24. Don’t be shy

Most users are curious to know more about the personalities involved behind a web site. Rogue’s gallery, ‘My name is Sharon…’, email addresses – whatever the method, introduce yourself.

You’re not trying to be everyone’s best friend, but you need to reveal a bit about your company. Trivia and a few jokes are good; home phone numbers and waist measurements are bad!

Who Are You?

Don’t be shy! Users like to see the personality/ies behind a web site. Whether it be photos of your entire customer services department or you the artist hard at work – the more personal the site, the more users will trust you. It really does make a difference if there are a few photos of the staff somewhere on the site; you would be surprised how many hits these pages receive. Competitors use the pages to size up who they are up against, clients or partners use the pages to see who they are meeting with and hopefully glean a bit of information from the site, and users will visit, mainly out of curiosity, to see what Simon from the warehouse department looks like.

Let your users into a little bit of your lives and they will reply with hits to your site and purchases.

The Numbers Game

I recently attempted to find the corporate telephone numbers of the country’s leading mobile phone operators regarding a business development proposal. I didn’t want their customer services department or recorded messages about new services or opening an account, but these were the only numbers on offer. How dumb does that make these companies look? They make their money out of telecommunications but don’t have the wit to list their own number for non-account holders who may wish to talk about something important. Don’t be afraid that listing a number will inundate your office with unwanted calls – it won’t. But it will allow people to communicate with you in the way they want. Most internet users are comfortable using email/web forms, or customer services when appropriate, but sometimes information is too delicate or time-sensitive to be entered onto a form or sent to your call centre many miles (and maybe continents) away from the corporate HQ, with no way of knowing when it will be read, and by whom. Or whether they will understand it.

Contact Us – Go On, Please!

As important as including a telephone number on your web site is for you to include at least one email address that can be used by users to contact you. Whether these mails arrive in a member of staff’s mailbox or whether they go into an email queue for your customer services department to answer is irrelevant. Let users contact you with whatever is on their mind. More advanced sites create email addresses for specific queries or comments, which means the question or comment has more chance of arriving at the right place and being answered by the right person. As a minimum, I’d suggest that each site has the following mail addresses set up:

E-commerce sites

• orders@ or sales@
• returns@
• shipping@
• info@
• contact@
• products@
• technical@
• unsubscribe@

General sites

• info@
• contact@
• unsubscribe@
• editor@ or webmaster@

Posting information about where you are based won’t ordinarily result in angry customers knocking on your door. If you write about your location in a positive way it will only increase traffic and custom. People tend to be quite loyal, either to a city or a country. If you are based in Liverpool, sing about it and show how you are a positive influence on local employment and commerce. Likewise, if you are a Europe-based company and are looking to improve home sales, let your users know you are here (or there, depending on where you are reading this) and show the user how your local knowledge improves your offering.

Finally don’t forget to give people the option to follow you on your social media – if they are interested in your site they are prime candidates to follow your blog/Tweets etc. so make it easy and have one click buttons to ‘like’/’follow’ you.

How did it go?

Q. We sell agricultural machinery; our CEO thinks that a few mug shots are hardly going to improve our sales. How can I convince her otherwise?

A. You’d be surprised, and it won’t cost much to find out – bear in mind that some customers feel there is something lacking with online sales. They like to walk into a physical shop, look around, have a chat with the shopkeeper and make a purchase. By adding some personalities to your site, you are helping to bridge that gap.

Q. Human resources fear that we run the risk of a member of staff being harassed by a stalker-like customer if we start posting pictures up. Is this not the case?

A. There are some very weird customers; most of them live in Texas and Iran, if my experience is anything to go by. Certain customers will harass your customer service department whether you post photos and information or not – these people like to chat or moan, it’s as simple as that. It is still worth having a go at the exercise anyway. And if the worst comes to the worst, you can always put up a picture of George, the Martin Johnson lookalike from maintenance.

Here is an idea for you…

They won’t like it. Not one bit. But it’s time to add some photos to the web site. And that includes middle and top management. Get some snaps up there; at worst, have everyone bring in a picture of themselves as a child to scan and post onto the site. Even less popular is to focus on a single member of staff, either once a week or once a month. Use a template questionnaire and post the results on the staff area of your site. It can be simple things like favourite holiday destination, book and film but what it does is creates a chink in the wall so that visitors feel more involved with the company they are dealing with.

Defining idea…

‘The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius.’

Oscar Wilde

Defining idea…

‘Honesty is the best image.’

Tom Wilson