Customer service for deaf people

Below is a great article written by Ben Wragg, one of our users in the UK. I think you'll find it very interesting and hope that those of you who design or implement IVRs will take note:

"We too suffer in Britain from wretched Customer Service phone systems. It is bad enough when you have good hearing, but imagine if you don't; it can be impossible! There are huge numbers like us, at a loss with existing systems, who could just about manage with a really user-friendly system. According to RNID, the British charity for the deaf and hard of hearing, one person in seven has a hearing problem to some degree. Many deaf people are strangely reticent about their disability; perhaps it is because, as a blind friend puts it, "Blindness evokes sympathy but deafness evokes mirth".

When trying to contact a "service" what happens? First we have to navigate the person whose recorded voice answers the phone. This voice is usually female, and therefore the pitch of her voice is at the less audible end of the range. Then she (or he) has had no training in how to speak; mostly too fast, slurred and to make matters worse may be in an unfamiliar accent. I greatly respect the Scottish people but now have great difficulty understanding what they say. One can shout and swear to one's heart's content, but somehow it is never heard.

If by luck or chance we get through to a live human voice our problems are by no means over. Though there are more male voices at this stage, they suffer from an inability to understand our problem; if we say "speak clearly because I am deaf" the reply is invariably "no problem", following which they speak as they always speak -- too fast and indistinctly. If we remonstrate, they may start to shout, which makes it worse; we can usually cope with the volume problem by means of hearing aids; the real problem is distortion for which there seems to be no effective solution. On the rare occasions when we can hear OK there is often the problem of background noise, usually talking and laughing, which interferes cruelly. Further there are inexplicable but very considerable differences between different systems, which must presumably be due to poor design and/or maintenance; I have never seen a discussion of the causation of these problems.

In practice I do not believe that solution of these problems will happen in my lifetime.

I take a different approach that could be adopted by anyone claiming to be deaf and insist on communicating in writing be email, text, or even snail mail. We may be in a better position to do this in the United Kingdom since the passing in 1995 of the Disability Discrimination Act, which makes it illegal for a business to discriminate against any disabled person in the provision of a service. Clearly making it impossible for a deaf person to communicate with a supplier falls within this definition. So, when I have problems which occurs perhaps 2 or 3 times a year, I write personally to the chairman or CEO of the business pointing out the problem, emphasising its illegality and saying that a copy of the letter is being sent to the RNID. I do not know what RNID does with these copies but it certainly seems to worry the recipient. By magic a means of written communication becomes available."

Posted by gethuman on Wed, 20 Sep 2006 9:41pm