Usable Words

As a refugee from the call centre industry, Chris Brogan’s post arguing that businesses would be better off investigating other channels of customer service than obsessing about call centre performance really hit home with me.

As I say in the comments to Chris’s post, one of the important things for businesses to learn is that customers who contact you via a given channel (e-mail, for example) probably want to keep the conversation going using the same channel. I used to manage an e-mail enquiry service that was a sideline to a larger call centre, and one thing I asked my staff to do was to sign off every e-mail by inviting the customer to e-mail again with any follow-up, rather than just saying “if you have any questions, please call us”. If they wanted to make a phone call, they would have done so already.

This does have some technical and procedural implications–you need to make sure the e-mail address you’re sending from is not one of those “unrepliable” addresses (a huge peeve of mine), and you need to try to route follow-up e-mails to the person who answered the original enquiry wherever possible. But in my experience, if your turnaround time and the quality of your replies are good enough, those weird customers who prefer to communicate in writing really appreciate it.

I’m one of those customers, and by way of contrast, here’s a really bad experience I had earlier this year:

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My friends at Acorn Web Studio recently posted a plea to anyone thinking of using “click here” to indicate a link on their website:

Times have moved on now. The web is literally an everyday tool for everyday people. The ‘click here’ is now implicit. So why do so many people continue to use it in their hyperlinks and their calls to action?…There are better ways to do things.

I agree, of course, but I also think there are even worse ways of pointing to a link than “click here”! What about “To contact us, click ‘contact us’ at the bottom of the page”? “To see a list of our New Zealand offices, click the map of New Zealand on the left”? Or worst of all, “To submit an order, click ’shop’ on the menu bar, then click ‘online shopping’ and then ‘new customer’ or ‘returning customer’ as appropriate”?! You get the idea.

Why do people insist on referring to a link somewhere else on the page (or on some other page that first has to be navigated to) rather than just doing the sensible thing and re-linking? I think it has something to do with a fear of redundancy, of providing the same information more than once. This might be a carry-over from books: we “navigate” books by referring to a Table of Contents, one entry per section, so people think we ought to navigate websites the same way.

But when it comes to web navigation, redundancy is often a good thing. True, people like to be able to build a “mental map” of your site, so your navigation should be clean enough that it’s not confusing. But having a link in your menu bar that’s reiterated in your body text isn’t confusing, it’s helpful, and increasingly people expect it. (If we could, we’d do it in books too!)

Here are two sentences:

1: “At Nemo’s Aquarium, we are committed to making sure you are happy with your new fish.”

2: “At Nemo’s Aquarium, we’re committed to making sure you’re happy with your new fish.”

See what I did there? Which do you prefer? (I’m hoping no-one says 1.)

This is not about lowering your word count or using fewer characters; the saving is pretty trivial in any case. What it’s about is talking to your customers, even when what you’re saying is written down.

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