Peter Bricknell helps organisations build maturity in digital accessibility across people, processes, technology, and communication. With over 20 years’ experience across Europe, Africa and the USA, he can join the dots by bringing innovation from one type of industry to another. Drawing from the ISO 30071-1 standard on digital accessibility, he coaches and leads clients from establishing the accessibility business case, through to building the programme and capabilities, driving change and making a difference to the bottom line.
Imagine the scene. Alice, aged 61, is a family doctor. She earns well, and saves each year, depositing money into a savings account with her bank. On paper, she is the dream customer.
Alice is also dyslexic and, as she approaches retirement, she has started to notice some of the common signs of ageing. So, when she goes to top up her savings, she struggles with the passwords and the complex resetting process.
As a result of these difficulties, she finds another bank and opens a new account. Her previous bank has lost a potentially loyal customer all because the digital experience hasn’t considered her needs and those of potentially millions of others who have a digital accessibility challenge.
These can arise due to a range of conditions, including sight and hearing impairments, reading or cognitive problems, fine motor difficulties – which make it harder to control a mouse – or more general impairments associated with ageing.
The over 65s opportunity
Many companies have a fallacy to only focus on the young. However, figures have shown that the over 65s are the richest generation, keen to save, keen to spend wisely, and are ready to transfer this to the next generation. The International Longevity Centre found that 55p in every £1 in the UK is spent by over 65s, and that will rise to 63p by 2040. That is a lot of spend to ignore.
So, if your business is not thinking about the digital accessibility needs of this generation, then you risk failing in your customer service and negatively impacting on the bottom line.
Research by Hassell Inclusion – ‘A golden opportunity: Are you serving the needs of older online consumers?’ – found that over 80% of older consumers had frustrations with the apps that they used, and one-third abandoned an online purchase due to difficulties using the website. These frustrations included dealing with complex passwords, not finding what you need to do, not having enough time to complete the task in hand, and poor structure and layout of the pages.
One blind user told of a company where everything worked until you went to pay, and the payment element didn’t work for blind people. How much revenue was the company losing out on? And, were they even aware?
That said, many older people embrace new technologies – 95% of over 65s use a mobile phone, and over a third use virtual assistants, like Amazon Alexa. For Leon, who has a condition where he cannot feel his hands and feet, online shopping is great as he cannot physically get to the shops. However, he told us that he felt that “that many of these organisations have never tried to put themselves in the position of an older person and properly consider how we interact with websites and apps.”
Getting the digital experience right for over 65s
In the research, one in 10 (11%) of the over 65s said they would spend more online if the apps and websites were easier for them to use.
As many companies are in the process of their annual planning cycle, this is the perfect time to look at your investments in marketing, your digital estate, and in customer services, considering the potential impact the older consumer could have on your revenue, net promotor score, and customer loyalty.
What steps should CXOs take?
1. Understand the opportunity
It is important to acknowledge if there may be an accessibility issue and do the research into your customer’s needs. Conducting an audit of your digital experience, as well as comparing it to competitors, is a useful exercise as it could unlock opportunities you hadn’t previously considered. In addition, exploring what older consumers like and what they find frustrating can be done by conducting focus groups and gathering feedback about their specific accessibility requirements. Look at the end-to-end experience, from marketing emails to brochures, to transactions, and customer services, so you get ‘return on delight’.
For example, when one financial services company started to look at its customer demographics, it was surprised how many over 50s were signing up, but the number of people actually putting money in was much less than other age groups. They had never considered whether there was a problem in the process for older people, and as such were probably losing customers unnecessarily.
2. Address the practical fixes
Consider what to do for customers with conditions such as hearing loss, impaired vision, and poor hand control, as well as people with anxiety, and those who find it difficult to remember things. There are standards for this, such as the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.2), and auditing against these can help you find the problems and address them to give a great experience for all.
Some of the fixes can be relatively simple. These include making sure your videos have captions for customers with hearing impairments, making your buttons big enough to tap with an unsteady hand, and ensuring the design of your website and app has a clear layout and makes good use of white space.
For example, one bank had a drop-down list of all its different savings products. However, someone with shaky hands would find it very difficult to press the right choice either on a screen or tablet. By simply widening each row, it made it easier to read and select the choice.
3. Adopt an age-positive mindset
The third stage is to embed the approach into the way you work – in planning, development, and testing across your entire organisation.
As a CXO you can shape the direction of the business by asking three key questions when your business is looking to make any digital investment. How are you serving the over 65s and people with disabilities? How will this improve your service for all? Where have you considered accessibility in the budget and plans? Just asking these questions will help the team think wider about building solutions that serve the whole market, and serve them better. Retrofitting for their needs is neither efficient nor effective in the long term.
What is clear is the older demographic has become increasingly tech-savvy. In just 20 years’ time, older consumers will be those of us who are currently in our forties and fifties, are used to doing everything online, and expect the experience to remain user-friendly as we age.
None of us can stop the impairments that come with ageing, so CXOs need to consider how this will influence the design of their digital platforms so that they meet the needs of an increasingly tech-enabled older generation.