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

What do you do? I'm customer journey producer. Eh?

There are many titles out there, and many I've had previously, that lead to uncomfortable silences at dinner parties, but none more so than Customer Journey Producer. We have a small team of of these in the customer experience group at Sun who have the unenviable task of trying to understand what we used to call the 'end-to-end experience', and mapping that back to what we do on sun.com to support our customers. It's not really end-to-end, because more often than not our customer experiences jump around within a particular task, which is wholly expected. If I followed a linear path every time I visited, say, Amazon, I've never have ended up with the re-issued Gang of Four albums.

The customer journey producers at Sun currently take ownership of the customer experience on sun.com for specific areas. They are responsible for working closely with the business teams, content owners, publishing, engineering and design teams, and anyone else who has anything to do with the content in their area, to ensure that what we put out is consistent, compliant, compelling, and above all, supports customer interactions as best we can.

Lou, for example, has the rather nifty customer journey subtitle of 'communities producer' and is the man behind, amongst other things, our RSS feed pages, embedded customer reviews and ratings, those technorati, del.icio.us, digg and slashdot submission links on every page and some splendid video output. In fact, Lou is our de facto 'web.next' producer, and if anything looks like it might have something to do with user generated content, aggregation, syndication, or have come to us via Twitter or something, it lands on Lou's desk. Lou pushes the boundaries constantly, and this is a key part of the producer role - to capitalize on business opportunities.

I, on the other hand, have a couple customer journeys that I'm currently producing that are rather more specific than Lou's wide-ranging remit; the ongoing program to bridge the gap between sun.com and our telesales force, and the rearchitecting of our customer contact provision and key touchpoints on the web. I've been out tonight and had a couple of drinks, so I'll go into those in more detail at another time, but they're interesting, honestly.

We also have Dave and Patricia who are a couple of the most hard-working producers in the world, and have the dubious pleasure of not only defining our globalization strategies (difficult), but also implementing them (that's just impossible, surely). Inevitably we all overlap on projects, so it's as well that we all face in the same direction on this stuff.

There. I used verbs and punctuation and everything, Martin.

Tunes: The Fall: I Am Damo Suzuki