Mud on my guestbook

Posted on May 15, 2007 by Dave J.

I’ve been tinkering a bit with our website’s guestbook form. I’ve always prided myself in how simple it was–not one asterisk indicating required details! Its short enough that all the information should be obviously needed, if not required. Eight fields, total.

For the address, in particular, there is just one multi-line box. No pull-down state menu, thank you very much! No having to make the user tab-thru multiple fields. This one step makes the whole form so much easier and inviting for the user, and I would hope it would show respect for the visitor. Polite, even.

The recent tinkering hasn’t been with the form, but how visible it is–which is attracting additional guestbook submissions. Great.

But these new guests seem to be getting less polite. They aren’t filling out the form completely, skipping (or skimping) on the address and phone number.

Folks used to do that, and we would have to do a little Googling to figure out where they are from. Location is important, as in other countries other divisions need to send price quotes, and there are questions of local electric power. But the frequency is now way up.

So I added a line above the address “Please include at least your city and state”, which has had the opposite effect, I think. They have figured out that this block is optional, and are skipping it even more.

I just had one come in from a major multi-national firm that had no address or phone number. Doesn’t he realize that location could matter in getting his price quote? Don’t they run into multi-site problems all the time? Did he see my word ‘please’? And, of course, his request is for pricing “ASAP”. Ughh!

As salespeople and marketers, we need to tolerate and accommodate our prospects. But with this kind of behavior, I can understand how some guestbooks are filled with asterisks. I won’t do it. But, I will rant about it, apparently.

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  • Anonymous

    Try requiring only name, company email and phone. You can extrapolate location from the country/area code and fill in the rest once you contact your prospect.

  • Anonymous

    Try requiring only name, company email and phone. You can extrapolate location from the country/area code and fill in the rest once you contact your prospect.

  • Dave J.

    Yea, we could do that, but that doesn’t fit our process. Guestbook request are usually requests for price quotes. Implying that the visitor gets a phone call right away has its own challenges. Overseas visitors would be an obvious problem, for example.

  • Dave J.

    Yea, we could do that, but that doesn’t fit our process. Guestbook request are usually requests for price quotes. Implying that the visitor gets a phone call right away has its own challenges. Overseas visitors would be an obvious problem, for example.

  • Dave J.

    t

  • Dale Underwood

    Dave J said:“Yea, we could do that, but that doesn’t fit our process. Guestbook request are usually requests for price quotes.”Could you generate a quote based on the email address instead or do your visitors use generic addresses?Dale

  • Dale Underwood

    Dave J said:”Yea, we could do that, but that doesn’t fit our process. Guestbook request are usually requests for price quotes.”Could you generate a quote based on the email address instead or do your visitors use generic addresses?Dale

  • Dave J.

    Dale, it works sometimes. And some companies break down their email URLs by location, which helps. The case in point was someone with a @solectron.com address. Turns out he was from Vietnam.

  • Dave J.

    Dale, it works sometimes. And some companies break down their email URLs by location, which helps. The case in point was someone with a @solectron.com address. Turns out he was from Vietnam.