Using Revue for communicating to colleagues

Roger on 28/12/2016

I’ve been using Revue, a simple email newsletter system, for the past twenty weeks to send weekly update emails, mostly to internal colleagues. The emails include what we’ve been working on this week, articles we’ve read, what we intend to work on next week and an interesting statistic from the Ecommerce business. The emails aren’t used to give detailed projects status updates, they are just a way of giving people who read it a broad overview of what is going on in ecommerce at the BHF.

Why Revue?

I could have produced the weekly emails in a number of ways. I could have just sent the emails using Outlook, which would have been simple but wouldn’t have provided any feedback on who is reading the emails. Or at the other end of the scale of complexity I could have used our ESP Dotmailer, which is would have been more on-brand but more work to create the emails.

I went with Revue because the weekly updates were a test to see if people were interested in what we were doing. If they weren’t then I would have stopped, so Revue provided an easy middle ground with statistics about who opened the emails. 

Good things about Revue

  • It’s easy to use.
  • It’s free.
  • It shows statistics of who opened the emails and how many times.

Not so good things about Revue

  • The template is limited, although there is a paid version.
  • It’s just about usable on a mobile, but it’s not great.


Generally the emails are opened by everyone on the subscribers list so there must be some interest in knowing what is going on without having to read through project status updates. These weekly updates also forces me to think about what we’ve done and what we’ll be doing. So, as the test seems to have been a success I’ll continue to use Revue. 

My 2016

Roger on 28/12/2016

2016 has been different to all the years that came before it. 2016 is the first year of no big changes in my life, no new job, no moving to a new town, no taking on a new project. Not changing is a new challenge for me. My life up until this year has been about moving on to new things, accepting new challenges, changing things regularly so as not to become static or too stable. But after forty years I finally realised that constant change creates limitations and that sometimes, staying put and seeing things through can be more of a challenge than moving on. And so with no big new changes this year my focus has been on smaller iterative improvements to work, projects and life. Here are a few of them: 

Growing the Ecommerce business at the British Heart Foundation

  • Learned about Product Management and Service Design to provide some improved frameworks for the business.
  • Recruited our first Ecommerce Executive.
  • Learned about transitioning projects into operational business as usual.
  • Launched Heartfelt, the new healthy recipe book by Pippa Middleton.
  • Began selling on Amazon.
  • Started working with a new supplier to ship internationally.
  • Redesigned and relaunched the Online Shop.

ATBA-UK

  • Organised the first UK Championship, meaning we have one competition a year instead of six.
  • Brought Instructor Training in-house so make sure we generate enough income each year for the ATBA-UK to continue to trade.
  • Trained loads of new Mountainboard Instructors.
  • Rewrote the Instructor Manual based on the course I deliver.
  • Went to the first ever guerrilla mountainboard competition.

Bucks Mind

I didn’t work all the time, I did a few other things too, including visiting lots of beaches and going on a few walks. I bought a new mountainboard, rode it a few times, and then stopped riding. 

Is Single Sign On really good for customer experience?

Roger on 23/12/2016

Lots of organisations have multiple websites and online services that require users to have an account with a user ID and password. Often these sites and services were developed in isolation to each other and then the idea of providing users with Single Sign On (SSO) comes along and organisations begin working on how to offer SSO across all platforms, and often in the name of providing good Customer Experience.

Is SSO good for Customer Experience?

The idea of using a Single Sign On service seems like it should be good for customer experience. SSO should make it easier for your customers to access services using only one set of account details, which makes it easier for them to remember. But I’m not so sure. It seems to me that it breaks one of the core principles of good customer experience: allowing the customer to choose how they interact with the service. From the customer’s perspective it could also be seen to be affecting the principle of being transparent as to the user, they effectively already have an account on a site that they might have never even visited (even though actually they only have one account with the organisation). 

