It's been used by press and users both. Some people just want help putting tipjoy on their blog. That kind of user research is really interesting actually. You practice explaining things to people who have no idea about the web.
Also, if you don't like talking to people, keep in mind others are like you. The calls have been very infrequent. And if it gets annoying, just remove it.
No. Never again. Customers who expect telephone support are simply not worth it. Even if we could, somehow, charge twice as much for those customers, I would still not be willing to put my number on our website.
Why not just say: "For sales, press 1. For support, go to mysite.com/help". If they ignore that and hit the sales #, say, "Sorry, I'm in sales. You need to head to the support page-- those guys are generally really responsive!"
By the time you have a dozen customers, at least one will have said, publicly, something along the lines of, "I had no trouble talking to them when I wanted to buy, but as soon as I needed help, they were nowhere to be found."
There are industries and products where it's possible to get away with telephone sales, but not support. But, it's not the business I'm in, and it's probably not the business most of the folks here are in. I don't know what makes it workable, exactly, and certainly larger companies get away with it all the time...and when you and I have hundreds of thousands of customers, we can discuss the possibilities.
It probably is possible to differentiate somehow on your website; making available far more expensive versions that include telephone support. I kinda suspect that will engender animosity in the non-premium customers who feel like they're getting second class treatment, but at least they'll all know where they stand. But, beware that no matter what you do, you will get phone calls for support, if you offer a number for sales. And your suggested solution will piss some customers off.
Anyway, I think everyone is just dramatically underestimating the cost of answering a phone.
"There are industries and products where it's possible to get away with telephone sales, but not support. But, it's not the business I'm in, and it's probably not the business most of the folks here are in."
I think it's a matter of how you set expectations around the number and whether you have a PBX. I ran a web dev / hosting company.
Contact page read: "To keep our prices low, we currently only offer support via email unless you have a dedicated server with a support contract." Or something to that effect.
Phone maze said: "For sales, press 1" (that went to a person, when we wanted to be available). For Support, press 2" (that went to a message that said "To keep our prices low, we don't offer telephone support. Head over to www..."
If someone circumvented it and got us on the line somehow, we'd say it verbally.
You're right, it probably pissed off the people who read the clear verbiage around the phone number on the site and chose to ignore it... But I was happy to live with that. And the phone number landed me plenty of high profit customers that I was glad to have.
Of course, this only makes sense if you have SOME premium offering and a generous margin. Most real businesses WANT to talk to a salesperson rather than buy online.
If we didn't have dedicated server hosting (thousands per year in revenue), that number never woulda seen the light of day. ;-)
I offered telephone sales and support for my prior company. For the first six months, or so, it was fine. Low customer count, and it was nice to talk to folks, find out what they were looking for, help them choose the right product, etc. But never underestimate how much more time a phone interaction takes than email or a ticket in an issue tracker--unless you're willing to be rude and end the conversation quickly. This is a skill I never obtained in seven years of running that company.
Someone dug up my phone number from whois just yesterday. I'm a nice guy, and I try to be helpful, even when it should be obvious from the fact that there is no phone number anywhere on our website that we aren't equipped to deal with telephone queries. So, I answered his questions as best I could. 45 minutes later, I hung up, having possibly convinced someone to spend $138 with us. For anyone not doing the math on this, even if he buys, given our long-term support and product maintenance commitments, I've already made no money on the sale. If he purchases the product, and then calls me again for help, I'm way down in the hole on this sale.
Here are the problems with talking to people on the phone:
1. You don't have a lot of customers today, so it's cheap and easy to answer a couple of calls per day. But, if you have any level of success, you will have more customers each day--and if you do your job, the number will only ever increase, forever and ever. 10 customers having your phone number aint so bad. 1000 customers having your number is bad. 10000 customers having your number is a nightmare, and an expensive one, at that. You have to hire someone, at some point, to handle the phones...and if they're technically savvy enough to help people, they won't be cheap. It's also a soul-sucking job. Nobody likes doing phone support. It's high stress, low satisfaction, and overall just sucks. Turnover will be high, and the low morale of this team will hurt morale in the rest of the company. You could outsource it, but that'd be admitting you're willing to provide shitty service. You could put them in a different building, but that hurts morale of the support team even more--and makes your developers no longer accountable for their products ease of use.
