Wow, ClickZ keeps up the great articles. Another great article on how to make it easier for people to get in touch with you via your Contact Us page. You think that this would be a simple concept but it isn't.Ever see a website that has a million numbers that you should contact?
Brian Eisenberg at ClickZ found a great one by a company called Zaaz. Clicking on "Contact" brought up an easy to use form that only asked for the basic amount of information. It should be up to the company to not the user to sort out where the inquiry should go to. In addition, it had a unique way of letting the user know that their message would be responded to. On the confirmation page it says "Thank you for contacting ZAAZ. Your message is probably in our inbox already - the web is just that fast - and we look forward to dialogue." How cool is that?
In addition, Zaaz clearly laid out other ways to contact then either by phone or snail mail. Brian Eisenberg stresses how important this is. Why not go a step further and provide an online chat option?
I believe that simplicity is the way to go - have a simple web form and phone number that is clearly laid out and you should be good to go. The more you put the onus on the web user to decide if their request is sales or support related, the less leads your website is going to generate for you.
Blogs don't really need a contact us page as it's easy enough to leave you a comment (or at least it should be) but it would be interesting to add some sort of feedback form. Has anyone tried this?
Chad H
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2 comments:
Chad,
I've found that oftentimes people respond to blog postings via email. After experiencing this for the past few months, I asked several if they didn't want to respond publicly or they didn't know they could post comments to the blog. All of them were unfamiliar with the genre of post-comment on blogs. Clearly, there's still a lot of education to do.
Why more companies don't have chat response mechanisms on their web sites, I don't know. Seems to me, this immediate feedback mechanism should be as critical as the telephone, especially for B2B organizations.
wow, that's intersting Steve. I may create a post on how to use blogs. Chat responses for blogs seems unblog like but this is definitly a good idea. Thanks for the comment
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