Helping supporters help themselves

with simple digital tools

Adam Gillett | Which?

Why tools?

Which? exists to make consumers as powerful as the organisations they deal with every day.

While petitions are great, we want to use our digitalskills and platforms to do more, every day:

➔ Empowering supporters to speak out

➔ Helping them navigate complex problems

➔ Creating ambassadors

➔ Growing our supporter base in return

Two initial avenues➔ Letter tools – help users produce formal letters for tricky personal

situations

➔ Triage/reporting tools – create a structured, guided journey to diagnose and report problems

Both add value to standard signup forms – the former by repurposing the inputs, the latter by restructuring the journey.

Letter-writing toolsPicked out the areas with the highest traffic and where personalised tools could be developed. Initial trials included:

➔ Flight delay compensation

➔ Flight cancellation compensation

➔ Faulty goods - repair/refund request

How they workEmbedded form Completion preview Letter email

The recipe (technical bit)

➔ Ingredient 1: a signup form – recreating your standard CRM form within a simple web page gives you the flexibility to add custom scripts and manipulate how information is handled and submitted.

➔ Ingredient 2: a little JavaScript/jQuery – submits to your signup form, then pulls it from the signup JSON into a preview complaint letter.

The recipe (technical bit)➔ Ingredient 3: email personalisation – use the personalisation

fields in your transactional/receipt email to deliver a custom letter that a supporter can send to a company or influencer.

➔ Ingredient 4: a little data analysis and follow-up – check in with tool users later to gain feedback for promotion and fix problems

Why they work➔ Fill in the gaps for non-experts – saving your supporters time

and money demonstrates your value and deepens trust

➔ Costs you nothing – if you already have a campaigns lead-gen platform like BSD, you already have everything you need to offer this

➔ Entirely self-service – no support or maintenance are really required once launched, and it will collect leads organically as long as it’s live.

Triage tools: what and why?

Gathering evidence for public inquiries that is valuable and relevant can be a struggle for government, and can be a slog for individuals. These:

➔ Explain the purpose of the investigation

➔ Break the process of participating into friendly, manageable pieces

➔ Personalise the process, asking only what is relevant to an individual

➔ Ensure that the submission collected is in a structured, useful format

➔ Avoid lots of custom development and microsites

How they workContent page

introduction/journeyRelevant forms for

different groupsRelevant support

content end points

Why structure it this way?➔ Gradually introduce a complex issue

➔ Filter out but still give outlets to those unaffected

➔ Personalise each step

➔ (Internally) clearly define roles with a project,contextualise comms

Example: bank transfer scams

Context:

➔ We wanted to highlight the lack of protection consumers have if tricked into transferring money from their account to scammers.

➔ The regulator was unsure of the scale of the problem

➔ We decided to help them find out

Example: bank transfer scams

Solution:

➔ Ask supporters if they have been affected, and allow them to report personal experiences, or those of friends/family

➔ Four steps – triage, evidence-giving, completion (with advice) and the option to discuss further.

➔ Social sharing, email journeys and press partnerships launched to boost awareness.

Example: bank transfer scams

The results:

➔ Over 32,000 people came forward to share their evidence, overwhelming the regulator

➔ Millions of pounds of scams were reported, many for the first time – breaking the shame barrier that often accompanies fraud.

➔ The regulator is now investigating this kind of scam further.

General tool advice: avoiding pitfalls

➔ Consider your embeds

➔ Automate away admin

➔ Define a strict time-frame (or have systems in place to cope with a trickle)

General tool advice: avoiding pitfalls➔ Provide a route for and be prepared to manage correspondence

➔ Think about how you’ll collect and treat user feedback

➔ Improve, adapt – and recycle!

Overall results for our tools

Latest developments➔ Widgetisation – better embedding,

better tracking.

➔ Pagination – adding decision trees and personalisation within forms themselves.

Which?/BSD widgetisation tool

Next steps

Taking the strain out of handling all the data

➔ Automation of feedback – triggered emails after a defined period that gather feedback

➔ Automation of analysis – using machine learning to spot word patterns and company names.

➔ Linking with data sources for better letters – although beware evil permissions!

Some final thoughts

Thanks for listening!

Adam Gillett | Which?

Email: adam.gillett@which.co.uk

Twitter: @ahgillett

Current status: extremely relieved