2. The kind of people who refuse to buy if they can't call you for sales assistance will insist on calling for support. And they will call a lot. This was a definite trend with my previous company. If I had to talk to someone for an hour or two to make the sale (expensive products back then), I expected to talk to them again for several hours through the life cycle of the product. If they can't call you for support, but could for sales, they will be angry--loudly, publicly, angry--about this difference. "You're easy to reach when you want my money, but when I need help you're nowhere to be found." No matter how aggressively you help people online or via email, you will be described as being unsupportive and unhelpful, and only interested in the sale.
3. Expense and opportunity cost. I did the math on this during the last couple of years of operation of my company, and I should have done it the first year of operation and every year after...I was losing money on every box I sold, because of the time I spent on the phone with folks. When I "closed" the company and stopped selling systems, and only provided contract services on an hourly basis, I had the most profitable year of my companies existence.
4. You can't help people with technical products on the phone, but they expect you to. You can't send them links to relevant docs, you can't send screenshots back and forth, you can't suggest commands for copy/paste usage. What you can do is spend five minutes explaining that "slash" and "backslash" are different characters, and that when you say "slash" you actually mean "slash" and not "backslash", likewise "dash", "underscore", "pipe", "hash", upper vs. lower case etc. So, 45 minutes into the call, you've finally gotten a sane description of the problem. An hour after that, you've solved their problem. So, it is deeply frustrating for everybody concerned. Two or three emails or comments in a ticket tracker would have solved this problem in a tenth the time, and that's time you could spend helping other customers.
I'm sure there are products and businesses out there that will be well-served by having a phone number. But, if your product is technical in nature, and doesn't cost thousands of dollars, I would argue that you'd have to be an absolute fool to make a promise to help people via telephone.
These are great points. IF you can get away without a phone number, you train your customers early on to use other means. Yes, you may lose out on customers, but this is built into your profit model.
Taking phone calls costs money. Typically, people who would prefer to call are going to be not as technical, and will indeed require 'support' that goes beyond your product, because if your product isn't working, you have to fix it or at least diagnose it on that phone call, even if it's because their networking is down. You essentially become their "IT" department.
So, not having a phone number will cause you to lose sales, but probably with those sales are the 'expensive' customers that you probably would not have made money on after factoring the extra support costs.
That being said, if you must have a phone number, increase the cost of your product to cover the extra cost of that.
Very true!
In my first job at a small hardware manufacturer, all we had was phone support (this was late 80's - early 90's, email wasn't widespread). The people who needed the most support often became very good customers because they knew they could rely on us to help them when they needed it. Almost all customers needed pre-sales support and a fairly high percentage needed tech support after purchase depending on what they bought. One of our product manuals was always being upgraded because the product was so complex that we began to anticipate the customer questions and answer them explicitly in the manual. The average sale was probably around $300 but we had a high number of repeat customers many of whom we knew by name.
As you said, the cost of the product must cover the anticipated support. If you are covering the cost, then make this an opportunity to differentiate your company even more by offering excellent support beyond what your competitors do.
So, I think this is one of those lessons learned from the school or hard knocks, for me. Sometimes it is just as important to be clear with yourself and the rest of your company about what customers you aren't trying to serve as being clear about what customers you are trying to serve.
You cannot satisfy everyone, but early on, when you have very few customers, you may tell yourself, "This customer would be worth doing something very different for." It is tempting to do anything you can do make a sale.
Sometimes, this is just a sign that you aren't targeting the right people yet, and it's time to evolve and grow. But, if you aren't careful it just leads to you trying to be all things to all people. I had this problem with my previous company...the questions would come, "Can you do X, Y, and Z?" And my thought process would be, "Yes on X and Y, and I could totally make Z happen, if I just spend two weeks developing it, making this a losing sale, but I'll amortize across future sales of Z." And I'd respond, "Yes." I'd make Z possible, and then I would never sell to another customer that needed Z. To be fair to this thought process, Virtualmin wouldn't exist had I been successful about saying "No, that's not something we do." But, counting up the successes vs. the things that merely distracted me from my real goals, that's batting about .025. And, I had wanted to make something like Virtualmin for years (and I'd even taken a stab at it three or four years previous and written 10kLoC, or so, and had some basic functionality and a half dozen users)...this customer just gave me an excuse to spend enough time/money on it to make it a reality.
