The View from a Drawbridge

Have you ever noticed that some websites seem to deliberately make it difficult for you to contact them? They either hide their “Contact Us” tab, befuddling all but the most determined, or don’t have one at all, or they make you jump through 20,000 hoops or they only provide their address and phone number, expecting you to take that extra step to get in touch, and banking on the fact that most of us won’t bother. This is HORRIBLE customer service.

It’s also an idiotic way to run a company. Often your customers will spot problems with your website long before you will, and can suggest ways to improve its functionality. Being responsive to these suggestions increases customer satisfaction and repeat business. Many’s the time I’ve simply gone elsewhere when I’ve bumped up against a site that isn’t user-friendly. If your site is full of dead links and bad grammar, the public won’t take you seriously.

I would love to be able to contact Facebook. I’ve had these two complaints/suggestions for years. But they don’t want to hear from me.

• Issue one: Their message drop down menu. Have you ever clicked on the “other” option? Check it out. You might be surprised. I once found a year and a half old job offer sitting in there. They need to get rid of the “other” category and just let all your messages be all your messages. I’m a big girl. I can figure out what to delete.
• Issue two: They need a place where you can write helpful descriptions about people on your friends list that will be visible only to you. Often I can’t remember why someone is there and how I even know them. It would be nice to be able to go to their page and look at a box that they can’t see where you can type, “I met this guy in 2011 through so and so, and we have xyz in common. But never discuss politics with him.”

And I wish WordPress, the site that hosts this blog, were a little easier to contact, too. I’d tell them that their latest improvements are giving me fits. If I click on the comment icon while in Firefox, nothing happens. And they’ve removed my ability to get to the comments from the drop down menu, so now if I want to look at my comments, the only way I’ve figured out how to get there is to click on statistics, then click on blog posts/add, then go to classic view, then click on comments. This, my friends, is a monumental pain in the a**.

And for pity’s sake, people, if you give your customers a mailing list option, include an opt out option that works on the bottom of every e-mail you send them. There’s nothing worse than signing up for something, regretting it, and then being perpetually pestered.

End of rant.

[This example of a really bad website, and ways to avoid having one, can be found on this blog.]