Levno Alerts
Levno lets you know
It’s Levno’s tagline that Levno “Lets you know”. How we do this is with alerts to let them know when something is going wrong which are sent by email and text message.
During some analysis through talking to farmers on site who were receiving alerts we talked about some of the problems and doing a simple user test of the alerts, we identified some key findings.
Text alerts were sent from multiple numbers from our text provider. This made it annoying for users as it made it hard for them to find their messages.
“Milk too warm” and “stirrer not running” alerts would send every hour on the hour if there was a problem. These could continue on all night which was incredibly frustrating for some customers. One customer said “if I haven’t got onto it by the third alert, please don’t keep telling me.”
When customers read through the sample alert for their plate cooler and I asked the simple question “can you tell me what this text means?” I noticed that we didn’t actually tell the customer what the problem was until line 3 of that text so they spent quite some time reading it before they knew what was happening.
Another interesting thing I noted is that every single farmer & farm worker I visited kept their phone in their front chest pocket. It was hard for them to know what notifications were important from their phone as it would buzz all day and often their hands were dirty. Interestingly enough - every farmer we met on site had an iPhone as well.
When talking to our customer engagement team they also stated that they received duplicates of every single alert sent and only wanted to deal with alerts that the customer hadn’t addressed already.
As a part of this project I ended up participating in a milking and lets just say…. I should really stick to the office! It helped me build empathy for our users as I got to step into their…. gumboots & face their challenges first hand.
Farm Manager
Location: Waikato New Zealand
Occupation: Owner & Farm Manager
Goals: To produce as much product as possible and maximise profits
To produce a high quality product and not receive grades.
Wants to ensure the quality is kept high on farm when they can't be there.
Background: Manages a small farm with over 300 cows. Responsible for milking, calving, feeding and looking after the farm in general. They manage a small team of workers. They keep their iPhone with them at all times in their front chest pocket and often use apps that support their work. They expect simplicity from technology as normally they are too busy and with farm chores.
Context/Environment: They are often out on the farm assisting with farm chores during the day. They return home at night to their partner who lives with them on site.
Frustrations: Dealing with workers - it's hard to keep track of what's going on when there are so many tasks to do. They don’t have a lot of time to get all the things they need to do done in a day so mistakes can be made.
Partner of Farmer
Location: Waikato New Zealand
Occupation: Partner of Farm Manager
Goals: To look after their partner and keep them happy.
Background: Happy to help out on farm where they are required. Stays home on-site to help out with household duties. They are more tech savvy than the farm manager so they often end up helping out with tech. They have more time to check their phone during the day because they don’t have to have their hands dirty with all of their farm chores, just the occasional job here and there.
They often do jobs in town and investigate new options for what products and processes could improve on the farm. Their partner also runs major decisions past them.
Context/Environment: Lives with their partner on farm.
Frustrations: When their partner doesn’t understand tech. When their partner complains about workers.
Farm Worker
Location: Waikato New Zealand
Occupation: Farm worker
Goals: To keep their job as a worker. To not receive a bad grade from doing something wrong during milking. Wants to look after the animals to the best of their abilities.
Background: The farm worker works for a farm manager. They turn up to work early to milk the cows and help out with other farm chores like calving and feeding the animals. They use vehicles on site to help out with these chores. They’re tech savvy as they’ve grown up with it.
The worker aspires to become a farm manager or owner someday so they will occasionally go the extra mile to talk to their manager to show them that they are capable of moving up the career ladder.
Context/Environment: Lives off site. Travels to the farm to work each day.
Motivations: Milk cooling & quality regulations mean they have to complete certain tasks on farm. Wants to make money so they can do activities outside of work.
Frustrations: Can make mistakes like forgetting to put the chiller on. Receiving a lot of messages on phone.
To address these problems I created a flow diagram of how I think an alert should be dealt with from when they’re first created til when they’re sent to customer engagement. One of the key ideas I came up with were telling them when their problem is fixed rather than continually alerting them until it’s fixed as Levno customers purchase us to have confidence that they know what’s going on.
During our initial onboarding process, we setup 5 default alerts for customers so that they automatically have some visibility over their vats without them having to go in and set them up (which is ideal for people with not a lot of time!).
The majority of our clients have single vats rather than dual vats - so when we were stating the farm name first - it wasn’t very relevant to what the farmer needed to know. We really needed to state what the problem was first.
Also when they read the alert they took a while to figure out what was going on as they had to read til line three - whereas after we made some changes the response was instant that “it’s a plate cooler problem”.
Before
Alerts come from various numbers so their phone gets clogged up with messages. Alerts happen frequently until the problem is resolved (so customers can get constant alerts overnight).
The year is mentioned when it’s unnecessary and the time is before the temperatures when the alert should be coming not too far from when the event happened.
After
Now the alerts all come from one number - there’s no reason to have the levno.com at the front as the Levno number is saved to their phone. Customers can also setup a specific tone for when Levno alerts them. Alerts are sent until a maximum number is reached (defaults to 3 messages)
The alert type is defined first as the majority of our customers have a single vat so they know what farm it’s at. Then the less important information is stated below. The year has also been removed.
Milk too cold resolution example - gives customer peace of mind
We also added a bit of fun in with these messages
Alerts can be paused for alerts of certain types
Users can pause alerts related to the same event like a power outage
The response from customers was great. Upon release we immediately had several users pause their alerts. When we rang them up to ask they cited that they “knew what was going on & were onto it”. This means they didn’t get several duplicate alerts for the same event as they were before. They also cited that the resolution alerts gave them “peace of mind” which is exactly why people buy Levno.
To accompany these I also created some reports to help farmers know how they’re tracking as these are sent as alerts by email.
Fuel Report
Milk Report
Water Report