Because I (almost) never have to spend an hour on the phone with anyone, either to make a sale or to support the product, I can spend that hour helping a dozen people solve their problems. Thus, sales are cheaper for us...so we can charge less. Support is cheaper for us, so we can do more of it, without having to charge extra as our competitors do.
If I ever said, "Yes", to the question, "Can I call you?" all of our math about how we make a profit on software that is as large as ours, while being as cheap as it is (and being 90% available in an Open Source form), would completely go out the window, and our prices would have to become too high to be competitive, or we would just start losing money on every sale, as I did in my previous business. I'm not saying answering a phone now and then would put us out of business...but I am saying that I don't want to be a telephone IT support business ever again (you're spot on in your assessment that you become every customers IT department, because you're the only company that answers the phone and has smart people on the end of the line--I can't even count the number of times I've fixed peoples routers because they couldn't afford a Cisco support contract). Before offering to answer phones, think about whether your business can support pricing that high (if you're unfamiliar with Cisco support pricing...do a little digging...be prepared to gasp), or if it will price you right out of the market.
I'm going to have to disagree here, based on data. We did A/B testing of our homepage with and without a phone number for months (using odd/even days) and simply could not see any measurable difference in sales. With all due respect to Ian, he makes a great product, and having a phone number on your web site is a good thing, but having the phone number on the home page (rather than a contact page) did ZERO for us.
That sounds like an odd way to do it - do your customers typically purchase on the same day they first hit your web site? If not, they likely came back several times and might have been bemused or even frustrated to find the phone number appearing and then disappearing. Or just seeing the phone number one of those days was enough to accrue all the benefit of having the phone number on any day.
Good point. A better way would be to randomly sort visitors to the site into either the A or B group, and make that sorting sticky over time (cookies aren't perfect, but are a reasonable approximation). No magically disappearing phone number!
This is a good point. I assume the testing measured how many sales were made during which days. A more thorough test would be 1 month intervals for say 6 months (even better would be for them to figure out how long the sales cycle typically takes from the 1st visit, double it and add a day, then alternate for that period).
I presume he means he puts all users who arrive on an even day into the control and all users who arrive on an odd day into the "show a phone number" bucket.
You then use cookies to track which user is in what bucket, because you have to know which treatment the user was in when they converted. As you said, that may or may not be on the same day they were treated.
That's still kind of weird, though. You should just randomly assign each user as they arrive to one group or the other.
If he's doing what you're suggesting that's bad methodology for all the reasons you said, and I wouldn't trust the results.
Really interesting. It SEEMS sensible that the phone number should have an effect in terms of credibility and actual sales calls that end up with a sale.
One theory might be that your audience is comprised of geeks. Less likely to pick up the phone, and less emotionality dependent on voice contact in terms of comfort/credibility. I wonder if A/B testing on Cabelas.com or LLBean.com would yield different results.
I'm using tollfreemax.com and added a phone number to FeedbackArmy.com weeks ago.
I recommend having a phone number and putting it everywhere. I know when I see it, I feel better.
No one calls me and I still get a lot of contact through the contact form. But I still think it provides comfort to people seeing the number there. I had one customer who was trying to get a response out of me but my email kept going to his spam folder. I finally emailed him from another address but if I didn't think of this, the phone number would have given him a last resort to reach out and strangle eer get the issue resolved.
If someone does call, I'll answer in my best phone voice, help out, and get on with what I was doing.
Oh one other thing about tollfreemax--I use them but can't recommend them. The service is fine once I got going. However the backend user interface is the most awful confusing thing you'll ever encounter. In fact, the whole user experience of the site is the most awful thing you'll ever encounter. Don't believe me? Signup and you'll understand.
