Nicollet.Net

Jason Cohen from A Smart Bear makes an interesting point about the looks of your company matching its actual voice:

We’ve all been jarred by someone’s voice not matching their picture. Take English footballer David Beckham, the quintessential picture of manly sportif — washboard abs, ex-captain of the English national team, and married to Posh Spice.

But then he opens his mouth.

It’s actually quite common around these parts for companies to explain that « your satisfaction is important to us » and that « you can ask us questions by e-mail any time » but the moment you look for an e-mail address, all you happen to find is an online contact form.

I could understand if it was a matter of protecting their support e-mail address from spam robots by not including in on an actual page. But the RATP (the company that manages most of the subway lines in Paris) printed actual paper notices for billboards (the kind that you find on subway station walls) to explain how dedicated they were to their passengers and how you could contact them by e-mail by going to their web site in the « contact us » section to use the contact form. I didn’t know spam robots could read real-life billboards.

Not having any kind of actual e-mail is annoying for several reasons. One is that I actually like to use my e-mail client to send e-mail messages, if only because I get to keep a copy of what I send without any additional effort. Not to mention that the text editor might be a little less ugly than a vanilla text area on a web page. Another is that you have to double-check the e-mail address you type in the contact form. Yet another is that you don’t have to agree to anything when sending e-mail, but contact forms come with policies, terms and conditions that you have to read and agree with.

Yet, I can understand that, for the companies, contact forms are better than e-mail under certain aspects:

• You get less spam (arguably not a lot less, but it’s still nice)
• You can ask for more detailed information (such as a customer ID number) that helps you process the request faster if provided, even if it’s not mandatory.
• The form dumps the data in a pretty format directly into your CRM software, while an e-mail takes a little more parsing (it’s hard to get anything out of an e-mail besides the body and the headers)
• You get more data about your customers, if you want to aim more direct marketing at them
• You get information about how many customers started sending a message, then gave up
• You get information about what a given customer visited in your FAQ or online help before resorting to the contact form

You can even perform a search in real-time in your knowledge base using the words the user types in the contact form, just in case you can answer their question this way! I’m not sure if anyone does this, but based on how Stack Overflow works, I’m sure it would do fine.

I’m not saying any of these are good for the customers (although some of these do mean the limited-budget, low-skills support staff will be more efficient), but you can see the logic.

But I do wonder which is better: to provide an e-mail contact or an online contact form?

Could it be both ?