Digital Strategy by Clive Gardner at Overherd

on 29/11/2018

Notes from Clive’s presentation:

  • The NSPCC has a child audience and an adult audience with very different needs
  • They have about a hundred campaigns a year.
  • The campaigns explain a need, and that the need needs help.
  • Only about 20% of the messages in a campaign ask for money.
  • Other messages build the NSPCC as a favourite brand.
  • Charities are not transforming digitally fast enough to reflect the world around us.
  • Charities shouldn’t be at the leading edge of marketing.
  • In order to innovate, big slow charities need to work with fast partners.
  • Learn from those who are doing it well
  • Digital is a way of doing things.
  • Digital has to help set the culture to be able to respond to needs faster.
  • Building a preference centre helped towards a single customer view but it’s still five years away.
  • Digital Risk Assessment needs a ‘Pace’ dimension to add to Severity and Likelihood

Rewriting the ATBA-UK Articles of Association for 2018

on 21/10/2018

In preparation for the changes in how ATBA-UK will be managed over the next few years I’ve rewritten the ARTICLES OF ASSOCIATION OF ALL TERRAIN BOARDING ASSOCIATION LTD. These will be agreed at the upcoming Special General Meeting where the new directors will be appointed, and will allow them to manage ATBA-UK as an organisation that licenses it’s brand name, competition formats, instructor training courses, etc. rather than one that operational delivers those things itself. It means that any organisation or individual from the mountainboarding community can apply to the ATBA-UK to hold a competition, for example, and be able to use the ATBA-UK name and resources such as banners, insurance, boarderx competition spreadsheet.

What did the CPR bot acheive?

on 18/10/2018

As part of Restart A Heart Day 2018 we built a chatbot to find out how much people know about CPR and whether we can help people feel more confident about giving CPR.

Proportion of users completing each step

Over 1,100 people used the CPR chatbot over two days.

Percentage of unique users who triggered the flow more than once

Percentage of unique users who triggered the flow more than once

Some of the phrases that re-triggered the flow were responses such as  ‘/like’, ‘thanks’,  ‘okay’ and ‘thank you’, and answers to the questions which people typed rather than clicking the buttons. Interestingly, these all started with lower case, so ‘yes’ rather than ‘Yes’.

Percentage of people who finished the flow

77.3% of people finished the flow. That’s much higher than I expected. It shows that people are interested in CPR and are comfortable engaging with a chatbot.

Percentage of people who finished the flow

Percentage of people who got the right answers

Percentage of people who got the right answers

80.9% of the questions the bot asked about how to perform CPR were answered correctly. This perhaps indicates that the questions were pitched at the right level for the knowledge of the participants as we were trying to help them be more aware of CPR rather than test their current knowledge.

Percentage of people how felt more confident about giving CPR

Percentage of people how felt more confident about giving CPR

Of all the people that completed each step and got to the end of the flow to answer the last question, 92.2% said they felt more confident about giving CPR. That’s a good thing to achieve.

Using Freshdesk – what I’ve learned so far

on 28/03/2018

Principles rather problems

It’s more important to be trying to adhere to principles rather than solving a particular problem (as the problem probably isn’t understood well enough, and will change).
We agreed on three principles.

  • Shared: We all work together to give the customer the best experience of the BHF. Customer experience is everyone’s responsibility.
  • Speed: We want to provide the fastest route to resolution for the customer.
  • Satisfaction: We want the customer to feel satisfied with the resolution, keep the relationship intact and maintaining the reputation of the BHF.

People drive processes

Any new system/product/business area needs someone to act as guide for others and make decisions and develop best practice. Without that people apply their previous ways of working to the new system, and then they don’t gain any of the benefits, and using a new system in an old way just creates drag on a process we’re trying to streamline.

Shifting mindsets

Emails are either replied-to or not replied-to, they have a binary state that doesn’t reflect the complexities of customer service.
Tickets in Freshdesk for Ecommerce Customer Services can exist in any of 224 different states, and some other teams have even more states. This means that each ticket can have a state within Freshdesk that more closely reflects the state of the customer’s enquiry in real life.
To use Freshdesk at it’s best we stop thinking about individual tickets, and instead think in states. So, it’s about asking “for the state of ‘Urgent and waiting on third party’, what’s going on in that state and is there anything I can do to make that state smaller and the ‘Resolved’ state larger?”

Empowering people

Calling them ‘agents’ is an interesting turn of phrase. They are agents of the organisation, representing the BHF. But to be agents they have to have a sense of agency, to be able to assume responsibility for their actions, to feel in control, to believe in their capacity to handle a wide range of tasks or situations. Freshdesk provides this. If software is the encoding of human thought, then Freshdesk is software that embodies this sense of agency.

Improving our customer services

on 11/03/2018

Today we went live with our new customer services system.

It’s a very Kanban-ish with all the tickets visible, each ticket having a status and states to move through (open, waiting & resolved), each ticket having an owner which means only one person can work on it at any time, and tickets having an SLA which serves to limit the work in progress.

The new system will help the eight people across three sites involved in customer services to be more coordinated in how they help customers and achieve our principles:

  • Shared: We all work together to give the customer the best experience of the BHF. Customer experience is everyone’s responsibility.
  • Speed: We want to provide the fastest route to resolution for the customer.
  • Satisfaction: We want the customer to feel satisfied with the resolution, keep the relationship intact and maintaining the reputation of the BHF.

From working with an agency to working with a freelancer

on 26/02/2018

Another example of figuring out how to work in a more Agile way in a risk-averse culture.

When you’re risk-averse, finding the right agency takes months. You follow the Procurement Policy, go out to tender to get five responses, do Dun & Bradstreet assessment, negotiate the contract, and then eventually you get to work.

When you embrace the uncertainty, finding a freelance developer takes days. You message a few on LinkedIn, have an informal phone interview, pick which one can do what you need and get them started.

There’s risk in moving from building a website with a reliable agency who you can have faith will be there tomorrow and next week and next month when you need them, to using freelance developers who can move on and take their knowledge with them at any time. So, how can you manage this risk?

Embracing the uncertainty, you make decisions quickly with what information you have, you break the work into small chunks, do a few pieces of work and then decide what’s next rather than creating a plan at the beginning of the project.

Will it work? We’ll find out over the next few months.