Sun.com Customer Experience and Stuff: Notes from the Sun.com customer experience team.

David McQuillen, a friend at Credit Suisse in Zurich, points out another good practice to add to the 10+ tips I recently posted: Do "Experience Immersion" with your execs. I know several companies that run this drill periodically.  Basically, you lead your your executives in 'playing customer' on the web so they see how different online experiences come across.  A lot of times this is an eye opener, and it works especially well in both consumer and B2B spaces where the execs are also somewhat representative of the real customers.

"We do this either by sending them on a 'mystery shopping' tour or walking them through the experience ourselves. It's a great way to get into their hearts and minds," says David.

I haven't ever felt we've needed to push for "guided immersions" at Sun with our top execs, and you can probably guess why: Both Scott McNealy and Jonathan Schwartz are rabid about the web, and so unprompted we get plenty of direct email from them about everything from broken links to multi-paragraph missives about particular bumpy experiences they may have encountered (which we then fix... honest, I'm working on it right now guys!).