Closed channels and open books

13May09

I’ve had more than a few documentation/customer support issues over the past year that resulted in extraordinary frustration.   It seems that more and more, business are designing closed channels, such as telephone, email, web-based support, FAQs, and chat, for supporting their customers.  These systems provide the illusion of being open and dialectic, but I don’t think that I’m being overly cynical to suggest that companies have quickly realized that they can impose limits on these channels that profoundly undermine users’ ability to get information and resolve issues on their terms, not the company’s.  Some examples:

• FAQs that don’t include your question and don’t point you to additional help.

• Exhausting phone trees that dead-end or conclude with a rep telling you they understand but can’t help, and that there is no escalation process.
• Ditto for online chat.
• Web-based support that misinterprets your issue, provides the wrong answer, and offers no escalation or dialog.
• Ditto for emails  (Please do not reply to this message.)

These channels are often cited as obviating the need for traditional ‘book’ content, with ‘books’ being denigrated as static and unwieldy compared to these more immediate, interactive systems.  But I would argue that well-written content in ‘book’ form produces more engaging, helpful, and empowering content than many of the interactive channels that I have been forced into throughout the year.

There are, I believe, a couple of big reasons for this -  one is that the traditional narrative style of ‘book’ writing is associated with practices that put a high priority on the reader’s interests.  A well-written book is designed, authored, edited, proofed, and published (even when produced by a single person) with readers (or ‘users’) in mind.  There is an implicit conversation and contract with the reader that good authors take pains to uphold.  The practices that support that conversation and contract are second nature to the best and most-experienced writers in our community, but are often not sought out or even recognized as a requirement for content in more ‘interactive’ channels.  Consequently, or perhaps opportunistically, depending on how cynical you might be,  new channels of interactive communication are often designed as information cul-de sacs that frustrate and alienate customers.

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