Festival Place is setting the benchmark for other shopping centres with its innovative approach to visitors with disabilities.
It’s joined forces with disability experts Purple Advantage to deliver bespoke training to all of its 160 stores and centre staff to help them understand and have more confidence in how they engage with customers with both physical and hidden disabilities.
Led by FP’s Business Performance Team, the pioneering pledge to deliver the training across the whole centre – the first for a UK shopping centre – has been announced for Purple Tuesday today (Nov 4). It’s further demonstration of FP’s commitment to delivering true accessibility and excellent customer service to all its visitors.
Kayleigh Roe from the Business Performance Team said: “Accessibility for everyone has always been part of our ethos at FP and we have delivered many initiatives to ensure we are genuinely inclusive. But we know that some of our retailers and teams lack confidence in how to appropriately help some of our visitors with disabilities.
“By partnering with Purple Advantage we can deliver a flexible, rolling programme of training to ensure a genuine culture change for us all.
“Everyone who visits our centre deserves to have the best experience and being accessible doesn’t just mean where people can park, or how many lifts we have, it’s about how they are treated in the centre and how inclusive they are made to feel.
“We hope that other shopping centres will follow suit and help their visitors – and employees – the same way.”
Dr Chris Whitaker, founder of Purple Advantage, said: “This is an exciting partnership for us. To be able to deliver our training on such a wide scale shows the true commitment that Festival Place has to accessibility and inclusion.”
The training consists online briefings and teams will have material they can refer to for guidance. The rolling programme means that whenever new staff join, they too can take part.
Other inclusive and accessible initiatives that Festival Place has undertaken include:
- Wider spaced car parking bays – marked in blue – for disabled drivers.
- Shopmobility wheelchairs and scooters that can be hired on a daily or part daily basis.
- An induction loop system in the Customer Lounge, where hearing aids should be switched to T. There are also deaf awareness signs in participating stores where staff have been trained on how to better communicate with the deaf and hard-of-hearing communities.
- An access guide created in conjunction with national disability organisation AccessAble, which uses facts, figures and photographs to help people plan their journey to and around the centre. The guides cover everything from parking facilities and hearing loops to walking distances and accessible toilets.
- Quiet hours which run from 9:30am - 10:30am on Saturdays.
- A Calm Corner with sensory toys and equipment in the Customer Lounge, where children with sensory issues can take a quiet moment out from the busy shopping environment.
- Braille signs, which can be found in the lifts, by each floor number and by the Church Street entrance to Festival Place.
- Ear defenders for children, available at the Customer Lounge.
- Sunflower lanyards, which indicate to staff that the wearer may need additional support, help or a little more time.
- Inclusivity retailer mystery shop visits twice a year
For the latest information on Festival Place, please visit: https://www.festivalplace.co.uk/ or for more information on Purple Advantage visit www.purpleadvantage.com
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