7 ms·

How to Sell More Software by Adding 12 Characters to Your Homepage

185 points by matthewking 18y ago

teej 18y ago
I'd love to see how the presence of a phone number affects web-only conversions.
- sidsavara 18y ago
  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 ;)
- babul 18y ago
  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.
  - teej 18y ago
    I agree with you. I think it would increase confidence as well. But I like to back things up with numbers.
    - jjs 18y ago
      More importantly, with those numbers, you could decide whether it's really worth the hassle (or expense, if you're hiring sales people)...
  - lallysingh 18y ago
    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.
  - goodkarma 18y ago
    What if you say you offer toll-free tech support to paid plan users?
- matthavener 18y ago
  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.
- dannyo 18y ago
  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.
  - jrockway 18y ago
    > 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.
Jem 18y ago
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.
ScottWhigham 18y ago
Live chat will help out those programmer dorks who want to "stick their toe in the water" and talk to customers yet not talk to customers...
nas 18y ago
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.
jpwagner 18y ago
Does your website have to be uber-ugly too?
- jpwagner 18y ago
  Check out: http://www.userscape.com/products/helpspot/ http://www.userscape.com/products/helpspot/ 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.
bprater 18y ago
Does anyone know of a company that this could be outsourced to?
- snprbob86 18y ago
  I think the best answer is: don't! 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.
staunch 18y ago
What's the cheapest way to get a toll free number?
- auston 18y ago
  Google - the paid ads tend to be the cheapest - I got 100 minutes a month for $4.95 in 2006 plus it was a vanity number.
- jcapote 18y ago
  ringcentral.com
- cellis 18y ago
  http://tollfreemax.com http://tollfreemax.com
- timf 18y ago
  What about a toll free voice mail? 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)?
  - webwright 18y ago
    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!).
    - timf 18y ago
      Cool, thanks for the pointer.
- lux 18y ago
  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.
ivankirigin 18y ago
We have my number on http://tipjoy.com/aboutus/ http://tipjoy.com/aboutus/ even outside a sales context. 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.
- Andys 18y ago
  Yes! People will give you feedback over phone, that they don't over email.
deleted 18y ago
[deleted]
raffi 18y ago
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.
- raffi 18y ago
  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.
  - teej 18y ago
    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.
SwellJoe 18y ago
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.
- snprbob86 18y ago
  Is there a story?
  - SwellJoe 18y ago
    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.
donniefitz2 18y ago
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.
chops 18y ago
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).
spolsky 18y ago
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.
- zmimon 18y ago
  > (using odd/even days) 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.
  - dkokelley 18y ago
    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).
  - aneesh 18y ago
    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!
  - jfarmer 18y ago
    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.
inovica 18y ago
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
- matthewking 18y ago
  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.
zmimon 18y ago
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: http://www.phonetag.com/ http://www.phonetag.com/ 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).
edb 18y ago
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.
herval 18y ago
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
ewiethoff 18y ago
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.)
known 18y ago
I like the way Gibraltar solicits business http://www.gibraltar.gov.gi/main_framesets/bus_frameset.htm http://www.gibraltar.gov.gi/main_framesets/bus_frameset.htm
known 18y ago
Communication priorities: 1. Meet 2. Phone 3. Postal Mail 4. e-mail

185 points by matthewking 18y ago

teej 18y ago

I'd love to see how the presence of a phone number affects web-only conversions.

sidsavara 18y ago
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 ;)
babul 18y ago
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.
- teej 18y ago
  I agree with you. I think it would increase confidence as well. But I like to back things up with numbers.
  - jjs 18y ago
    More importantly, with those numbers, you could decide whether it's really worth the hassle (or expense, if you're hiring sales people)...
- lallysingh 18y ago
  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.
- goodkarma 18y ago
  What if you say you offer toll-free tech support to paid plan users?
matthavener 18y ago
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.
dannyo 18y ago
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.
- jrockway 18y ago
  > 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.

Jem 18y ago

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.

ScottWhigham 18y ago

Live chat will help out those programmer dorks who want to "stick their toe in the water" and talk to customers yet not talk to customers...

nas 18y ago

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.

jpwagner 18y ago

Does your website have to be uber-ugly too?

jpwagner 18y ago
Check out: http://www.userscape.com/products/helpspot/ http://www.userscape.com/products/helpspot/ 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.

bprater 18y ago

Does anyone know of a company that this could be outsourced to?

snprbob86 18y ago
I think the best answer is: don't! 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.

staunch 18y ago

What's the cheapest way to get a toll free number?

auston 18y ago
Google - the paid ads tend to be the cheapest - I got 100 minutes a month for $4.95 in 2006 plus it was a vanity number.
jcapote 18y ago
ringcentral.com
cellis 18y ago
http://tollfreemax.com http://tollfreemax.com
timf 18y ago
What about a toll free voice mail? 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)?
- webwright 18y ago
  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!).
  - timf 18y ago
    Cool, thanks for the pointer.
lux 18y ago
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.

ivankirigin 18y ago

We have my number on http://tipjoy.com/aboutus/ http://tipjoy.com/aboutus/ even outside a sales context. 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.

Andys 18y ago
Yes! People will give you feedback over phone, that they don't over email.

deleted 18y ago

[deleted]

raffi 18y ago

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.

raffi 18y ago
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.
- teej 18y ago
  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.

SwellJoe 18y ago

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.

snprbob86 18y ago
Is there a story?
- SwellJoe 18y ago
  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.

donniefitz2 18y ago

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.

chops 18y ago

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).

spolsky 18y ago

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.

zmimon 18y ago
> (using odd/even days) 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.
- dkokelley 18y ago
  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).
- aneesh 18y ago
  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!
- jfarmer 18y ago
  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.

inovica 18y ago

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

matthewking 18y ago
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.

zmimon 18y ago

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: http://www.phonetag.com/ http://www.phonetag.com/ 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).

edb 18y ago

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.

herval 18y ago

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

ewiethoff 18y ago

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.)

known 18y ago

I like the way Gibraltar solicits business http://www.gibraltar.gov.gi/main_framesets/bus_frameset.htm http://www.gibraltar.gov.gi/main_framesets/bus_frameset.htm

known 18y ago

Communication priorities: 1. Meet 2. Phone 3. Postal Mail 4. e-mail