Customer Service Mistakes In Web Design
Customer service is something that has evolved a lot in the Web 2.0 age, especially in terms of the channels customers are able to use to talk to people from a given company when they have a problem or complaint (or even to give positive feedback).
Many consumers now extol the virtues of using social media platforms like Twitter to get customer service or make a complaint. The fact their messages to the company are publicly visible means any company that values its reputation is likely to reply quickly and efficiently. Others love the fact that many companies now provide web chat options for talking to customer service reps, meaning they don’t have to wade through automated call routing menus on the phone, and can carry on with what they’re doing on their computers while they wait in a queue to talk to someone.
Phone Support Is Still The First Choice
However, for many of us, there is nothing that can properly replace being able to speak to someone on the phone. It can feel more immediate and responsive, and seeing as how it has been our primary way of receiving customer service for generations, we tend to trust it more. Much as we may complain about speaking to offshore call centers, where representatives may have accents we are not used to, or the problems with navigating automated systems on the phone, many of us would still pick a phone call to a company over more modern ways of reaching out like tweeting or opening a web chat. This is where we notice an odd problem with many large company websites: Contact numbers are really hard to find.
Hunting For The Number To Call
On a small business website, you can easily find the contact number from their homepage. Usually, it’s the same number whether you have a query, want to buy something, or you have a complaint. When you need to speak to a large company however, like a bank or a key service provider, this is not so simple. Understandably, they have a huge range of different numbers you can call if you want to speak to a sales person, or access an automated service that will tell you your account balance, but finding the right number to use for support can be very hard. So hard, in fact, that this great resource was created by a third party to help people find the UK customer service numbers they can’t find themselves on websites.
Why Did They Do This?
Most companies probably make their phone numbers hard to find because they would prefer their customers to use other ways of getting support that are cheaper for the business to provide. This is why you may have to go through pages of FAQs and ‘troubleshooting’ before they will finally reveal the number. However, given how important customer satisfaction is to customer retention, and how key that should be to these businesses, perhaps it’s time they realiszd that it would be better to let the customer decide how they want to interact.
Making customer service easily accessible to consumers is important, and it’s something many of the largest brands in the UK are doing poorly in the layout of their websites.
