[Sigia-l] Driving customer to offline from online task

[Fred Beecher]

Gabby,

For this project are customers going to be driven to make the phone
call themselves or will they be called by e.g., a sales rep? If
they're going to be driven to make a call themselves, do all you can
to educate your client about the high potential for negative effects
that experience can have.

>From what you've said, the goal of this project is to gather sales
leads. So, assuming that goal, here are some observations I have made
in my experience working on these types of sites.

1. On an insurance quote site, the system would direct users to a
different site with a different URL and completely different look and
feel. This created a huge abandonment rate. Something like 2% of the
people who clicked on the link to be taken to this new site actually
filled out the form. When we changed the system so that the quoting
took place all on one site with a consistent user experience, the
completion rate jumped to 69%. So if an inconsistent UXP between two
elements of the same medium caused such a horrendous drop-off, imagine
what would happen if you made your users switch media!

Note: This insurance company was very "touchy feely." They wanted
person-to-person customer contact and have a huge call center to make
this happen. While your project may not require a massive call center
to fulfill on all the leads, some changes may need to happen with the
business to be able to support this kind of business model.

Also note the importance of metrics here. Is your client currently
keeping track of their traffic? If so, you can probably get some data
out of that system that will help back you up. If not, yikes! That's a
whole other conversation.

2. I have worked on a number of sites that are typical sales campaign
sites. People receive a flyer in the mail or see a TV ad and type in a
URL and get to a site, the real purpose of which is to gather sales
leads. I've found that an effective structure is this:

  - Landing page (branding, introduces product/benefits/etc., shows
visitors the "carrot" -->
  - Form page (where users fill out their info... keep to one
well-chunked page if possible) -->
  - Payoff page (where you give visitors their "carrot.")

The carrot is the important bit here. People want stuff and, if they
perceive value in it, they will be willing to do a little work to get
stuff for free. In this case, that work is giving out their contact
info. The advantage of the Web (here's where I'm getting to my point)
is that it offers instant carrot gratification. You can offer PDF
research or white paper documents, screensavers, downloadable demos,
etc. etc. that they can get *right away* after doing their work. This
strategy has been very successful on the projects I've been involved
in in the past.

But to make people go to a phone from a Web page, you'd need a pretty
big carrot. Like a 60GB iPod for instance. Even then, more people
won't bother because of the lack of instant gratification (well, maybe
not with the iPod example :).

I realize you said that you had very little control over the
situation, but hopefully these examples will help you in some way.
Even if they only help you as CYAs. : )

Take care,
Fred

Fred Beecher
Evantage Consulting


On 10/3/05, Gabby Hon <gabbyhon at gmail.com> wrote:
> I am looking for examples of online experiences that drive customers
> to offline contact methods in order to complete a task--be it
> purchase, information retrieval, etc.  I am faced with a project in
> which customers will most likely fill out some information online and
> then be driven to offline contact (probably a phone call) in order to
> complete their experience.
>
> Please note that I have very little control over this situation and am
> looking only for examples.