Just the job

Fiona Miller – BT Age & Disability manager

 

 

Our job is to ensure that the interests of disabled people continue to be met. We are proud to work passionately in the interests of our older and disabled customers, helping them to increase their opportunities to communicate with the world around them.

The team has more than twenty years of experience in helping people with a wide range of disabilities. We are a relatively small team but we pride ourselves on our community involvement and our links with healthcare professionals and disability organisations.

 

 

 

The team has two main objectives. Firstly, to raise awareness of BT’s products and services designed to benefit people who are older or who have a disability, and secondly, to support BT’s product community in developing inclusive and accessible products and services. For example, we’ve helped to develop very popular products and services like the Big Button 100 phone and the BT Text service.

We act as 'accessibility consultants' and have developed good practice standards, for instance, for the provision of alternative media like Braille or audio. We have recently launched BT Sign, a website providing content in British Sign Language to make information more accessible to BSL users.

 

 

 

Well I don’t know of any other company that has a similar team actively going out into the community to build relationships and talk to groups about the benefits of new communications products. There are service providers that have dedicated call centres for disabled customers but none that provide the services that the Age & Disability action team does.

 

What are the main challenges you face in your job? 

The environment in which we operate has changed since I have been in the role – about seven years now. People are much more aware of disability legislation and quite rightly, disabled people demand equality of access. There are still issues to be overcome in the perception of impairment and stereotyping of disabled people to ensure that we are truly inclusive when we develop our services. There is a cultural change taking place both inside and outside BT and we are leading the way in promoting the adoption of inclusive design.


Apart from providing assistance and resources to various groups of BT customers and beyond – do you think your team’s activities bring something positive to the ‘BT brand’?

 

Absolutely! BT is a trusted brand and our vision is about helping people to thrive in a changing world. The population is ageing and, as we age, we can all expect to experience impairments. The way we treat our older and disabled customers has an impact on the way their friends and family perceive BT. Not only that but designing products with customers with impairments in mind makes them easier to use by everyone which is so important as technology becomes more complex and ease of use impacts on customer satisfaction.

It also makes good business sense for BT to consider the needs of a market worth an estimated £80 billion pounds.

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