at new products and services, and testing them out. Our employees are representative of our customers. We have about 45 people on that panel at the moment, and the numbers are growing almost daily.
One of the things that it is important to remember is that we have a wide range of phones. We do recognise people's differing requirements and we recognise that people have different preferences.
The first Converse phones were launched in 1992 and the popular Big Button phone was launched in 1998. Since then, the ranges have developed. Many of the phones have features that can be helpful for people who are hard of hearing, and much of that information is found on our website www.btplc.com/age_disability, we are really rather proud of it. It is an accessible site itself and we have just recently got the accreditation "See it Right" from the RNIB.
We do not aim to put every accessible feature into every product. What we want is for all our customers to have a choice, and there is also a place for a very basic telephone in the market, so we don't aim to put everything into every phone.
In the middle of our stand is the latest phone, the Relate 3000, which we hope will be launched next month. I think a number of people here have been helping us with the testing of that phone.
The specification of that phone was drawn up between the people in A & D and the product managers, specifically from feedback that we get from people on a day-to-day basis. We fully expect it to be another big seller like the Big Button phone because it covers so many different features.
It has incoming and outgoing amplification. It has an optional lock on the amplification as well. It has an inductive coupler, hands-free and headset facilities, ringer tone and volume selection, visual calling etc. We really do think that this is going to be a big high street seller.
One of the issues that was highlighted earlier was about how people find out about phones and how do they choose the phone which best suits them. I have mentioned before that we have a website with information and we also have guides. We go out and actively talk to local groups about the products that are available. I have some examples of things that are going on in the early part of this month.
We are going to lipreading classes in Stoke and Crewe, to audiology teams in Bradford, Retford and Bridlington, as well as talks to groups like the University of the Third Age and Independent Living Centres. That's just a kind of snapshot fairly typical of the types of groups that we go out and talk to. We are actively developing our relationships with professionals like audiologists, occupational therapists and social services, in order to make more people aware of the products that are available.
Our advisers receive about 250 calls a day and our website has resulted in more hits to the BT online shop than any other, so it shows that there is obviously a big demand for this type of product.
Talking about shops, I think you will probably all have recognised the fact that BT no longer has any shops in the high street. A lot of people have said this is a real concern because there is nowhere you can go and actually see the phones. However, we have a network of what we call resource centres throughout the UK, where we donate phones so that people can go and try them before they buy. Currently, we have about 200 locations. This number rises to about 600 if you add in all of the additional individual people that we have loaned phones to in Social Services, etc
To give a couple of examples of the sorts of locations, the Disabled Living Foundation on the Harrow Road in London has phones where you can go and try them out, and the Catholic Caring Services for Deaf People in Carlisle. They are fairly typical examples. The most northerly centre we have is in Thurso. I think we have phones loaned for the new Hearing Concern bus as well. When that goes out and about, phones will be there for people to try.
Although we do not have our own shops now, we do sell to third parties. You will have seen phones in places like Dixons and Argos, for example. We sell to the distributors who then sell through the catalogue accounts. We hold what we call range reviews, where we get all the buyers together, show them all the product range, and then they can choose those types of products which best suit their needs for their particular store or their particular catalogue.
The thing to bear in mind is that, when they are doing their buying, they are looking four to six months out, so they are looking now at the types of products which are possibly in our development portfolio at the moment for something which they can sell in six months` time.
Although we can highlight the features, we can point out the different phones and tell them what the opportunities are, you can't actually force them to buy them. That is one of the difficulties. You have to be aware that it is not through lack of trying that some of the phones are not easily visible in other high street shops now that we do not have our own.
One of the areas that a couple of people have talked about is call steering. We know people dislike call steering, and it is not just hard of hearing people; it is everyone generally. We have to accept, though, that they are not going to go away. They can be useful to the customer, in that they get you to the person who can best answer your call, and they are very useful for businesses. The issue, though, is that they are badly designed in a lot of cases.
BT, together with a lot of other consumer groups, like Hearing Concern, have produced a paper highlighting the barriers that there are for disabled people with call steering. We have done a lot of work of our own within BT to improve the systems. You may well say that there are still improvements we can make, and we probably would agree with you, but the number of options that people have to go through has been reduced and simplified, so you have a better ability to be able to get to where you want. For instance, if you want to get information about a product, you now only have to go through two stages. There is the issue about what happens when you get through to a person, and we are refreshing the disability awareness of all our people in our call centres as well.
Having said that, we have this report about all the different barriers, and we are actively looking for people to come on board with us, to support and jointly sponsor some research into good practice for call steering. If there are any companies here today who would like to join us and help sponsor some research, then please do come and talk to me, because we are keen to get a pan-industry piece of research going.
We are proud of our history and our achievements, but we are not complacent, and we know there is always room for improvement. We are always open to suggestions and ideas. We are looking at new things, new developments, and you will hear about a couple of them later. If you have any other suggestions or thoughts of what we can do better, then please do let us know. We would only be too happy to listen.
Discussion
LARAINE CALLOW, HEARING CONCERN: I was interested in your comment about how do people find out information. This is something that Hearing Concern is always looking at. How do we share information? How do people find you? How do they find us
NEW SPEAKER: I work with Peterborough Social Services as a support technician. I can only say that BT are very accessible when I have to make enquiries of them. I can't think of a better service and back up than we get from that company. When you deal with other phone companies and have to sort out bills through Social Services for people who cannot do it themselves, there are such barriers, but I find BT are absolutely wonderful. I think a lot of people would agree with me. Thank you.
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