By Roxana Widmer-Iliescu, Senior Coordinator For Digital Inclusion, ITU
Learning in the classroom lays the foundation, starting early on, for the rest of our lives. But when students lack equal access to today’s digital technologies, their personal and professional development can be affected for years to come. This is true, especially for children with disabilities.
Of the 240 million children with disabilities in the world today, half will never attend school at all, according to UNICEF estimates.
Those who do go to school, meanwhile, face limited access to course material, often causing them to fall behind compared to their peers.
Inclusion begins with the changing of mindsets and advocacy for the equal education of all children, regardless of their different abilities. At the same time, a growing range of technologies can provide content in digitally accessible formats, helping ensure equal access to information and knowledge in the classroom.
Accessible, inclusive educational solutions are at the forefront for International Day of Persons with Disabilities, observed on 3 December, with a special focus this year on “Transformative solutions for inclusive development: the role of innovation in fuelling an accessible and equitable world.”
Rapid advances in assistive technologies, backed up by ongoing innovations with artificial intelligence (AI), have created unprecedented opportunities to support persons with disabilities in living independent lives.
The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) works closely with its membership, with policy- and decision-makers, and with other stakeholders, to foster and implement digital accessibility, aimed at achieving the overarching global goal of digital inclusion of all citizens, without any discrimination.
Through “Accessible ICT for ALL” regional knowledge-development forums, ITU engages continually with key public- and private-sector information and communication technology (ICT) players to raise awareness of ICT accessibility as a key requirement for inclusion. Associated activities leverage knowledge through executive training, share best practices and challenges, and promote accessible digital solutions and innovative applications to support persons with disabilities in the digital space.
Starting with Accessible Americas in 2014, the regional “Accessible ICT for ALL” approach has since expanded around the world, with the latest events taking place from 1-3 November in Asia and the Pacific, from 16-18 November in the Americas, on 6 December in Europe, and on December 13, in the Arab Region.
Persons with and without disabilities must be included, equally and equitably, in today’s digital societies, environments, and economies. By recognizing technologies as a key enabler and by mainstreaming ICT accessibility across sectors, we can achieve an accessible digital world for all.
Digital inclusion for all
Equal treatment, regardless of age, gender, ability, or location, is a fundamental right for all. As our lives become ever more digital, equality and equity also hinge on digital inclusion.
Everyone in today’s world needs equal and equitable access to information, and to the use of digital services and products.
By helping countries define and implement ICT accessibility requirements, and by encouraging manufacturers to develop human centred technologies and embed accessibility features from the design stage, ITU aims to make digital spaces equitable for all.
ITU provides expert advice to policy- and decision-makers on ICT accessibility policies and strategies to support their effort in building inclusive digital societies and environments, which includes over 60 free resources in multiple languages to support everyone’s inclusion globally and thus also enable persons with disabilities to live independently in today’s digital world.
Targeted policies – taking account of the specific needs of persons with disabilities as end users – are crucial to ensure relevant digital access and use, as well as inclusive education, for all children and youth, including those with disabilities.
Inclusive recruitment
Persons with disabilities participate in the labour force much less than persons without disabilities, and their unemployment rate is higher.
Many employers are unfamiliar with basic accessibility principles. As a result, many online job portals present severe accessibility and usability barriers, so that persons with disabilities who try to apply for a job vacancy find it almost impossible to do so.
A forthcoming joint report from ITU and the International Labour Organization (ILO), Guidebook on accessibility of job application and recruitment system, shares recommendations to improve the accessibility and usability of online job application platforms, as well as practical steps and good practices to follow when recruiting persons with disabilities.
The report highlights risks of discrimination against candidates with disabilities using AI algorithm-based recruitment tools and offers recommendations on how to avoid bias. It also provides practical steps for creating and enforcing digital accessibility policies.
Salesforce, the global leader in CRM, has announced that Genie Customer Data Cloud, the #1 CRM data cloud, is now powered by Tableau, helping businesses better understand and unlock customer data and deliver actionable insights in real time and at scale. Now, any company can analyze billions of data points stored and harmonized in Genie using Tableau, and then visualize, explore, and automate insights and take action securely. In addition, because Genie is natively integrated with Tableau, businesses can drive down data warehousing costs, increase time to insight, and enable better decision making by bringing all their data and analytics together in one place.
Genie Customer Data Cloud now processes more than 100 billion customer records on average daily across the entire Salesforce Customer 360, enabling every company to use data and become a customer company by saving time and money while growing revenue with the world’s #1 CRM. During Cyber Week 2022 alone, Genie Customer Data Cloud enabled 43 billion customer engagements for Salesforce customers and ingested 1.1 trillion records.
