Being age-friendly makes perfect sense for businesses – and the customers they serve

Here, our Age friendly Programme Manager, Rebecca Bayliss, explains how customer-facing businesses, organisations, and community settings, such as shops, cafes, leisure centres, libraries and arts venues, have a huge and positive role to play.   

We want to encourage and enable such places to take an active role in supporting the older members of their local communities. But the topic can be complex for the uninitiated, and that’s why we’ve launched a new resource: How to be an age-friendly business: A framework for customer-facing settings. 

The framework maps out many of the steps you can take to be more age-friendly in the context of five key areas. These are: Your people, your premises, your communications, your offer and your place within the wider community. 

One of the biggest challenges with this work is to understand how to create change in a field where some of the current priorities and challenges often feel insurmountable. How do you justify prioritising your older customers as part of your business strategy when faced with the impact of Brexit, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the cost-of-living crisis? 

In short, we believe that embedding age-friendly practices has the potential to mitigate some of these challenges. This is particularly relevant because many age-friendly practices are likely to appeal to a whole range of potential customers not just those who are older. Therefore, it presents a perfect opportunity to further expand your customer base. 

With this in mind, there are three messages we want to share about age-friendly businesses: 

Older customers represent a sizeable consumer base. With people aged 55 and over having on average 25 times the assets of individuals aged between 16 and 24.

Some estimates suggest that by 2040, 63 pence in every pound will be spent by older households. with the total spending by this group to be worth £550 billion (ILC 2023). By taking some of these steps, more people – whether customers, staff, or volunteers – could stay in work, contribute to their communities for longer, and spend their money locally. In turn, this can support local economies, enable independent living, reduce social isolation, improve mental and physical health, and increase wellbeing.

People will go where they receive great service and have access to products and services that meet their needs and desires. So, taking steps to support and encourage older people to engage with and enjoy the consumer experience can encourage repeat business as well as the chance of bringing in new customers.

Research by the Institute of Customer Service in 2020 found that more than a million over 65s have experienced bad customer service. And in our own Ageism survey, among the 45% of people aged 50-71 who felt they’d been treated badly because of their age at least once in the last 12 months, 32% said it was as a consumer, with this figure rising to 43% for people aged 71 and over.

The experience older customers have with the staff in a business is so important that it could even mitigate other barriers.  

Members of our Experts by Experience network told us that some of the challenges or barriers they have faced when engaging with different businesses will often be forgiven if they are treated well, listened to, and respected by the staff. This was the one aspect of the customer experience that they felt most strongly about and that has the potential to make or break a decision to return.    

There are easy steps that any business can take to ensure that respect for and inclusion of older people is embedded in their business practices.  

Many of the identified and recommended practices we refer to in our framework for customer settings are likely to be things that successful businesses are doing already or be considered just good common sense. And yet, our previous work on this area found that 4 in 5 people aged over 55 say their favourite retail brand no longer understands them or what they need. 

This is not about being perfect, it’s about making improvements. All progress is beneficial and even the smallest of changes can make a huge difference to how older customers experience a business.

Bearing all of these points in mind, surely the question should not be ‘Why be age-friendly?’ but rather ‘Why not?’