Dear broadband provider,
Once a month you send me an email to tell me that my latest bill is ready.
“Your monthly broadband bill is ready.Simply log in to view your broadband account to view you bill.”
Really? You couldn’t tell me what the bill amount is in the email, or attach the bill as a PDF? Why don’t you want to send me the detail in the email? Why the interest in getting me to log in to your site?
Perhaps your concern is security – these are personal details about me, after all, perhaps you feel that email is not secure enough. But you used to send me bills via the post, printed on sheets of paper that would then hang around my house. Anyone visiting my house might have come across one – and there are a lot more visitors to my house than my personal email account.
Anyway, my broadband usage is hardly a state secret is it?
Besides, placing the bill behind a login doesn’t make it any more secure. Anyone who manages to access my email account has the link to it, plus the username (which you generated for me and helpfully add in the body of the email). All they lack is the password. But guess what? I don’t know the password – why would I? It’s been months since I logged into your site and I’ve forgotten it. So my imaginary hacker and I are in the same boat.
Not to worry, I can simply click ‘Forgotten password?’ on your site and you will reset it, by sending a message to my email account containing a temporary password. That’s right, the same email account that isn’t secure enough to receive my bill as a PDF.
So security can’t be it. No – I suspect that what you are really after is ‘engagement’. You want me to come to your site so that we can form a deeper ‘relationship’. So that your service is more ‘sticky’.
Well, I’m sorry, I don’t want a relationship, you are just not that important to me. I just want to access the internet.
All the best.
colebourne169
Martin Colebourne 