Customer Service - sponsored by W.C. Duke Associates, Inc.
Transversal Provides Online Customer Service Solution to Enable Websites to Access £80 Billion Disabled Market
Cambridge, UK: Organizations are risking missing out on a major market by not being able to provide disabled and visually impaired customers with online answers to shopping and customer service questions. This is the view of Transversal (www.transversal.com), providers of Disability Discrimination Act-compliant eCustomer Service software, who believe that organizations need to do more than simply comply with the legal accessibility requirements if they are to genuinely offer disabled customers a service.
There are 10 million disabled adults in the UK, spending over £80 billion annually. The Internet should provide the perfect environment to provide goods and services to this market, but too many websites can not respond to the most basic customer service questions from groups such as the visually impaired.
Recent research by analysts Verdict reported that online shopping rose by 44.5 per cent in the three months up to Christmas 2004 with estimated sales of £2.6bn and nearly 24 per cent of the UK population buying online. This comes against a backdrop of a fall of 0.4 per cent in like-for-like retail sales in December, according to the British Retail Consortium and accountants KPMG.
The Disability Discrimination Act, which came into force on 1st October 2004 makes it a legal requirement for anyone providing goods or services to the public to ensure that disabled people can access their premises, or that an acceptable alternative service is made available. This includes websites as well as physical business locations such as shops.
“Businesses must look beyond simple compliance with the Disability Discrimination Act in order to make sure that their sites provide the answers that customers are looking for. Ignoring the estimated 15-20 per cent of the population that is disabled risks missing out on a major market,” commented Gerard Buckley, CEO, Transversal. “The recent Christmas shopping season demonstrated the growth in online shopping at the expense of the high street – websites must be in a position to meet this need.”
Transversal’s Metafaq software enables users to quickly and efficiently access web content and customer service information from a company’s website. Metafaq implementations integrate closely with specialist screen reader software to make them compliant with the requirements of the Disabled Discrimination Act and are tested and validated up to Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) level AAA. The solution uses Transversal’s unique proprietary Memory Engine technology to understand customer questions and provide precise intelligent answers from a dynamic knowledgebase of customer service advice.
For more information about Transversal’s screen reader DDA compliant technology please visit www.transversal.com.
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http://transversal.com/html/news/viewpress.php?article=37