Why Have A Phone Number?

It just ties me down.

[iJeep]

I have had a phone line for my business since I started it. The business is completely on-line. Everything that I offer for sale can be ordered though the web site.

Also, an effective web site should be able to answer all of a customers questions and complete the sale for me.

With that in mind why do I bother to keep a phone line that people call to get information that could easily be distributed through e-mail in a fraction of the time?

I am sure I will loose a small percentage of customers that rather place an order over the phone than online.

Amazon.com does it, and they seem to be doing OK.

Anybody tried this? Is there anything else I should think about before discontinuing the phone support?

[Receptional]

Not having a phone number works for some people, but it does lower your credibility.

Instead of removing the number completely, consider using a web service that converts phone messages to email attachments. Then use that number. eg Efax is one but I am sure there are many others.

[Macro]

but it does lower your credibility

I agree. When I find a site that has no phone number I have a deep mistrust that the company doesn't actually exist, doesn't have any premises and that it is an ether-only affair. You want me to trust you with my credit card number but you won't trust me with your phone number?

What if I have a problem with my order? If you publish your phone number I have a feeling that there is somebody at that number I can speak to about my delivery that hasn't arrived.

If I run a rating agency/directory/business finder service I'd like to send customers/visitors to someone who looks like a solid established firm. And they all have phone numbers. If you don't have a phone number published I may assume that you don't have a number at all.

Hope that helps :-)

[sun818]

> why do I bother to keep a phone line

There is some built in frustration with customers that choose go the easiest route to ask quesions already answered in your product description. Its inevitable and it is just a part of online retailing.

The benefit of the phone is that you can interact with the customer. You receive an insight into who they are. You can upsell related products. You can also take credit cards over the phone which some customers prefer due perceived online credit card risks. Others just want to talk to a real person to feel comfortable with the transaction. Some of my biggest sales come from phone orders. I got a call from England today for fifty widgets, and another call from Germany today for fourty widgets. The more flexible you can be with the customer in terms of communication and payment methods, the less barriers you have to a successful transaction.

[ganderla]

After setting up shop, I decided that I would have a toll free number and my address on the site. My main competition publishes neither. I feel that if I want people to trust me, they might want to talk to me also.

Just my 2 cents.

[warrisr]

I publish my business number on my ecommerce sites, but put a note next to it asking people to use it for non-sales related calls only.

For the most part people seem to respect the request as I very rarely get a call about placing an order. And it does give the customer some comfort in knowing that they have a number they can call if they run into a problem.

Ron

[raja4]

For us putting a phone number is very important. We get 20-30% of our sales via phone. One reason is we want people to call us so that we can upsell.

[Herath]

We show our toll free number as follows:

1-800-****-xxxx (Customer Feed Back)

We belive this message tells the customer, ok there is a way contact us, but not
really for sales related questions.

[andy_boyd]

You could get a cheap toll free number online instantly and just have it point calls to your mobile phone, you could be taking orders at the beach! ;-)

[iJeep]

My site seems to be different. I would say at most 5% of the orders are from the phone and most of the time they even ask if they should place the order on-line or over the phone. I will have to check on a concrete number for the phone orders.

The way I see it is that I would free up my time to do other things. The things I do in that time could probably make enough money to make up for the missed sales from not being around to answer the phone. Most people don't have a problem with e-mail because they obviously have internet access already.

[sun818]

It sounds like there is a better return for you not having a phone:

1) Save time - focus your energy on "revenue producing activity"

2) Not pay for phone line

[iJeep]

It sounds like there is a better return for you not having a phone:
1) Save time - focus your energy on "revenue producing activity"

2) Not pay for phone line

That's kind of what I was thinking. It feels like I spend more time on the phone with solicitors trying to sell me advertising than with customers anyway.

[John_Brown]

If you are engaged in e-commerce, you need to have contact information available for customers to contact you with queries. This is especially true if you accept credit cards. A primary method of avoiding (non-fraudulent) chargebacks to your merchant account is to provide your customers as many methods as possible to contact you for resolution prior to them initiating a chargeback. Additionally, the new CIP provisions of the money laundering statutes in the Patriot Act now require you to display the city and state where your business is located somewhere on your site. The anonymity of the web is shrinking...Please contact me if you want the link.

[ish]

I never buy from a site without a visible phone number. If something goes wrong I want to speak to somebody.

Why not hire somebody to answer the phone and perform other admin tasks? By the sound of it this will free up loads of your time so you can concentrate on growing your business, rather than just maintaining it.

