From: "Nick May" <nick@kyushu.com>
> keitai-l@appelsiini.net writes:
> >This poster from Toyota instructs the user to CALL a number to get the
URL
Nick May responded:
> Å@... thus reducing the number of hits, but significantly increasing their
> quality and allowing customisation of the webpage prior to the user
> browsing it. No need to extract info with a form, you already have their
> name and email address from the phone call....
>
> In this case, whether they subsequently browse the URL or not, you have
> contact info....
It is, after all, significantly easier to enter a phone number than it is to
enter a URL, on a keitai. Admittedly, unless you're dialing straight from
the ad, you have to take down the number. But after that, everything is
easier. But it's not just about what's easier.
I had an interesting conversation the other day with a co-owner of a wine
import business, in which she expressed her frustrations over her Japanese
customers' reservations about ordering via webforms. Many of them, given a
choice between ordering via e-mail and ordering over the web, chose to write
the e-mail, even though it meant more typing, more opportunity for error,
more time.
Speculating on this, we considered the possibility that most people simply
find e-mail a less alienating way to communicate--it's more like talking.
I'm not suggesting that Toyota was thinking this way--it might be just a
matter of the call-center bureacrats having won a turf war against the
(ostensibly) more-progressive IT department. Even so, it's possibly that
this approach simply works better. The best way to bridge users into your
keitai site might be to invite them to use the phone as a phone first,
initially personalizing the customer relationship by...well, by letting them
talk to a person, first. Imagine that. And this might not necessarily
increase Toyota's total call-center expenses. It might be that, having
first had a conversation, people using the site call Toyota less frequently
and with fewer problems, expressed more coherently, because the initial
conversation has somehow committed them more fully to thinking through the
interface challenges before giving up. Why would this be? I don't know.
User interface psychology isn't entirely rational.
-michael turner
leap@gol.com
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Received on Mon Nov 19 13:34:48 2001