Five things we learnt from building a test and trace platform

As we see more and more local authorities roll out their own test and trace platforms I want to share the things we learnt building and rolling out RecordCustomer.com

?You have to provide more than one way for people to give you their details

We primarily use QR codes for our system but plenty of people don’t know what these are or how to use them. To solve this we have provided two extra ways to sign in; access via a web address or the venue can sign people in themselves.

People are using it for more than we intended

We thought people would just sign in and out but smaller venues are using it to call people forward to the counter to pick up orders to help with social distancing. To help with this we introduced optional fields on our forms such as table numbers and show check-ins in real-time.

Different types of venues are using it

We built it primarily with pubs in mind but we have galleries, museums, gyms and training centres amongst our users. Be careful how you market it, don’t be too niche.

Venues operate over multiple locations

Some venues want to use the platform across multiple venues and creating multiple accounts introduces all sorts of problems. To help with this we changed our platform to allow multiple locations so they can be linked and administered from a central location.

GDPR is a nightmare

To be compliant, venues have to be registered with the ICO and have a privacy policy for using the test and trace system. Many smaller organisations haven’t really thought about that and you need to make sure they do their bit. We create a privacy policy on the fly so venues are compliant and we do this by capturing their GDPR information. They cannot use the system without providing this.