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

One of our biggest goals - and challenges - for this year comes in the shape of simplifying and enhancing our 'customer touchpoints'. Broadly speaking, what this refers to is all the access points through which our customers come into contact with Sun. Those access points can be obliquely physical (if that's possible), like the packaging on our products that get delivered to your door. They can describe an experience that is defined by a set of (mostly internal) processes, such as how you feel when you order five products and they come in five boxes, when they could have easily fit into one, or having to install your optional memory upgrade - which was delivered separately - yourself. More often than not, however, these access points are defined by those places our customers find themselves when they are interacting directly with us, either by phone, web, e-mail or any other communication channel (of which there are more than I can neatly fit onto one my my slides). Its this last category that is currently making the brains in our team hurt.

In order to map out a 'best possible' customer experience across those multiple channels, we're trying to determine the structure of a channel-neutral information architecture. Our reasoning behind this is pretty simple. We can probably go after each channel in turn and create a new phone tree, a new web hierarchy, a new customer feedback system, and so on, and map those back to our internal departments. The trouble is, that doesn't address the underlying inconsistencies and is unlikely to excite either our external or internal stakeholders ('let me get this straight, you've moved technical support under "post sales" and now we have to change all our internal numbers because customers now press '4' and not '3'?"). What we have to do is understand the key customer journeys that we need to support for those interactive touchpoints, and build out a taxonomy based on that. Its not about pressing pound for sales advisors, or tabbed web interfaces, or even the right kind of fax headers. Its about customer tasks. What are the expectations for a customer wanting to talk to someone about enterprise software licensing and how do we exceed those expectations? What is the most effective entry point for a journey that ends with "thanks, that's just what I wanted to know about Java training in Minnesota" (which, incidentally, you can find in our training section). What, in fact are customers trying to contact us about? Now, that's the real question, of course.

A large part of the task will involve understanding just what we already do, so that we can be pragmatic about change (not boiling the ocean etc.). We do a lot, and some of it works great, some of it doesn't. Some of it might even be hijacked and redirect you to unexpectedly mature content (I think we caught all those already). In any case, there's a whole world of touchpoints out there, and somehow they need to map back to a channel neutral information architecture, so that we can overlay our developing standards and guidelines, ensure quality and consistency, and manage change. Which reminds me - I'm supposed to writing a presentation on all this, but I'm stuck on a catchy nomenclature which describes a customer task focused touchpoint information architecture. I'm thinking 'touchonomy'. Jennifer might like that.

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