Are You Playing Hide And Seek With Your Customers?
Don’t hide from your online customers. Yes, one of the advantages of having a website for your business, whether your business is solely on the Internet or if you are a brick and mortar, is that it can do a lot of work for you. It can answer questions for you, increase your exposure, project a certain image, take your orders, earn you money with advertising, sign up your subscribers, inform your customers, etc, etc. But that does not mean that you can hide from your web visitors.
Too many times I see small businesses/online businesses that expect their web sites to do all the work. They make their contact information difficult to find, limit the ways they can be contacted, and/or make it difficult or unattractive for people to contact them. (Big companies are sometimes guilty of this as well. I tried to call Norton just a couple of days ago for a problem that I was having with their software and they wanted to charge me $10.00 to speak to someone.) When you use these kinds of strategies to discourage people from contacting your company you:
- Send a message to your web visitors that you would really rather not hear from them.
- Lose customers that cannot find their answers on your website. (Even if the info they are looking for is displayed clearly on the page.)
- Give the impression that you are a fly by night or not necessarily an above the board business.
- Lose out on opportunities to get positive feedback from your customers so you can keep doing more of what you are getting right on your page.
- Lose out on opportunities to get negative feedback from your customers so you can fix what you are getting wrong on your page.
- Find out what questions people are still having after visiting your page so that you can make that information more available/visible.
- Miss out on customers that are simply not comfortable completing their business online.
Highlight your contact information on your page. Make sure your web visitors can find it easily. Sometimes just seeing your phone number on the page is enough to make people feel comfortable enough to do business with you. Make sure you have multiple ways for people to contact you as well. Having something for everyone will increase the chances that instead of moving on to the next page, they will go ahead and contact you to get their question answered. Use email forms, live chat programs, toll free numbers, and if applicable a physical address.
Every contact with a customer is an opportunity for either learning or earning. Don’t hide from them and you will be able to maximize both.
Reader Comments
The ‘usability test’ is a great idea Barbara. And for those that can’t get customers or someone they know to test the site, try and put yourself in the shoes of a first time visitor to your site and see how intuitive you feel things are. And always remember that not everyone thinks the same, is working on the same machinery (as Barbara suggested), or has the same knowledge of the web so you might need to present things in different ways.
Wow , you got the point!. I love the post and try to do as you said 
It seems that the businesses that ‘hide’ from customers are always online companies. They discourage calls at all costs. It must be that they are trying to save money by not hiring phone operators.
Good advice Brandi. I up until recently had no forms of contact on one of my websites other than an email address and a contact form. We still received a lot of orders but, i thought it could be improved. Upon playing with my website, i added a phone number and a physical address. Within a matter of a few days our conversion rates went from 2.3% to 3.8%, whilst the amount of phone calls we actually received didn’t really increase at all.
I think by posting these details it give the customer the ability to trust that you are a ‘real’ company, and you can easily be contacted if they had any problems with your products or service.
@Andy - You are absolutely right. Those extra details can put the customer’s mind at ease that you will be there if they need you. Another important point that you made is that the number of calls that you received didn’t really increase at all. I’m sure this is one reason people are leary about adding the phone number. They think that it will significantly increase their call volume but, that is not necessarily the case.
Generally the customer knows if they are going to purchase before even visiting your site. If they need to contact you first, then they were not going to buy in the first place becuase they are not ready. So 90% of the time if they call you or email you, then they are just wasting your time.
@Ahuddy - I do think they are a lot of instances where customers are coming to a site while doing research before making a buying decision. So in those cases I would agree that they may have already decided that they are not going to purchase before visiting your site. However, I would disagree with your statement that 90% of the time if they contact you they are wasting your time. For instance, we absolutely do not find that to be true in our own business. I would say that a company that is finding that 90% of the people that contact them end up never purchasing should look at 1) their customer service 2) their product or service offering and 3)the website people are calling from. There is probably a breakdown in one of those areas that is causing their visitors to fall out of the purchasing cycle after contacting the company. Is the customer service helpful? Do they make the customer feel like they are wasting the reps time? Does the website misrepresent itself? Is there a gap in the product or service offering? A good place to start is to track what questions the customers are asking and work your way back from there.
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Tim is Co-Founder and CEO of About Brandi Cummings
Brandi is Co-Founder and CCO of Telecentrex, LLC and brings over 3 years of expertise related to article marketing and various content-related Internet marketing strategies.
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Hi Brandi,
What a timely topic! As you note, it’s not just small businesses but large ones that hide from customers. In a service-oriented economy, what message is that sending?
Nevertheless, many companies that DO want to connect with clients often don’t realize that they’re hard to reach. That’s because they feel their online information is prominently displayed–but don’t anticipate how others will look for it.
As a business-to-business marketing consultant, I often recommend that my clients “usability test” their sites. One way to do this is to ask existing customers–or prospects–to “find” answers to pressing questions on the site. They’ll then learn at what point, web visitors feel the need to contact them and how easy it is for them to find the contact info they need. Believe it or not, some people never think to look at the masthead or the bottom of the screen for contact info, particularly people with older, smaller screens who can’t see your web page at a glance.