That said, I called technical support, and they "trained" me on how to get around the quirks of the system. The technical support was absolutely excellent. I was surprised and I think it'd be cheaper for them to fix their site rather than have every customer call technical support.
I worked in technical support for a company who worked in a similar way. Unfortunately, one great developer costs as much as 3 technical support people, so the math doesn't work out in the heads of some people.
I've started using twilio.com for a new site. They offer a toll-free 866 number for $5/mo + $0.05/min. Now it's not a phone line or voicemail per se, but rather a service for programming phone features like an answering service, support ticket system, company directory, or anything else. You can forward calls onto any phone too, so they can connect with a real person as well.
I've also tied it into voicecloud.com so that any message that's left or support request from the phone is automatically transcribed into an email and into our support database along with the mp3 of the actual message. voicecloud.com does add another $20/mo to the cost, but now I never have to listen to messages which is a big plus for me.
Anyway, for $5/mo you can build a complete toll-free phone service in almost no time. I can't recommend it highly enough.
There was a post several days ago either here or on techmeme showing a conceptual system between twilio, voicecloud, SMS, etc. Since you've developed a system that clearly implements this would you happen to know more details of something like that. Are there any out of the box examples online that demonstrates the interoperability between this, or did you set it up from scratch?
The APIs look pretty straightforward, but if you have any further insight or resources on this integration it would be very helpful.
The integration really just happens in your script, it's very basic. When I receive a RecordingUrl parameter from Twilio, I just save the file (I'm using PHP, so file_get_contents() to get the file, and file_put_contents() to save it) then I give Voicecloud the link to the file using their API call. I use file_get_contents() for that as well, which returns an XML response, but since it's so simple and I'm only looking for a transaction # to reference, I just do a regex for it instead of parsing the XML. You need to save that # to your db so you can reference it again in the Voicecloud response script.
The Voicecloud response handler is equally simple: they call your script and pass it a transactionuid (the value saved in the last script) and a transcribed_text parameter. From there you can do whatever you want, like send it in an email or save it to your database.
The Voicecloud API isn't really completely setup right now though, so you have to work with their support team to get an API key and to give them your response handler URL. They have to input that stuff. One other thing is I initially ran into issues with Twilio's mp3 encoding not working with Voicecloud, but Voicecloud solved that for me and probably for anyone else too.
I have no problem talking to people on the phone but I doubt they'll call at a good time (yes, not an ideal situation) so I may as well cut to the chase and try to find something cheaper.
Search results for "toll free voice mail" yield plenty of choices ... anything good? Is the strategy itself bad (I wouldn't advertise it as a voice mail box)?
Not to be a total twilio fanboi, but this is cake if you build a quick-n-dirty app on their api. You could have it email you the sound file (or have it email it directly to your helpdesk software as an open ticket!).
yep. $2 per month for phone numbers plus usage. The cool thing is they don't charge per user. Totally SIP compliant so any phone will do. http://www.onsip.com
For those terrified of actually answering the phone, and who dread the idea of having to check voice mail constantly (like me), there are outfits that will take your call and transcribe it to an email for you. eg:
This way you can pretend to have a phone number but it's actually no different to publishing an email address. (Not saying this is really good business practice ... but it's there).
Through enhanced confidence. Many consumers like to see a phone number on the site (especially for companies/services they are not familiar with) even if they have no intention of calling (at least in the purchasing phase).
It is psychologically reassuring to think you will be able to call if you have a problem.
Agreed, it's what sold me on at least 1 web-based service (rsync.net). I didn't call until after I had subscribed for quite some time... to get voicemail that was apparently ignored.
Me too - I suspect it does though. I hate to admit it, but there's definitely a part of me that likes to see call us now 1-800.... on the top right of online stores when I'm browsing. Or how newegg has a contact page that lists a phone number with hours of operation
Now does that actually mean I buy from newegg more often as a result? Who knows ;)
I'm so used to ordering from big sites like Amazon and Ebay that I usually don't even check to see if there's a phone number. I expect one to be there.