[iJeep]

By hiring somebody I don't think that the gained sales would make up for the cost of a competent employee who can answer technical questions and take orders.

If a phone number is so important why doesn't Amazon have one? I never even noticed they didn't until I had a printer go bad under warranty and needed to contact them last month. The great thing was that with the e-mail it got directed to a knowledgable person in that field that could help me. If that person had been at lunch and I called I probably would have ended up unsatisfied.

As a test I have taken the phone number off the heading for all of the pages except the front page. This evening it hasn't seemed to affect sales, but there hasn't been enough time passed to tell if it will.

[MrFishGuy]

It also depends on what you're selling. If you're selling say computer related products, odds are good your customers will have internet access. If you're selling something like geriatric vitamins, then there's a good chance that most of your potential customers may not have access to the internet. It could affect revenue to drop the phone line.

[sun818]

> If a phone number is so important why doesn't Amazon have one?

Amazon has a toll free number, its just not easy to find. :) I recall reading an article on Amazon a few years back where their customer service e-mail replies are crafted by customer service/marketing professionals. Over time, you have e-mail templates for most customer service issues. Replies to new issues are again written by these professionals and it gets added to the template library.

[Rossv1]

Two words: up-sell! We want to get as many people on the phone as possible - everything we sell is available on the web site, but if a customer orders a square widget, we would like to sell them a square-widget wrench and maybe some widget oil, too! We have found it's easier to do with a knowledgable sales-person on the phone.

[WibbleWobble]

You have a phoneline because customers are stupid. It appears to be an intrinsic part of working on the 'net, and there's nothing to be done about it.

just yesterday, we had some woman phone up unable to complete her order because one of the items in her cart was out of stock; but she didn't know this was the reason, despite it being mentioned on the site (where she was) at least thrice.
Its enough to make me want to tear my hair out, but we'd have certainly lost that order had we not had the phone number, and that one call alone covered the phoneline costs and indeed the five minutes time it took to explain everything to her.

The other issue is, of course, the trust or credibility that having a phone number lends, as mentioned numerous times in this thread -- which can only go to show how importantly people rate it.

[PCInk]

YOu also don't get feedback: "I tried to place an order, but it wouldn't let me." "Which browser are you using, is it Internet Explorer?" .... It can help fix problems that you were unaware of.

You would also need to have a very lenient returns policy - "I could not ring to confirm it was the correct product, so I have posted it back to you" ....

I would never buy from an unkown company that has no phone number displayed.

[Macro]

You have a phoneline because customers are stupid.

Very few businesses actually admit it but many <not all> customers are stupid. Very stupid. Annoyingly stupid. And it's a shame we have to put up with them.

I'm very clever when talking about our products but when I'm a customer and buying things elsewhere I have my stupid moments too. So I guess I get my own back ;-)

[choster]

If a phone number is so important why doesn't Amazon have one?

Because they're Amazon, and there's safety in numbers. They've been around for the better part of the decade. They're also in the newspapers frequently, and have shareholders and public relations staff and lawyers and a reputation to be concerned about.

In other words, I know that if I submit a web form or send them an e-mail, they'll attempt to make some sort of reply, if only a generated form letter that tells me they're adding my problem to their stack.

A new or small site has no such reputation to rely upon, at this stage of maturity in the market it is likely building one from scratch. I don't trust e-mail because it might get lost (for instance caught in a spam filter or accidentally deleted), and I trust web forms even less (for instance things get sent to wrong or nonexistent e-mail addresses). While I may never call, it's reassuring to have the number there anyway.

[derekwong28]

In our case, I can honestly say that there is no significant differences in our sales after providing a telephone no. If anything, sells have gone done. But since we aren't getting many calls, we have left the number there.

I think the actual effect depends very much on your industry and products. The only way to find out is to see what happens after you have removed it.

[wingslevel]

We had phone #'s on our sites for 2 years - just took them off with no decline in sales! What a happy day! We were getting hundreds of calls a day asking really stupid questions - most of these people weren't going to order anyway.

If I were selling diamonds, I guess I'd put my phone number on my site, but we sell pretty simple commodity items. I wish I had done this long ago.

[iJeep]

In our case, I can honestly say that there is no significant differences in our sales after providing a telephone no.

That's interesting.

Has anybody else recently posted a phone number after not having one up? Has anybody taken down a phone number that had previously been posted?