by Gil Fewster
Do You Have A Needy, Insecure Website?
Imagine you walk into a store.
You’ve probably actually done that in real life, so this shouldn’t be a terribly difficult (or particularly interesting) exercise. But humour me for a moment.
Imagine you walk into a store.
You know roughly what you’re after but you haven’t visited this specific store before. You pause just inside the doorway, taking a moment to orient yourself and collect your thoughts. It’s 2016, so you’re probably also listening to a podcast, chatting with a friend on Facebook and shouting at people on Twitter for being wrong about politics or Joss Whedon or something. In short, you’ve got a lot on your mind.
So it comes as something of a rude awakening when a store assistant materialises barely a few inches from your face, looming so fully into your personal space that everything in your peripheral vision literally darkens and goes out of focus.
HELLO!!!!
DO YOU LIKE WHAT YOU SEE?
DO YOU WANT TO BE OUR FRIEND?
YOU SHOULD SIGN UP TO OUR MAILING LIST.
You stumble backwards in shock, but this beaming full-moon face has locked into a precise geostationary orbit around you and wherever you step, whichever way you turn, there they are.
You try saying “no thanks” but they don’t appear to understand the phrase. Eventually you offer that “maybe later” you’ll consider their generous deal of a lifetime’s supply of junk mail so, temporarily mollified, the greeter zips back to wherever it was they came from.
For reasons you don’t fully understand, they make an audiblezwwwwoooooooshh noise as they leave.
You start browsing the shelves, and after a while become aware of something tugging at your sleeve. At first you ignore it, figuring you just snagged your unfashionably baggy jumper on the corner of a display stand, or maybe you’re experiencing that uniquely digital-age delusion of phantom smartphone vibrations. It takes nearly 30 seconds of sustained jiggling before you glance down and see a hopeful little face staring up at you from the bottom right corner of your field of view.
I’m Bruce, your personal sales assistant. What can I help you with today?
Well. That’s odd.
But ok, he seems like a nice little chap. So you gesture to the display stand and ask: “Do you stock any of these in different sizes?”
Wordlessly, Bruce hands you a business card. On the front of the card is Bruce’s name, photograph and a message: Bruce is typing. On the reverse side, three emojis* — happy mouth, sad mouth, straight mouth — are perfectly arranged beneath a heading: Please rate my service.
Eventually you find what you’re after (no thanks to Bruce) and head over the to checkout. The purchase process takes a little longer than expected because you can’t remember the name of the person who first told you about the store, and apparently the cash register can’t open without this key piece of data.
In the process of excavating this vital information from the archeological depths of your Facebook history, the greeter you’d long since forgotten decides to pounce. After all, you you said “maybe later” not “never”. And “later” was said earlier so it must surely have swung around to “now”, and since you’re going to be leaving in a moment there’s really not very much later remaining so how about that newsletter?
“In fact,” says the greeter, “why not like us on Facebook. You do like us, right? Surely you don’t not like us?”
When you politely refuse, the cashier frowns and cancels the 5% discount you’d previously negotiated.
The cash register is barely five feet away from the exit, but it takes you a further ten minutes to leave because the doors won’t open until you complete a satisfaction survey and take a selfie for Instagram. When you finally exit the store, you enjoy a fleeting moment of victory that lasts only as long as it takes for you to return to your car, where you discover that while you were being distracted by the exit survey Bruce had snuck away to reprogram the Home location in your GPS so that it points back to the store.
When did the internet become so damn needy?
Last week I ordered $80 worth of RAM from an online store. After the delivery was complete I received three seperate emails from three seperate sources, One from the eStore, one from the fulfilment platform and one from AusPost each asking me to complete a satisfaction survey. Seriously.
Every second site you land on slams a “sign up to our mailing list” popup over the actual content you’re trying to see. Live chat windows slide over the screen and merrily blip and bleep at you, videos with leaden voiceovers and chintzy muzak autoplay, blasting unexpected noise and kicking off that ever popular workplace game, the Which-Damn-Browser-Tab-Is-This-Coming-From Treasure Hunt.
Is this really the experience brands want to create for their customers? Unless you actually settled on Needy, Emotionally Insecure Boyfriend/Girlfriend at your last brand archetype persona workshop, I can 100% promise you that these techniques do not create the kind of impression you’re looking for.
Being digital doesn’t give you license to expect more for less. Why should anyone want to sign up to your newsletter within 2 seconds on landing on your home page? What value have you shown them to warrant that kind of commitment?
It’s like the dude said: ask not what your customers can do for you, but what you can do for your customers. Help new customers discover the quality of your work and the excellence of your service by showing it to them. Give them what they need quickly and efficiently and they’ll come back for more.
*What even is the correct plural form of emoji? Emojii? Emojie? Emojiae?