Here at the Access Card team we have for a long time been committed to rolling out the use of the card as far and wide as possible and have, to date managed to do this successfully and quite organically by approaching decision-makers in key organisations.
A prime example of this was the work we developed with Merlin Entertainments. After listening to our member’s feedback we gradually, over time, managed to speak to the right people and convince them of not only how important the scheme was to disabled people, but also how useful it could be to them. We now have all Merlin Group venues onboard and have a great working relationship with them.
COVID
The COVID situation has seen a massive surge in demand from disabled people for support when using retail services such as supermarkets. The main two barriers we have been made aware of are the issues around Standing and Queuing in the new social distancing era, and accessing online shopping slots.
We’ve had reports of many stores happily accepting your Access Cards and meeting your needs with no issue at all but sadly, at the same time, have heard some awful stories about how businesses have failed and mistreated us as disabled people
The Access Card can certainly support disabled people and the stores involved but the demand has come so fast that stores have not planned for these issues and we simply cannot take time to grow relationships organically; so these issues need to be raised directly by you, our members.
So far, member feedback has been massively important and constructive and has given us the opportunity to talk to decision-makers which would otherwise have taken us months or years to develop relationships with.
A Feedback Template
To help you bring these issues to retailers attention we have produced an email template for you to use to outline the issues you have faced and how you would like to see things improved for disabled people. We are also asking that you copy us into this correspondence so that we can then educate the businesses further.
Feel free to copy and paste the text from the document below and email to the customer service team of the company your feeding back about.
Simply replace the text in italics with a little bit more information about your specific experience.
We have provided 3 email addresses to copy into your email so that we can then support you make your point.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1XrmNv2HVRHV7Fk2y8BFOcwZqqHg1LvCfqq9g2EwDjBI/edit