Nice looking Web 2.0 websites just look reliable, so I don't check for phone numbers on them. The older the page looks, the more i look for a number.
> I'm so used to ordering from big sites like Amazon and Ebay that I usually don't even check to see if there's a phone number.
Well, in those cases, neither make their phone number easy to find. Amazon has it hidden very deeply in their "help" site, and eBay requires an account to get at their number. I assume, anyway -- I browsed for a few minutes and didn't find any phone numbers at all.
Big companies prefer email just as much as small ones.
I think its similar to having a domain name (and a nice, simple one). It shows that you've committed to the business by investing in a domain, phone number, nice sign, etc.
True story (in a nutshell): I was running a hosting company with a friend of mine. Things were good, our sales were increasing to the point where we quit our jobs to grow the company.
It was a good life. Wake up, set your own hours, do some programming on the site and automation tools, take a mental break to communicate with users via email. All in our boxers. Our friends would call us to go out, one of us could handle the emails while the other was out, or hell, we would both leave, so long as people got a reply within 6 hours, everybody seemed to be happy.
Life was good, we were both getting laid and our apartments were clean. Every now and then, a customer here and there wouldn't get it and would request a phone call. We gladly called them up, and fixed in 30 mins what normally would take us 7-10 days of back and forth emailing!
This gratification encouraged us to put our number on our webpage. We did, and closed many sales over the phone. Our sales tripled, our company grew more. we were both earning 50k/year in profits compared to last year's 20, and growing more than linearly.
What happened next? The calls grew more frequent. We would leave them to answering machine and when we would call back, the customers would be angry. Eventually customers called us out on the fact that we only answered calls as of 11:00am and they made us feel guilty about not having a phone answered during business hours.
So we conceded. 9am - 6pm our lines would be answered. After all, we owe it to the customers who brought us our livelihood. 2 guys splitting the task; it was maintainable. All of a sudden though, we couldn't work when we wanted. We had to be up and in the office at 9.
We tried maintaining our lifestyles, coding killer features until 4am, going out when our friends would call us. Eventually there were consequences for these actions.
Gone were the days of coding in our underwear, gone were the haphazard productivity blitzes, gone were the days of our startup's spirit. We lost sleep because we had to be up at 8. Lots of it. If one of us would sleep in, the other would cover until eventually the person waking up early more often would fall to resentment.
Our product suffered, our relationship suffered, our productivity blitzes? Gone. We were canceling plans with friends because we had work to do at night that couldn't get done cause we were on the phone. Nobody would outsource our calls, most of our clients spoke french. Our website hadn't changed graphic design since we put our winter theme up. It was july and our logo was covered in snow. Our phone staff kept quitting. Our sales plateaued. We even started wearing pants. I eventually sold my half.
Trust me kids, don't put your number on your homepage. Stick to email support and get by. Find a way to get by without a filing cabinet and go travel the world while working.
I'm shocked this floated to the top. At Poll Everywhere, we have our phone number on our web page and it will remain there until it simply doesn't scale anymore. Like this guy said, it tripled his sales; too bad he didn't just take the phone number off the web page when it became unmanageable.
For Poll Everywhere putting the phone number on our website has been a great experience. When people call us up with questions we can learn more about their needs or where they are confused. When enough confused people call, you know that something isn't right on your website and you go fix it to reduce those calls.
From our point-of-view, putting our phone number has been a great way to close the feedback loop between us and our customers. I strongly recommend signing up for a RingCentral or GrandCentral number and at least try putting it in your website.
If answering phones was tripling your sales, why didn't you just hire someone to answer the phone? They could at least field a majority of the calls, and that frees you up to improve your company and make even more money. Seems like an investment to me.
You need to be moderately technical to answer alot of the questions we were getting. In our case, the people who were good on the phone wanted to do more. They couldn't because of the call/email volume and they ended up leaving.
Again, this isn't the whole story. I'm being a little dramatic here so that the story isn't all that boring, but it's essentially what happened. It's probably a good idea for a lot of people. For me, however, it really took all the fun and all my passion out of my company.
