ATBAmus Prime, the ATBA-UK’s Facebook Messenger bot had it’s first conversation with a real human. It was short, but it worked.
An instructor wanted to renew their membership so they messaged ATBAmus and selected ‘talk to a human’ from the options and typed their question into messenger. ATBAmus emailed their question to me, which I replied to, and which ATBAmus posted into the chat with the Instructor.
I assume they chose to contact the ATBA-UK from the message us button on the website, and hopefully it was a more useful experience for them than sending an email using a contact form.
At the British Heart Foundation we have an annual fundraising campaign called Love Notes. People visit our shops, pay £1, and write a message on a red paper heart that is then put in the shop window. This year we want to build a digital version. It would need a means of collecting the message, taking payment, having the message approved, and then making the message publicly available and shareable.
My first thoughts about how to do included using a messenger bot, but the payment would be an issue. We could have also built a separate microsite but that might prove too expensive for a speculative venture like this. So, for cost effectiveness, speed of build and ease of management, I decided to look at using Magento, the platform our Online is built on. Using our Online Shop would mean we already have the platform, infrastructure, payment gateway, etc. working for us to use for Love Notes.
I did a quick user journey map of how it could work.
Starting on the home page, which would display some of the recent Love Notes and two options; ‘See more Love Notes’, which goes to a category page displaying all the current Love Notes messages, and ‘Create a Love Note’, which goes to a page with a form to take the details of the Love Notes including who it’s too, the message, and who it’s from. Completing this form takes the user to the payment gateway to take payment and within Magento creates a product with the message as the product name. This product would be held in an On Hold state until it has been checked and approved, and will then be displayed on the Online Shop and an email sent to the customer with a link back to the product page. The product page displaying the Love Note would have options to share on various social networks.
The next step is to write the requirements, get some costs, and start designing the pages.
Howard Hodgkin, one of my inspirations, has died aged 84. His paintings taught me so much about colour, layers, composition, but mostly about the connection between our mental and emotional worlds and our physical world.
I think the customer journey mapping exercise was interesting (and I’ve done similar exercises in the past) but I think it needs to carry on, perhaps with some informal drop-in training sessions or maybe something more formal. We have a programme of training for our finance system and understanding how our customers interact with the organisations is even more important. I think everyone across the BHF should be involved in some journey mapping to understand how they contribute to the customer’s experience of the BHF.
What in particular worked well about the day?
Having everyone in the same room and seeing how big and how diverse the team is. It made me excited and enthusiastic about what we can achieve together.
What improvements would you make to the day?
I was only there for the morning, but I think the challenge with days like these is trying to do lots of things to give people a broad overview but also delivering some value to those people. So I wonder if we should have fewer but more focused sessions.
What would you like to see included in the next Away Day?
Building on the journey mapping and understanding how the customer experiences the BHF.
Do you have any other comments or suggestions that you’d like to share?
This might not be within the scope of the Away Day but I think there could be some benefit from inviting selected people from other directorates who have strong connections with D&CE so they can see of the department is changing.
It was a beautiful sunny morning. As I drove into Worcestershire the Malvern Hills brought back all kinds of memories from my years in this part of the world. And as I drove down the A4103 I almost turned right to go to Out To Grass.
At Hereford Board and Bike Park, with no digger coming this weekend as planned, the five of us went up the hill and after a bit of time spent clarifying the plan, we got to work digging by hand.
Digging gives you a lot of time to think. And at a mountainboard centre my thoughts were about the current state of mountainboarding and whether we are flogging a very lame and unhealthy horse.
I’ve had previous thoughts about how we have got into the current situation of not enough mountainboarders riding often enough through a lack of infrastructure, and I think I’ve known for a while now that there isn’t very much the ATBA-UK can do to fix it, all we can do is respond to the situation in what we think is the best way.
One of the consequences of fewer riders in recent years has been reducing the number of competitions the ATBA-UK holds. This in turn had a knock on effect on the amount of money the ATBA-UK makes through entry fees and membership. This income had to be supplemented somehow and the most likely to be successful way was through instructor training. So, the ATBA-UK changed it’s model for delivering Instructor Training and rather than external training providers offering training it was all provided by the ATBA-UK. This worked and we made enough money last year and this year to cover the business overhead costs and continue to trade. But of course it had a not-unexpected consequences.
