Being visually impaired carries stigmas and challenges that are difficult to overcome when looking for employment. A partnership between the Junior Blind of America and TCN, a global provider of enterprise grade cloud-based call center solutions, highlights how technology can be used to overcome the visual limitations that young individuals have so they can work in contact centers.
A statistic by the National Federation of the Blind regarding the employment rates of the blind and visually impaired underscores the challenges this population faces. According to the organization, the unemployment rate in 2013 was 59.8 percent, meaning only four in 10 people were employed. The data points also indicates it doesn’t include individuals that have given up looking for employment, which means the actual number could be much higher.
“Junior Blind of America remains committed to training our students for success by equipping them with the skills they need to achieve gainful employment,” said Allison Burdett, director of rehabilitation and employment services at Junior Blind of America. “Our ongoing partnership with TCN has allowed us to broaden our curriculum and provide our students with the opportunity to thrive within the customer service and call center field.”
The TCN Platform 3 VocalVision is a virtual call center technology designed for the Contact Center Training program. The company has come together and offered the platform as part of the Junior Blind’s Contact Center Training and Employment Services Program. This included bringing in the Job Access with Speech (JAWS) software, the leading screen reader, to provide individuals with vision impairment a comprehensive platform so they can interact fully within contact center settings to deliver services customers require.
With the TCN technology, along with the Junior Blind’s curriculum, students receive hands on skill and experience to be proficient enough to secure employment in the call center industry.
The Platform 3.0 is a cloud-based contact center suite designed to simplify the complicated infrastructure of call centers with predictive dialer, Interactive Voice Recording (IVR), call recording, business analytics and other leading features that are essential in today’s environment.
“We are confident that this partnership is directly playing a role in not only expanding our technology user base, but also opening new doors of employment for visually impaired adults who are trying to launch their careers and succeed in life,” said Terrel Bird, CEO and co-founder of TCN.
We live in a world with many individuals that have a wide range of disabilities, blocking them from easily using the infrastructure businesses have in place. Usually this discourages them from applying for any openings. But development in information and communications technologies (ICT) has introduced many solutions that take into consideration different disabilities.
TCN is a great example of a company taking the initiative to help one segment of this population so they can have productive and independent jobs. By making its resources available to the Junior Blind of America and coming together with JAWS, the company has accepted its corporate responsibility and used its resources for the greater good.
Edited by Kyle Piscioniere