CernyM - 10:33 pm on Aug 24, 2005 (gmt 0)

I think a lot depends on what you are selling and what niche you are serving.

If you are, say, Newegg and your market is electronics/computers at rock bottom prices and you serve the market niche that is most concerned about rock bottom pricing, you do not want phone calls. You want high volume, low cost transactions.

If you are, say, Tiffany, you sell very expensive designer goods to the niche that cares far more about brand image than cost. While you certainly do make sales off your website, you want and expect customers to call you and/or visit your bricks and mortar.

Most companies are somewhere in between. For us, we sell branded designer apparel. While we certainly love our shoppers that complete their transaction 100% of the way through via our website, we also love to get phone calls.

Some of our best customers simply will not order on the website. They will use the website and then call in their order. Given our price points and margins, providing this level of personalized service is of obvious benefit to us.

Apparel, especially women's apparel, can be difficult to describe completely on a website. We provide excellent quality pictures of our goods on our site and do extensive work with fitting models to be certain that our sizing charts match the way our clothing actually fits. But, women's bodies are all different and sometimes its just *easier* to talk to someone about how individual styles might look/fit.

Also, colors do not come through well on the web. At least, not true representations. From a picture, you can tell than a red is, well, red - but you cannot tell if it is necessarily a warm red or a cool red. Even if you can, you cannot be sure that your particular monitor is showing the color the way that it will show in real life.

Certainly we get a lot of calls that don't directly lead to sales, but we gain a TON of useful information that helps us. We stumbled into a market segment we never would have considered because a couple of women happened to call us and ask about it. That market segment will probably end up being 3-4% of our 2005 revenue and has tremendous growth potential for us. No additional investment beyond a few additional PPC keywords and emails to a few key influencers was necessary.

So, while occasionally we have to deal with people asking questions way out in left field, I'm generally excited when the phone rings and look for reasons to try and keep someone on the line rather than try to figure out how keep them from calling in the first place.

So, when thinking about your phone lines, you need to think about your business first. Sometimes what appears to be a cost center might actually be a profit center.