Some of the training providers felt that the ATBA-UK was taking away income from them and despite explaining the reasons behind this change they wanted to take it back. One of the ideas they talked about was setting up an alternative organisation to deliver instructor training. The thing is, the ATBA-UK is a community asset, it belongs to the mountainboard community. It isn’t ours, we are just looking after it for the community. It makes me laugh (and wonder if the issue is that the current committee haven’t communicated this to the community) when I hear about mountainboarders talking about setting up another governing organisation in competition with the ATBA-UK. If they want an organisation to provide validity and authority to whatever they want to do they could just have the ATBA-UK. They don’t need to set up in competition, they can just have it. I don’t think there is a single member of the current committee that wouldn’t happily hand it over and walk away, and I would certainly spend a lot less time and money driving around the country teaching people to be mountainboard instructors.
In some ways, the ATBA-UK committee, the team that does the work of the ATBA-UK (instructor training, organising events, marketing, accounts, etc.) is a microcosm of the mountainboarding community and is suffering from the same problems; not enough people doing enough work. I’m as guilty as anyone on this point. My focus is the Instructor Training but I’m behind on finishing the new training manual. Other things in life get in the way and mountainboarding becomes less and less of a focus.
So that’s the horse. Not enough people doing enough work to encourage more people to go mountainboarding to get even more people into it, and some conflict, and some other things in life. At some point we’re going to have to face the fact that it just isn’t worth carrying on with (in it’s current guise, anyway).
Discussing expanding our range of Wedding products.
Shifting focus on the Online Shop from Dechox to MyMarathon.
Sending emails to thousands of people about the Gifts From The Heart range.
Setting up Freshdesk for Ecommerce.
Product Development session to discuss introducing new products for the Online Shop.
Discussing having publications on the Online Shop.
Working on the integration between Magento and Dotmailer.
Testing Digital Pop-up Shop by taking payments and placing orders.
Planning the advertising tests for Wedding product development.
Setting traffic KPI’s for the Online Shop.
Interesting stat of the week…
The New Visitor/Returning Visitor split for Converters is 50/50. This means that half of the people that place orders do so on their first visit and half come back for further visits before placing an order.
Thinking about how to implement a Customer Service System to avoid the system being used as just another mailbox, as just a different way to receive emails from customers and send replies. A customer services system should be so much more, and with some consideration it can be. And I think that consideration starts with agreeing some principles.
Good Customer Service starts with principles
Four principles that are important to me for customer services are ‘Presenting one organisation to the customer’, ‘Customer experience is everyone’s responsibility’, ‘Aiming for the fastest route to resolution’, and ‘Building capacity for information sharing across the organisation’.
Presenting one organisation to the customer
I heard a stat from some customer services research that said that companies that have three ways for customers to contact them only answer the same question with the same answer 23% of the time. Three channels of communication and the giving customers the same answer falls to 8%. And if a company has four means of speaking with customers the same answer is provided 0% of the time. A good customer service system coupled with an organisational shift to wanting to be customer-centric is important for presenting one organisation to the customer. And presenting one organisation to the customer is simply what customers expect.
Customer Experience is everyone’s responsibility
This is a favourite of mine. It doesn’t necessarily mean that everyone in the organisation writes replies to customers (although that is one way to go) but it’s vital that everyone in the organisation understands how they play a part in the experience a customer has of the organisation. Making the aim of providing excellent customers experience the responsibility of the finance clerk who banks cheques, the warehouse picker who double checks he’s got the right items, and the customer service agent who takes an extra few minutes to properly understand the issue the customer is facing helps the principle to filter throughout the entire organisation.
Aiming for the fastest route to resolution
Speed is important but competency is more important. There is little point being fast if the answer doesn’t resolve the customers issue as they’ll be back with further questions. Aiming for the fastest route to resolution involves understanding and optimising the route. This means being able to analyse reoccurring issues to fix the cause and identify barriers to resolution, so it isn’t quite as simple as just answering the customer as quickly as possible, it requires a lot more thought and even more action.
Building capacity for information sharing across the organisation
Answers found for one customer should be available for other customers and for other agents. This principles is important for optimising the discoverability of answers and encouraging self-serve. For the agents it means having a comprehensive knowledgebase that is kept up to date with new answers added by people from all across the organisation. For customers it means having a front-end system available that gives them the answers they need when they need them.
Principles, and getting everyone bought into them, are essential for shifting people’s thinking from ‘just another inbox’ to having and using a customer service system that delivers real value to the organisation and it’s customers.
