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The Royal National Institute for the Deaf has provided this UK telephone service that gives a 5 minute confidential hearing test. To date, 300,000 people have taken the telephone hearing check.

Over 40% of people over the age of 50 have some level of hearing loss.

Much to my amazement (and my friends) my hearing is OK. Yet, I find that many of the people working at customer contact points, ranging from store checkouts to call centres, talk so quietly that I am forever having to say: “can you say that again”.

There is no doubt that the populations of Europe and the US are getting deafer. Few companies are adapting their customer contact points to reflect this fact. How big is the problem? The RNID believes there are 4 million people in the UK who could benefit from wearing a hearing aid, but who currently do nothing about it. Dick Stroud