Healthy retail: hints and tips for healthy customer service is one of a series of five ILC guides created to help retailers understand the barriers older people may face when shopping.

This guidance on Healthy retail: hints and tips for healthy customer service should take approximately 6 minutes to read. It gives you the basics on why great customer service is important, and how everyone can benefit: customers, workers and retailers.

We’ve created these guides to help retailers understand how they can respond to an ageing population, and why being inclusive makes commercial sense. Welcoming a wider range of customers and workers opens up new opportunities for businesses.

Everyone’s entitled to a healthy, happy and long life – but the ageing process affects us all differently. Retailers have a key role to play in enabling customers and staff to live healthier, more active later lives. Making shopping environments more welcoming and inclusive supports independence, helps us stay fit, and ensures that people who have a health condition, disability or caring responsibility can maintain access to the products and services they want.

This guide explores how you can adapt customer service to become more inclusive for customers that include older people, those with buggies and small children, and those with limited mobility or impaired vision. This can help you avoid common customer complaints and gain a valuable advantage in the current economic landscape. It shares ideas, real-life examples, and sources of further information.

ILC has created these guides to help transform the way the retail sector sees and serves older people. We believe that encouraging inclusive shopping spaces is better for everyone, no matter our age or ability.