12 Mar 2007 1003H

Don’t underestimate the customer support logs

It’s been said before, but, I’ll say it again. Customer support logs can be enormously helpful in redesigning the UX, but they’re rarely in a form that can be made actionable. For instance, search query logs for online help reveal a ton of information that you sometimes may not need to run usability tests to find, just because the sheer number of inquiries is enough to meet basic conditions for validity. Oftentimes the CSR manager needs to generate a monthly report anyway, so the added benefit is that they take leadership in owning that part of the problem identification cycle.

Where that fails is, the search queries don’t tell you the whole story. Let’s say, for example, the top query is “password.” Well, that doesn’t tell you much, does it? So in this case you still have to run the usability test to see where people fail in the task.

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