Tuesday, May 17, 2011

 

Web usability: Account required

Web usability is about enabling users to achieve their goals with ease, at least not make it impossible to complete a task online. When the Nikon website no longer recognized my account credentials and the password reset function claimed to send an e-mail but I never received any communication from Nikon, I contacted their support using an online form. So far so good, the usability problem started when I received their response.

David D. from Nikon support (why do people no longer have full names?) sent me a message which started with instructions how to respond: “If you have any further questions to our support response, please click the link at the bottom. Hitting reply from your email browser will not reach our group.”

Clicking on the link then brings you to—you probably guessed it—the account login page, and there is no way to respond to the message if you don't have a valid, working account.



I did not get my account restored since I had contacted the wrong Nikon country branch, and rather than forwarding the request to the appropriate support team David sent me the country list to find out how Nikon wants to be contacted.

I have another request into the local support team now, in the same ticketing system, so I really hope that their first response will solve the problem…

Recommendations

  • Hide the complexity of your organisation from the customer. Forwarding a request to the appropriate contact within the company is more efficient than having the customer track down the right contact and submit the same information again.
  • When sending an e-mail message, be prepared to receive a response by e-mail too. Most online support systems can handle e-mail responses and link the response to the support thread with a unique ID in the subject line.
  • Provide an alternate path to address problems with the support website itself. Customers with non-working accounts obviously cannot login to discuss their account problems.


Update: The local support team could easily solve what appears to be a general problem with the online support system that the first team should have been aware about as well.

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