I’ve also seen poor customer experience resulting from using a central website as the Identity Provider (IDP) for other websites and when a customer tries to reset their password on one of the satellite sites and is taken to the main site to do but then left to manually search for the site they were originally on. Creating dead-ends isn’t good for customer experience.
Done well, SSO should be good for the organisation as it provides a single-view of the customer and their behaviour, but achieving this isn’t an easy task. And what is good for the organisation should be good for the customers of a customer-centric organisation, but again, achieving this is a difficult thing to do.

SSO Vs. Social Login

Social Login (using Twitter, Facebook or Google) is often used for sites like Medium, but this is different to SSO. Social Login has the benefit of making the user feel in control of the account and that the site that that are logging into isn’t holding and info on them (other than user behaviour data such as which pages they’ve visited). Social Login differs from SSO as the external site (e.g. Twitter) serves as the IDP but only as a way of identifying the user, not as a way to hold information such as delivery address about them.

What’s the solution?

Maybe sites that are part of the ecosystem of online sites and services for an organisation should offer customers the option of logging into a site using their account, but this isn’t really SSO as the point of it is that once you’re logged in on one site you can move between sites and will be already and automatically logged into those too.

Maybe if services like Twitter or Google allowed users to hold billing and delivery address details against their accounts then organisations could benefit from providing Social Login to their customers and still use the data provided by the Social IDP for things like order fulfilment. Then maybe the solution is for organisations to have a mind-shift in how they think about customer identity and data to focus on dynamic user behaviour data rather static user identity data.

Maybe the solution hasn’t been invented yet and is an opportunity for a service that allows customers to be in control of their accounts and their personal data, and that allows organisations to authenticate against it as an IDP.

Parking with RingGo 

Roger on 22/12/2016

RingGo is a telephone payment system for car parking. I’ve used it before, albeit a while ago and with a different car, but I figured that having an account with RingGo meant it would be an easier option than finding enough loose change.

So I wrote the car park location number on my hand, got my debit card out and called the RingGo number. The automated voice asked me if my old car was the car I wanted to park, which of course it wasn’t, so I opted to change the car details. The automated voice asked me to speak my number plate and then to confirm that the number plate it repeated to me was correct. When I answered ‘no’ the automated voice told me that I would receive a text message and then hung up on me. Clearly it was something I said.

Good customer experience should be about allowing the customer to choose how to access the service. RingGo could have offered me another go at speaking my number plate instead of deciding for me that the only way was to end the call, reply to the text message, and then call them back. Changing the method of accessing the service without asking the customer is also bad practice.

It’s experiences like this that make me think more about using Product Management techniques to understand the needs of the customer and Service Design to build a service that works how the customer wants it to.

Experimenting with Service Design Blueprinting

Roger on 22/12/2016

As part my attempts to learn about Service Design and implement it as an approach when developing the Ecommerce business I’ve started experimenting with service blueprints.

Service Design Blueprint

As blueprinting is new to me and I don’t fully understand it yet, my approach is to mix what I do know with a waterfall-y approach that includes things like phases and changes over time. This should also help a little with getting it adopted by other people in the organisation as it won’t be such a conceptual leap to something completely new.

I’ll develop the blueprint over time and use it ensure that all the parts of the business are aligned to ensure that we can give our customers the best experience with the British Heart Foundation Online Shop.

It’s the anomalies that are interesting

Roger on 20/12/2016

I scanned a bottle of Pepsi at a supermarket self-service checkout and the system recognised it as a packet of biscuits. The staff member corrected the error and dismissed it with ‘these machines never cease to amaze me’.

But its the error that amazes me. It fascinates me that anomalies like that occur in systems. It’s not exactly a bug and I doubt it could ever be replicated and so fixed, and yet strange things happen in systems that are supposed to work in logically, structured ways. A bar code reader scans a bar code and either recognises it or doesn’t. It isn’t supposed to get confused and mistake one bar code for another, and yet that’s exactly what happened. Maybe the idea that computers don’t make mistakes isn’t an entirely reliable heuristic.