Blog

Do you have a phone number on your website?

There aren’t many things I consider cut and dry when it comes to website usability and user experience design. When I put concepts in front of users, no two websites get the same results—so I’m cognizant about sharing these hard and fast rules with others.

One rule I believe to be almost universal is:

Failing to leave a phone number on your website for people to call and allowing them to get in touch with someone right away.

I have no idea why so many websites make this detrimental mistake. After all, it’s one of the most common website scenarios: getting in touch with someone. It’s also one of the most common usability problems. The data is pretty consistent: people want to talk to someone—especially if they’re genuinely interested in investing their time and money with a company.

Even when showing qualitative data to organizations that have a strong UX culture, I almost always get push back in the end. Here are some reasons people get worried about this:

Cold calls/marketing solicitations
Sales team isn’t prepared – they want to talk to customers on their terms

I think this is bullshit. After all, most of the time the entire purpose of having a website is to make a “conversion” and that interaction usually happens more effectively over the phone (not automatically).