Usable Words

My credit union (which, by the way, is a terrific organisation that employs excellent customer service staff) has recently launched a fancy new website that’s mostly very pleasant to use. But there’s one thing I think they’re doing very wrong: using modal windows to advertise their products.

It’s been a much-discussed trend in web interface design lately, littering sites with these windows that require users to take some action before they can get on with what they came to do. They do look pretty nifty and have their uses – they can work really well for quickly displaying full-sized versions of thumbnail images, for instance. In fact, I’m planning to have a (user-initiated) modal on my website, so I’m certainly not against them in principle.

But when they’re used for advertising, they really do suck – it’s the ultimate form of “interruption marketing” because users can’t get on with anything else until they’ve interacted with the ad in some way. On a banking site, which existing customers use on a daily basis to accomplish specific tasks, that’s an even bigger sin.

When my credit union started using modals to advertise credit cards a couple of months ago, I wrote to them with a polite objection. They sent me a prompt reply, which was great, but they didn’t really seem to be taking in what I was saying. They pointed out that there was a cookie preventing anyone seeing the ad more than once (fair enough, but some people disable cookies, and maybe once is one too many). And they went on to tell me again how wonderful the credit card was. So I guess they think it’s OK to interrupt people if the product you’re selling is good.

This week I see the modal ads are back, this time advertising mortgages. What do you think – am I being a drama queen, or do you agree that this is really not on for a financial institution?

Photo credit: House of Sims

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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