Corporate culture and personal behaviour
I’ve been thinking about the relationship between corporate culture and the personal behaviour of employees, and about how much corporate culture affects the behaviour of individuals and how the way individuals behave affects the corporate culture. Does one come first and the other grow from it, or do they mix and change each other and grow together?
The example I’m thinking of is how the IT department manages changes to working practices and how managers communicate to their teams. Both have the same approach. Things are done to employees, not with them. There is no consultation about the best way to do things, no communication about why a change is being made or what the benefits might be.
So I wonder, is that the way of the corporate culture and the manager having worked within that culture has picked up the behaviour, or is that the management style of the manager(s) and it creates the culture? And I wonder how do I avoid it, how do I avoid adopting the same corporate culture, especially when I don’t think it’s a healthy or productive culture?
In-messaging donations thank you idea
With various messaging services taking or soon to be able to take payments it opens up more donations collecting opportunities for charities.
Once a donation has been made the charity could use a sticker/gif making service to generate a personalised thank you and message it to the donor.
This would be a nicer experience for the donor than a simple thank you message and would make the first charity to do it stand out in the messaging donations space.
One place for all your messaging
The dream of having a single interface to deal with all your communications is one I’ve had for ages, and one that seems increasingly needed as the number of messaging services grows.
Imagine having to only open one app on your phone or browser tab on your computer to read SMS, email, Facebook messages, WhatsApp, etc., all in a single stream. Wouldn’t that be great. No more switching between SMS to chat to this person, WhatsApp for that person, work email, slack, etc., etc.
The Facebook Messenger app goes a little way towards this by having SMS messages for your phone, And Franz, free messaging desktop app that combines chat & messaging services into one application, goes a step further by having a long list of messaging services you can integrate, but both still have lots of limitations.
Of course there would be challenges. Not least, there are security concerns with a single service having access to all of your other accounts and providing means for quickly and easily spreading a phishing attack. And for a service like this to truly work it would need to address enterprise interoperability issues such as common format data storage. These challenges, and many more, along with the ‘we want to own it all and not play nicely with others’ approach of companies like Facebook are why we don’t have this kind of thing right now. But I can dream…
Perhaps an MVP could start with providing a simple notifications list of messages (and not other notifications like phones do) and collect data on how many messages people get from which services, which messages they respond to immediately, and which they leave till later. Understanding this user behaviour would then be used to improve the UX allowing users to filter the message stream in different ways, set reminders to read certain messages at certain times, prioritise senders, etc., etc.
Weeknotes 12
What happened this week…
- Started receiving lots of positive reviews on Trustpilot.
- Customer Journey mapping using See, Think, Do, Care, which will evolve into our Ecommerce Marketing Plan.
- Updated the roadmap for Magento to include all the development work we want to do over the next six months.
- Attended the RMSP Programme Board meeting.
- Designed emails to go to 300k supporters and all our suppliers.
- Met with our Business Improvement Project lead to talk about our Customer Services project and how we can bring it together with other Customer Services improvements.
- Met with iWeb, our Magento development agency to discuss the development roadmap.
Read this week…
- The Happy Healthy Non-profit.
- Building a Shop with Sub-Second Page Loads: Lessons Learned.
- Automating Google Analytics reporting via Google sheets.
- Applying the Scientific Method to Ecommerce Marketing.
- The Product Manager’s Essential Reading List for 2016.
Doing next week…
- Sending more review request emails.
- More RMSP process mapping.
- Shop facing Customer Services training.
- Preparing the send list of 300k supporters for our Christmas cards email.
- Customer Services presentation for the Ecommerce Working Group.
Interesting stat of the week…
- We sent 574 emails requesting a review of the Online Shop and had a response rate of 6.62%, better than the industry average of 5.7%. 38 customers wrote reviews and all of them gave us five stars.
In the not too distant future….
- Better finance reporting to provide the business with a clearer idea of the profitability of Ecommerce.
Social selling: What it is, and what it definitely isn’t
Social selling: What it is, and what it definitely isn’t
Not sure I agree, but it’s interesting nonetheless.
Internet applications at a Wedding reception
Imagine our internet applications taking on stereotypical human form at your average wedding reception. What would be going on?
The website is the grandad passed-out drunk in the corner, snoring loudly so everyone knows he’s there and will need someone to look after him and make sure he gets home.
The apps is the dad embarrassing himself on the dance floor, trying desperately to get people to join him and not yet realising that his time has passed.
Messaging is the hip-young-thing going around talking to people, chatting to auntie about how lovely ceremony was, buying the best man a drink, directing people to the toilets, booking taxi’s, and making it all looks effortlessly easy.
Relaunching interniser
As I’ve thought more about bots and what they could be used for (pre-diagnosis for the 111 service and getting info about places to visit) I decided to relaunch interniser as a side project to do all my bot projects under. It seems more appropriate than RogSwaBot which would be fine for more personal stuff and which I may still work on.
I built a quick responsive webpage in html 5 and will get it uploaded once I’ve set up the domain. And I set up the Facebook page so I can connect the webpage to the messenger service. The next stage will be to start building an MVP bot using a simple keyword response system before I move on to learning Python and how to integrate a more complex AI system.
I don’t know where interniser might go but it should be an interesting side project.