Announced at Dreamforce, Genie Customer Data Cloud ingests, harmonizes, and unifies all of a company’s customer data across channels and interactions into a single, real-time customer profile, so every experience across the Customer 360 is more automated, intelligent, integrated, and real time.
The rise of customer companies
In today’s economic environment, every company must focus on their customers, and it all starts with data. Businesses have massive amounts of siloed, disparate, and difficult to manage data. In the past, companies needed to build complex data pipelines, which created issues with data duplication, static or out-dated data and ultimately, delayed or flawed decision making. To succeed, companies need access to vast amounts of data from within Salesforce and elsewhere that inform business decisions in relevant, easy-to-understand ways. With Genie Customer Data Cloud powered by Tableau, organizations can bring in harmonized customer data, engagement data and external data efficiently, and at scale.
“Every company needs to be a customer company, but customer expectations are changing in real time and companies need real-time data and timely actionable insights. Genie Customer Data Cloud is revolutionary because it is the first platform that can deliver real-time personalized customer engagement across every sales, service, marketing, commerce, and IT touchpoint,” said EVP and GM, Next Gen CRM and Unified Data Services, Salesforce, Steve Fisher. “Now, powered by Tableau, Genie Customer Data Cloud enables companies to securely visualize, explore, and act on their data about every customer, in real-time, on the right channel, at scale. This is only the beginning of what’s possible as we build more native automation, intelligent, and real-time integrations deeper into the platform.”
Genie Customer Data Cloud is revolutionary because it is the first platform that can deliver real-time personalized customer engagement across every sales, service, marketing, commerce, and IT touchpoint.
Genie Customer Data Cloud powered by Tableau
With Tableau now powering Genie Customer Data Cloud, customers in every business can visualize, automate, explore, and act on data in real time. This means:
Marketers can leverage data to understand the factors driving customers’ attitudes and behaviors and maximize every cart with personalized recommendations. Real-time sales, commerce, and web traffic data can help brands scale to meet demand quickly, delivering a flawless customer experience and connecting engagement to activity, for example, following unplanned endorsements or a video going viral on social media.
Service leaders can access real-time data on customer activity — such as what’s in their shopping cart — and use that to route customers to the right agents with the right skills. Once connected, Genie provides the agent with a unified customer profile so they can personalize the service experience for that customer.
Automotive leaders can get insights into daily and monthly driving distances and trips by model and region, helping them understand driving habits and usage to help upsell subscription services, and better service customers.
Retailers can turn their enormous reservoir of customer data into actionable insights. A holistic understanding of customer data can help create personalized shopping experiences and help organizations across the industry make informed decisions about marketing, sales, and loyalty.
Financial Services companies can use client activities and life events to better understand their clients’ financial needs and proactively help them plan for key milestones like buying a new home, paying for college, or planning their retirement.
Customers are using Genie to create personalized customer experiences at massive scale to increase revenue, efficiency, and productivity
With Genie Customer Data Cloud, companies across every industry globally can leverage their data directly within Salesforce to drive the most relevant business outcomes. Whether patient data for healthcare, telemetry data for manufacturing, or shopper data for retail, Genie can ingest all data in real time and create personalized actions across the Customer 360.
Formula 1® uses Genie to deepen fan engagement and attract new fans
Formula 1® growth has been explosive in recent years, and its growing fan base of 500 million global fans and a global TV audience of 1.5 billion is at the heart of everything it does. Formula 1 partnered with Salesforce to get a full view of its fanbase, increase and deepen the intensity of fan engagement, and attract new fans. Genie enables Formula 1 to understand how its data integrates across every channel — physical and nonphysical, and across the globe. Salesforce helps the organization understand its growing fanbase using AI and automation to deliver scalable, hyper-personalized, and real-time experiences. Formula 1 can now move away from a siloed set of solutions to have a seamless platform, Genie Customer Data Cloud, to store and maintain its fan data.
Inter reaches the right customer at the right time through personalized and automated actions
Inter, a financial services platform in Brazil, is using Marketing Cloud, Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Experience Cloud, CDP powered by Genie, Tableau, and Einstein’s artificial intelligence capabilities to bring together a comprehensive understanding of customer behavior across all their service verticals. This has become a fundamental part of their offering, which allows customers to bank and make purchases like airline tickets, and insurance, among others. Inter has seen a 20x return on investment with CDP powered by Genie Customer Data Cloud, and 35x marketing campaign conversion rate.
Casey’s accelerates focus on personalization to drive guest loyalty and business impact
Casey’s, the third largest convenience chain across the US with more than 2,400 stores, engages millions of guests each year with fast and convenient service, and now personalized digital experiences. With CDP powered by Genie, Casey’s leverages first-party data to create audience segments from more than 13 million customer records 30x faster than before. With improved customer data management, Casey’s connects data from online orders, in-store transactions, and emails, enabling the company to send relevant messages at scale.
