Is Your Website Driving Potential Customers Away?

The Pew Research organization estimates that this year, 2015, will see Millennials overtaking Baby Boomers in the workforce.  We also know that Millennials are more prone to digital communication -at least as a first point of contact – when engaging with a new company, brand, service, provider, etc. 

Virtually every website that you visit will have some sort of Contact feature – perhaps a separate page with multiple contact options:  a fill-in form, email addresses, phone numbers, snail mail addresses, live chat, or multiple social media paths: Twitter handles, Facebook page links, Instagram feeds, and so on. 

If you are a small business, keep this in mind:  be sure to have Contact information, but you must also endeavor to monitor those incoming communications.  It’s fine if you have a channel on every social media platform out there – but if you do, you’ll need to monitor those for engagement, at a minimum.  Bonus if you devote the time to provide content to engage your existing and potential audiences.

The same applies to the most basic online contact – a fill-in form or email contact.  Do you know where that information goes after a visitor to your website sends it?  If not, you should do an immediate ‘health check’ on your website.  Full disclosure, I’m not a millennial – more of a Gen Xer – but my communication style is all millennial.  Millennials, and many others, are often behind keyboards or smart phones for most of the day. It is far easier for them, and me, to keep my fingers on the keyboard to reach out to your company – as opposed to stopping my productivity to pick up a phone and call you.  If they reach out to a company, it’s usually digitally – texting, via social media, email, or submitting a fill-in contact form via your website. 

When those inquiries are not handled, not only have you potentially lost a customer, but that person is likely going to share that frustration among other social media channels about your business.  Case in point: over the last two weeks, I’ve submitted either emails or fill-in contact forms to the following entities, because I’ve just bought a home and would like various projects done: a home repair business, a co-op, a furniture store, a waste management company, an attorney, an insurance company, a car dealership, and probably some others that I can’t recall.  How many of these entities contacted me back? Zero.  None.  In some cases I’ve reverted to phoning them, because they were the only providers in my area. But if there were more competition where I live, these businesses would not have been given a second chance to obtain my consumer dollars. 

Don’t let your website disappoint a potential customer before they even have the chance to do business with you.  Make sure all of your Contact lines of communication are active and addressed to prevent this problem.