Answering the phone

I'm back on deck after a week away and ploughing through the zillion emails, subscriptions and blog entries that I've missed.

One post that caught my eye was an entry in the Sydney Morning Herald Enterprise Blog about "being too honest in your business", Valerie Khoo encountered an e-commerce site that outright stated they won't answer their phones.

I can understand this. Coming back from holidays I dreaded my message bank. Eight calls had me paralysed for two days.

Those eight calls sitting in my unanswered message queue were more intimidating than several hundred emails.

The worst part is technology brings out the worst in people. A normally calm, patient, rational person often becomes a rampaging, demanding fool when faced with anything related to computers. So I'm firmly on the side of the "Internet Ferals".

I don't think it's going to help their business though, Valerie went elsewhere for her purchase and the comments on her post are less than impressed with the business not having a contact number.

I tend to agree that not having a landline is the kiss of death for an online business. I wouldn't shop at one that didn't and I certainly wouldn't recommend it others.

The lesson for any technology based businesses is that customers, as painful as they can be to deal with, are the reason for the business' existence.

Without 'em, you don't have a business.

Get the phone, hire someone patient with a nice phone manner and get the systems to allow them to find and fix problems.

Or just don't bother going into business.