Boyink Interactive contacted the largest 25 employers in the West Michigan area via their web sites, timed them to see how how long it took them to respond, evaluated the helpfulness of their responses, and used the responses to write a set of guidelines.
Holland, Mich.
October 14, 2002
A recent study of the Web sites of West Michigan’s largest corporations shows customer service on many of these sites might more accurately be labeled “customer non-service”, based on slow response times, inaccurate information, and, in some cases, no response at all to customer e-mail inquiries.
The study, conducted in October, 2002 by Boyink Interactive of Holland, concludes that among the region’s 25 largest companies only four, or 17 percent of the study subjects, capably combine technology with the right human touch to provide information in a prompt, concise and courteous manner.
Study director and Boyink Interactive founder Michael Boyink’s process was simple and straightforward: He surveyed each of the Web sites for a piece of information, confirmed its presence on the site, then sent an e-mail message via the site’s Customer Service link, requesting the same information. The question generally was financial in nature, often pertaining to executive compensation. Boyink Interactive then judged the Customer Service responses to his queries based on factors including length of response time and helpfulness of answers.
Because Boyink has consulted several of these corporations in Web development projects in the past, he set up an e-mail account under a pseudonym to avoid being recognized and skewing study results.
The results are telling. Excluding one corporate Web site that lacked a customer service component and another site that was simply broken, only four companies earned the highest ratings for prompt and thorough service. Four companies simply did not respond to Boyink’s query; the remaining 19 responded in one to four days.
“I had two goals in doing the study,” Boyink says. “First, I wanted to put the e-mail customer service capabilities of West Michigan�s largest companies under the microscope. Second, based on the study results I wanted to create a set of guidelines for corporate Web site developers and the people responsible for answering e-mail queries from the sites. Ultimately, I want to help improve the e-mail experience for anyone trying to communicate with a company via its Web site’s Customer Service department.”
Boyink’s recommendations to those responsible for corporate Web sites include:
- Provide a “Contact Us” link on every page. One company placed its contact information in a section labeled “Communications”, where it was hard to find.
- Make sure your Web pages don’t have development text on them. Boyink found one “Thank You” page that read: “Some text goes here.”
- Do provide e-mail addresses, or at least phone numbers, for the subject matter experts in your company. Boyink encountered one site that did not provide e-mail or phone access to its Public Relations department.
“It seems rather surprising that a corporation ranked among the largest in West Michigan wouldn’t offer a way to contact its PR people from its Web site,” Boyink observes, “but I also experienced a lot of buck-passing - “please contact so-and-so” - and cut-and-pasted replies that suggested the recipient hadn’t even bothered to look for the information I knew was on the site.”
Ultimately, Boyink says, corporations should follow three simple rules:
1. Make contacting your company easy.
2. Respond quickly to e-mail inquiries.
3. Be helpful.
“I know organizational complexities, distributed responsibility and other factors can affect the smooth operation of a Web site’s Customer Service function,” Boyink acknowledges, “but to the average site visitor those issues aren’t important. If I come to your site with a question and can’t get it answered, I’m only a few mouse clicks away from your competitor’s Web site. I would recommend that the four companies that didn’t even bother to respond to our initial inquiry take their Customer Service function off their sites, at least until they develop a better strategy for handling it.”
The full version of the study including Boyink Interactive’s complete list of suggested guidelines, can be downloaded here (192K PDF File).
Boyink Interactive is a Holland, Mich.-based Internet consulting and development company. Founder Michael Boyink has been developing software and Web-based technologies for a number of West Michigan companies for over 14 years.
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