What is Java?
I recently worked with one of our agency partners to audit around 50 of our key customer contact scenarios on sun.com. We were hoping to get a good idea where we support customer interactions well, or, more importantly, where we might have common customer journey issues. In most cases, we expected there to be the occasional dead-end, or one of those annoying circular scenarios where you never actually get closer to what you're looking for.
We came up with reasonably specific scenarios to try and identify issues, such as "Looking for status on an existing hardware order", or "Wants to ask a question about training courses in local area", but we also threw in a couple of what might be referred to as 'curveballs' (I think, I'm in the UK you know). The real eye-openers were the ones that assumed little or no knowledge about a particular product or service. I had a conversation at the weekend with a cousin I'd not seen for a number of years, and we got onto the subject of work. I told him I work for Sun Microsystems (and gave him the golden pitch, naturally). His response was "didn't you invent that Java?". I said yes we did. He said "What's that then?".
Which brings us back to our scenarios. We included "Looking for information about 'Java'", to see where that would lead. Although there are multiple entry points for this journey, the auditor picked what seemed like an obvious one, and unfortunately ended up on a journey that went down a number of fruitless dead-ends, and ended up with a search for a way to chat online with someone instead.
All of which reinforced the idea that, if you get it right, supporting specific tasks can be the easy part of customer experience design, but as the vagueness of the task increases, so your ability to map the customer journey dramatically decreases. We obviously can't think of all the possible questions we might get asked and how to route those questions to someone who knows the answer, but its invaluable to at least understand how well you route the one's you do get asked - even if it's only at a dinner party.
Tunes: LCD Soundsystem: All My Friends
