Stuff Happens
An entry in our ongoing series around tips and trick for insurance-user-experience-awesometm
Stuff goes wrong with software all the time . Shocking news, right? Really, sometimes it’s a wonder that it works at all. As software designers and developers stuff breaking presents an important user experience opportunity. Something went wrong, but how do we now spin that into a chance to keep our user empowered and create a customer touch point at the same time? It stinks when something goes wrong. It stinks even more when it’s not clear what happened or what to do next.
At Kodiak we’ve been experimenting with routing certain error messages right into our Intercom system. Intercom, if you’re not familiar with it, is a customer communication platform. It’s worth giving it (or a system like it) a look if you’re not using one. With our latest release we pipe certain actionable error messages right into Intercom-powered chat, all via the Bear-Bot, our artificially intelligent, bear-themed, task runner. Check out the screenshot to see how it looks in action .
So where in the olden-days, an error message might have taken over the whole screen with some cryptic gibberish followed by vague instructions to ‘contact your administrator’ (looking your way policy administration systems), now with this approach we can deliver an actionable message to a forum where the end-user has an immediate, direct opportunity to communicate with support staff, all without interrupting what they were doing. And further, the whole interaction is logged so that there’s a historical trail and the ability to segment that audience for future targeted messaging (i.e. send this email to everyone who had a problem like this in April).
We’re excited about the approach and while (thankfully!) we haven’t seen a high volume of exceptions generated since we released last week, early indications are good. We’ll dig in on data we collect later in the year to see how the error-empowerment experiment plays out.
