When a web-form crashes, propects don't call instead

My current website is simple, stable HTML. The only server-side scripts on the site are for the web forms, using ASP. Our quote-request form being the most important, of course.

Well, turns out the forms stopped working early on Monday. I didn’t figure that out until one of our salespeople told me he was getting a ‘corruption error’ when submitting an internal form via the website on Tuesday afternoon.

I guess I should have figured out that I hadn’t received any web-leads in over 24 hours, and there might be a problem. Or when one of the sales people faxed a printout of the internal form. Or when one of the reps indirectly suggested they were having problems.

Lessons learned:

• Customers don’t call and say ‘your website isn’t working’.
• Salespeople tend to think they did something wrong.
• The ISP didn’t know there was something wrong with their server.
• And I was too distracted to notice the drop in activity.

The really big lesson here is this, however:
You’d think we’d at least have seen a pick-up in calls since the web form wasn’t working. And one of these prospects would have complained.

NOPE.

Incoming calls weren’t any higher than normal. No one complained.

I can only assume that the normal web prospect got the error and moved on. Potential sales lost! Crap!

Kinda scary isn’t it? The prospect on your website who wants to fill out the request form, doesn’t want to call instead. It wasn’t that important after all. Or perhaps they didn’t want to break their ‘flow’ of web surfing. Either way, there’s not much I can do about it.

But for those marketers out there who just assume that ‘the customer will call’ if they have questions or problems on their website, the answer from this small debacle is no!