Do you have a human?
I’m a big fan of forms on websites, email addresses, twitter presences for companies and heck even a Facebook page so people can contact you. Be it a B2B market or consumer one. Sometimes though you want to talk to a human and I long for a phone number! Am I mad?
Is the website saving money or making money? Why not both?
That’s always a big question for business. It certainly was for me when I started selling website design services back in 1995 anyway. If a business is going to spend money on an activity they are the two basic questions. The answer for websites back in the early 90s was “well it’s ahhh umm.. well.. ahh save you money because you won’t have to send out brochures” . Then in the late 90s web design became even more about saving money. I remember attending the En@bling Australia Summitt in 1998 at Parliament House. Big talkfest. One of the main presenters was the then CEO of FedEx. They were doing some pretty ground breaking things with their website back then. They had introduced the world’s first online package tracking system. These days you can’t be in the parcel delivery business without one. One of the main drivers for developing the system was to save money. It was about taking the pressure off the call centres with people ringing up wanting to know where their parcels were. It saved them millions.
Let’s play hide the phone number.
It seemed after that case study, it became the darling of the bean counters & web designers to hide the phone number and force customers to use forms to communicate withthem. There are times when I just want to use a form but I really like the option to pick up the phone and talk to a person. Not an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) unit or a computer but one of those human thingies we used to see in shops when we bought offline.
There are some businesses who recognise this and make sure their phone number is nice and prominent. AAMI for instance make it a point of difference in their advertising. You’ll always talk to a person. Look at their website. The phone number is nice and prominent. They were unfortunate though to be running their ads in primetime during the Qld floods. They pulled them after a couple of days I think.
When you compare AAMI efforts though to one of their competitors the RACV, whose big ad campaign seems to about “calling Jason”, their site does not reflect it. Basically you have to click off the front page to a sub page the scroll below the fold to find it. I don’t get that. Spend heaps of money on a people friendly campaign but the website says something different.We won’t touch a website unless it’s about making money. I think the idea of a website purely to save money is very 20th century. What do you think? Love to know your thoughts. (Original Towoomba pic above from http://www.aussiejoyslife.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/car-pile-up-toowoomba.jpg)
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
