I have a pet peeve about many ‘contact us’ pages on websites. Why do companies make them so confusing?

Many corporate sites have addresses, general phone numbers, a generic ‘info’ email address and different email addresses based on what department you might want to contact – usually a very small list. Customer service or support usually has its own link on the site. If the company is public there is usually another link for investor relations. But it seems that the larger the corporation, the more difficult it is to find how to contact a company. I shouldn’t have to know a corporation’s organization structure to figure out how to contact the company.

But many of these web sites are really an internal articulation of their corporate organization structure – how they think about themselves – rather than how their users want to contact them. They either implement their ‘contact us’ pages based on how they would contact themselves or they have no idea how someone would contact them outside of their defined customer channels. The other thought is even more sinister – they don’t want you to contact them.

If you are on an ecommerce site like Amazon – or a community site like myspace or linkedin - trying to find contact information is like trying to find a needle in a haystack. Or it is just not there. You can easily find how to track your order, contact customer service or sales support, or find help to use the site. If you want to contact the company, sometimes there is a separate corporate site; in other cases you can find some information in the tiny links at the way bottom of the home page. Many times it just doesn’t exist – because they don’t want you to find them! If you have millions of members like Amazon or Myspace, you probably don’t want them to find you.

Leaving out those companies that want to hide from you, why can’t the ‘contact us’ page have EVERY single way you might want to contact a company? Why send your web users on a scavenger hunt?

I like to send companies suggestions about their products or business operations. I had a recent suggestion for Dell Computer. I have ordered Dell laptops for home use over the years and it has been very easy configuring and ordering over the web. But that’s where the convenience stops. I have to sign for my delivery. I don’t want to have my computer sent to work but I’m not home during the day. UPS and FedEx are not close and aren’t open very much outside of normal business hours. I had this great idea that Dell should set up a relationship with a national chain that didn’t sell computers where you could go and pick up your delivery – (e.g. Borders, Barnes and Noble). So I went to http://www.dell.com/ and clicked on ‘contact us.’ That’s when the frustration began.

I tried Customer Service – the page assumed I had an outstanding order issue and issue number. The Forums didn’t work for me either. So I finally went to the tiny bottom links, clicked on Dell USA and found the link for “About Dell.” I tried Customer Service – the page assumed I had an outstanding order issue and issue number. The Forums didn’t work for me either. So I finally went to the tiny bottom links, clicked on Dell USA and found the link for “About Dell.” Direct2dell takes you to another site, http://www.direct2dell.com/. Another set of blogs.

Don’t ask me what the difference is between IdeaStorm and Direct2Dell but I didn’t spend a lot of time trying to figure it out. Finally, I found a menu on the right, scrolled down the page and found a ‘suggestion box.’ If you click on that link it says ‘Suggest a topic for direct2dell.’ Out of desperation, I clicked the link and Eureka! All I had to do was enter my name, email address, subject and message.

So what’s going on here? This took probably 20 minutes. It is so counter-intuitive that when I tried to recreate what I did, it took another 20 minutes. I am not going to put myself into the Dell website mindset to figure out what is going on here. If I was cynical I would say they don’t want me to find this link – but it would be a lot easier just to not have the link if that was the case. Most likely Dell has many marketing and customer service organizations with different agendas. Couple this with the corporate craze for creating Web 2.0 “communities” and you have so many of them it is incredibly difficult to know where to go.

Anyway, in Dell’s defense, I actually got an email from a real person at Dell, the Digital Media Manager of Direct2Dell who said he would pass my suggestion to some of his colleagues in consumer. Well, we’ll see.

But that’s not the point. I don’t believe it would take that much effort to add a paragraph of text with links in the original ‘contact us’ page that could explain the myriad of ways you can communicate with Dell.

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I had a suggestion for LL Bean. I bought a great rain jacket with the ability to buy fleece or down vests that could zip into the jacket to make it work in all four seasons. I wanted to send them a suggestion to make the product better by adding a button to keep the vest in place on the top. So I went to ‘contact us’ that actually appears under Customer Service. There is also an ‘email us’ link but that only includes Customer Service, Outdoor Discovery Schools and volume discounts for business. I had to go to the site map where I found a link for Product Feedback where you can enter your feedback on a product along with your name and email address. Why couldn’t all the ways to contact LLBean be on their ‘contact us’ page?

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I have a suggestion for Palm that they will never get. I want a clam-shell Treo. They have a pretty extensive ‘contact us’ site where you can pretty much find all the places you can go on their website. But I don’t think they want my product suggestion because there is no place to submit it.

In summary, even if you have many, many ways to contact a company through their website, list all of them on the ‘contact us’ link. It would be so much easier.