It’s cheaper when customers use the website

If you can replace a customer phone call with a visit to your website, you’re going to save money. In the UK, it’s on average 14 times more expensive to take a phone call compared to having your customer visit your website.

Having said that, your website is just one part of the overall customer experience. Providing a good customer experience involves giving your customers what they want. So when they want your phone number, just give it to them.

We’re getting wise to poor customer service

As customers, we’ve all experienced poor customer service from companies who are trying to keep costs down by ignoring us. So some of us will do a bit of digging before we buy from a company. It’s all very well having your sales number emblazoned on the homepage. But what about the customer service number? What’s it going to be like after I’ve decided to buy?

In usability tests, I’ve noticed some people go digging for the customer service number before buying. Some even say they call these numbers, just to see what the service is going to be like. They also want to know if it’s a freephone or a local rates number.

This behaviour is a reaction to past experiences of poor customer service. The approach you take to being contacted on your website will say a lot about you to prospective customers.

When these people encounter a website that hides its contact details, they know that the customer service will be practically non-existent. So they don’t buy.

Finding contact details

People tend to look for a link that says that ‘Contact us’ when they want to phone or email the company. They’ve become used to the the contact page having this name, so this is what they look for.

This has implications when you provide your telephone number at the top of the page. The example below shows how the Talk Talk website provides its phone number.

I’ve witnessed a lot of people overlooking numbers like this in their search for the word ‘contact’. Of course, other people will notice it quite quickly. So you should never rely on this approach alone. Make sure you also provide a contact page. Thankfully, this is exactly what Talk Talk do.

Avoid the ‘Don’t contact us’ page

The contact page below from Scottish Power is an example of what I call a ‘Don’t contact us’ page. Scottish Power clearly doesn’t want to speak to its customers. We’re shoved towards an online help instead.

This page tells us a lot about the company’s approach to customer service. The link to an email contact opens a 2-page contact form that asks for every possible scrap of information about you that they can think to ask.

Hiding the phone number

A less extreme version of the ‘Don’t contact us’ page is when the contact details are smothered by alternatives to contacting the organisation. Tiscali uses such a tactic, as you can see below.

The ‘Contact us’ page here is swamped with alternatives to calling. If you want to call them, you need to find the ‘Contact us’ link on this page. Despite already being on a page of the same name. There’s nothing wrong with providing a few alternatives but these should not prevent the user from finding the contact details.

BT handles this a little better as shown below. The way the frequently asked questions are provided here is good. Unfortunately, the user experience goes down hill rapidly after this page.

BT presents the top 3 questions to the right-hand-side of the contact options.  People who have exactly these questions, may read them and perhaps no longer need to call. Importantly, the alternatives don’t smother the main purpose of the page.

Positioning of contact options

On many websites, the phone number will be the preferred contact option for users. Some organisations however, prefer you to fill out a contact form. So they put this first and hide the number lower down the page.

When you put your contact form first, you’ll find that many people don’t get to see your phone number. We’re now very used to websites without phone numbers. So much so, that lots of people hit the Back button as soon as they see the dreaded contact form.

If you want your users to contact you at all, give their favoured options prominence on the contact page.

Contextual phone numbers

On some websites, presenting the phone number at the right moment will make the difference between getting a sale and losing one. In such circumstances, it’s not enough to simply provide the ability to find contact details. Instead the phone number should be presented contextually.

A lot of people research products on the internet but prefer to buy over the phone. If you want their business, you shouldn’t make it difficult for them to find your phone number. Consider providing your contact details contextually at points when they are likely to be useful. See the example below from the Share Centre.

The Share Centre associates the phone number with the call-to-action button by positioning the number alongside it and making the text the same colour. So people who don’t want to open an account online are presented with an alternative without the need to go looking for a number. This should lead to more calls from new customers.

Did you find this useful?

If this article was useful for you, try reading a few more. Here are a few suggestions.

• FAQ usability
• Good pathway pages
• Good call-to-action buttons

• Prioritisation
• Language
• Positioning
• Colour
• Size
• Restraint

You’ll need to read the article on the UXBooth website if you want to get access to those pearls of wisdom.

Positioning and appearance

Your ‘Find Address’ button will be overlooked if you don’t  position it well and give it a prominent appearance. To start with, don’t put the button to the right-hand-side of the postcode field.

When we’re completing forms, most of our attention is devoted to the top or left-hand-side of form fields. We scan between the form field and the label. So we often don’t see things that are placed to the right of the form field. The example below shows a web form that makes this mistake.

Another problem with this example is that the button itself doesn’t really stand out. I’d have reversed these colours so that the background was purple and the text white.

Here’s another example below.

This one doesn’t even use a button (buttons are good for indicating an action) so it’s even more likely to be overlooked than the first example.

The previous examples are missed opportunities to help the user. The next example from Travelodge Hotels is likely to just antagonise them. Check it out below.

Loads of people will see this button and think “Oh great, now you tell me”. They’ll have entered their address already. So the button actually harms the user experience. There’s a whole world of validation pain that follows this bit, but I won’t go into that.

An example of good positioning

I don’t like to moan on too long about what you shouldn’t do, so here’s a good example. It’s from the John Lewis website.

The postcode field is the last input field on this form and the ‘Find address’ button is immediately below it. The ‘Find address’ button is essentially the ‘Continue’ button. I like this approach for its simplicity. There are no fields to potentially distract the user and the button is nicely aligned with the postcode field.

Assist, don’t enforce

Imagine you’re in a furniture store buying a new bed. You tell the sales assistant your address so the bed can be delivered and he says “Sorry that’s not a valid address, choose one from this list”. It wouldn’t happen, would it? So why do websites do this?

I know my address better than a stupid database. I mean, I live there for pete’s sake.

Your address look-up should exist to help users, not shackle them. Lots of people have problems receiving deliveries when they use the standard address provided in these address finders. So they need to change the address a little.

Allow some flexibility when providing an address lookup . There are 2 main ways of doing this:

• Don’t use the look-up to populate the house name/number
• Provide a list of addresses for the user to select from, but also provide a ‘my address isn’t here’ option

Which ever you use, make sure the address can be manually amended.

Also be careful about how you validate the form. Only exclude characters you know for a fact do not appear in any addresses. It’s best not to bother. If you’ve prepopulated most of it, there is little need to validate the fields again.

But I’m protecting data quality

You might argue that by enforcing the use of your address database, your form is guaranteeing that valid data has been entered.

But this is a purely programmatic view of valid data. Your data doesn’t validate because it agrees with your address database. Instead it truly validates when your customer receives their delivery without hassle.

There’s little benefit of the data validating with your database when doing so dooms the delivery to failure.

An example of the wrong approach

I was once trying to buy insurance from an old client of mine. I entered my postcode, chose my address from the list and hit the ‘continue’ button. The form validation barked at me to provide a valid address, despite having put the address in itself.

The address was correct. But, the full stop in ‘St.’ (to respresent the word saint) was not accepted by the validation. I couldn’t change the wording manually because the form didn’t let me edit the address fields. Needless to say I left and bought my insurance elsewhere.

I wanted to see the extent of the problem on my clients business. So I went to Streetmap and did a search for all of the streets in the UK with the word Saint abbreviated as ‘St.’ in them. Either Streetmap or my computer couldn’t handle the results and my browser crashed. By this time, well over 1000 results had been returned. That’s a lot of people who can’t buy insurance from your company.

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