Disclaimer: The below post is meant for informational purposes only. Do not use this in place of professional legal advice.
Customer Service Standard:
The customer service standard is part of the AODA. The basic premise is to set out requirements for how organizations must become more accessible to people with disabilities. This standard applies to any organization that provides either goods, services or facilities to the public. The Customer Service Standard applies to designated public sector organizations as of January 1, 2010 and to other providers of goods or services as of January 1, 2012. The customer service standard can be broken down into 3 parts: Policy, Training and Feedback.
Policy,Procedure and Practices:
The main focus of this section is to ensure that organizations have policy, procedure and practices in place that maintains the dignity and independence of all persons when the organization is providing goods, services or facilities. Policy is what the organization intents to do, procedure is how an organization plans to carry it out and practice is how it actually happens on a day to day basis.
An example can be that a restaurant has a policy to offer to give a receipt to the customer to confirm the final charge of a meal. Now let’s say the customer has a visual impairment and can’t read the printed receipt. It can be company policy to offer to read the receipt to the customer, provide braille version of the receipt or provide an electronic copy of the receipt with text to speech software. In each case the customer is being provided access to the organization’s services/goods that maintains their dignity and independence.
Training:
Training covers how to provide goods and services to any person with a disability. There are two groups of employee/volunteers that require training. This first group is anyone that interacts with the public or a 3rd party on behalf of the provider. The second group is anyone directly participates in the development of the organization’s policy. The training covers the Customer Service standard in addition to 4 other aspects listed below:
- How to communicate and interact with persons with various types of disabilities
- How to interact with persons who uses an assistive devices or service animals or support persons
- How to operate the organization’s own assistive equipment to help a person with a disability
- How to handle a scenario of a person with a disability having trouble accessing the organization’s goods or services.
Feedback:
This requires that all organizations that provide goods or services have a process for receiving and responding to feedback. The feedback must be permit people to send feedback either in person, by telephone, or via electronic communication (eg. email). It is the responsibility of the organization to respond back in a timely manner. The feedback process must be made publicly available.