ISO has recently published ISO22458 - Consumer Vulnerability. The aim of this standard is to help organisations to identify and respond to customer vulnerabilities. It exists to ensure that organisations are fully committed to providing a fair and inclusive service with consideration given to the needs of vulnerable users.
Meeting the requirements of this standard
To meet the requirements of this standard an organisation must demonstrate that it has effective systems in place to identify and accommodate service users who may be vulnerable. Additionally, the service offered by the organisation must be fully accessible including any marketing materials and websites. To ensure this is the case an accessibility review must be completed and all operatives dealing with vulnerable groups must be trained so that they can accommodate vulnerable users.
We do not start you from a blank page. We bring a complete, ready-built library of management system documentation with us. Policies, procedures, registers, risk assessments, audit checklists and training material, already mapped to the clauses of ISO 22458. That material is then tailored to the way your business actually runs, rather than your business being reshaped to fit a template. It is the single biggest reason a fixed-price engagement can hold to a predictable timescale: the writing is largely done, so the work is in adapting it, implementing it and building the evidence.
See our ISO consultancy service for how onsite and remote delivery works, or our system implementation service for what the build stage involves.
How ISO 22458 certification works
We take you all the way to ISO 22458 certification, and certification is guaranteed, backed by a 100% success rate. We build the management system around the way your business already works, support you through your internal audit and management review so your team owns them, and close out anything an assessor would otherwise raise before the audit rather than after it.
The system we leave you with is integrated and meant to be used. It should not add workload or complexity to how you already run, and if it does then it has been built wrong. By the time the assessor arrives your people know the system and can answer for it, because it is theirs.
It is a fixed price, agreed before we start, with payment by milestones or monthly instalments. Consultancy clients also get our ISO and legal update service at no extra cost, so the system does not quietly go out of date once we have finished.
We help you choose the right certification body too, based on an objective review of what you actually need rather than who we happen to know: whether accreditation is required by your customers and tenders, what the full three-year cycle costs, and how quickly a body can realistically get an assessor to you. Lead times vary far more than prices do. Our guide to choosing a certification body works through all three.
Benefits of ISO 22458 Certification
- Demonstrate to customers and other partners that the organisation is committed to providing an accessible and inclusive service
- Gain recognition for your efforts in developing and implementing an inclusive service
- Mitigate the possibility of accidentally excluding or disadvantaging vulnerable users
- Establish effective systems for monitoring and dealing with any concerns about vulnerable users
- Establish systems for ongoing checks of accessibility arrangements