I'm in this exact situation and I am not sure if I can get the right person to answer the phone as effectively as I could.
I'm not dying to answer the phone - but until I have a good feel for what the "frequently asked questions" are, I can't pass that responsibility onto anyone else.
One day, long 2 years ago, one of my website's users did a whois on my DNS name, found my phone number there and called me (in the middle of the night) to tell me he had a problem with his account.
Guess I didn't hide my phone well enough :-P
This is especially excellent advice. For my business, I list the phone number on the "contact us" page and I've scored countless sales simply because someone was there to answer the phone (the phone number is just my cell phone, no real need for a toll-free number these days - everyone gets free long distance).
Historically, I've been a terrible customer service person (when I worked as an usher for a movie theater I hated customers), yet when it's your own product, and it's something you're excited about and something in which you truly believe, it really shows through in voice communication.
Those customers that get the rapid phone support are frequent sources of referrals, especially the repeat callers.
That said, I've been in business now for 2.5 years, have always had the phone number on the site, and have had more than 3,000 customers with a few hundred thousand users, yet I probably average maybe 30 minutes on the phone per day, sometimes more, sometimes not a single call for a few days. Most users use the contact form or the forums. I'm still honestly surprised I don't get many calls. As a one man shop, I was expecting to spend a lot of time on the phone, and I was pleasantly surprised to be wrong. I was originally hesitant to post the phone number, but it becomes a very helpful tool, in my opinion.
But like some other users have mentioned, the phone number helps users be reassured they can get instant support if it's needed. And like the article says, you can always let it go to voice mail if you're too busy.
Overall, great advice, imo.
(I know this is structured poorly as a sort of stream of consciousness, and for that I apologize).
Unless you are a huuuuge company with millions of customers -- end consumers really -- then you are better off doing it yourself or hiring dedicated, in-house staff.
The more directly you handle customer's questions and problems, the better equipped you are to enhance your product, your sales materials, you self-help resources, etc. If you outsource it, they have no incentives to help you reduce call volume, which indicates reduced questions and problems (hopefully not reduced interest!). In fact, they have incentive to INCREASE call volume, because they charge you by the unit.
I'd love to have a phone number on our site, but our market is global, so wouldn't it look negative to have a UK number, or a US number, for people in other countries? We are based in the UK, but we mainly sell outside of the UK (www.sourceguardian.com). I might try to put a number prominently on the site and see if this achieves anything or maybe gives more of a comfort factor to our visitors and I'll report back
I use skype with a skypein number, I also have an 0845 (UK local rate) number pointing to that. For my customers in other countries I intend to get an additional skype number that is local to those countries, but then we're only 1 hour time difference. You'd still get difficulty with that if you're UK and US, but then at least you'd have some overlap plus an answering machine.
I think this is a great piece of advice. It seems especially valuable if you are selling B2B and your clients are not all web-savvy. I am going to take this advice and try it out. What could it hurt? I might have to talk to customers who come to me and are already somewhat interested in my product and close the sale (potentially). It's worth a shot.
Aside: Whether or not your site shows a phone number, make sure your contact information and the FAQ/Help areas are usable without Javascript or Flash. Google is sure to find it. So are customers and potential customers with peculiar disabilities. (Asus, I'm looking at you.)
The company I work for designed and built a new e-commerce site for one of our clients in the first quarter of last year. Although it's been a huge success, there are still customers of theirs who will ONLY place orders via the telephone.
It really depends on what kind of customers you are serving. There are many industries where it is the norm to call a vendor if you are interested in their product.
It is difficult to navigate and understand what is going on. Of course we get the idea and understand, but think from the perspective of a prospective customer. This is typical of the type of website that has a phone number on the front page. It looks unprofessional. When you get larger you can post your automated answering line (like 1-800-NOSOFTWARE for Salesforce.com) on the front page, because it's limited overhead.
It's been used by press and users both. Some people just want help putting tipjoy on their blog. That kind of user research is really interesting actually. You practice explaining things to people who have no idea about the web.
Also, if you don't like talking to people, keep in mind others are like you. The calls have been very infrequent. And if it gets annoying, just remove it.