This has recently become a personal pet peeve of mine.

If you are selling something or providing a service you need to provide a way for a potential customer to contact you if they have a problem or question.

More important is that you need to have a responsive support system for your customers.

I had two incidents recently that I will recap for you and you tell me if this is the way you want a business you are thinking about becoming involved with to work.

I recently was told about a URL tracking service that was supposed to be the new best thing of free tracking services. So, I decided to check it out. I went and signed up and as I expected I was told I had to confirm my email address before I was provided access to the site. This is all normal and I don’t mind this one bit, I went and checked my email and the confirmation had not arrived yet. So, I spent a little while working on another site and came back to my email about an hour later, still no confirmation email. It was late so I said forget it and went to bed.

The next morning when I got up I did my usual routine of checking my email and still no confirmation email so I went to the site and tried to login. The response I got was, “Username/Password are incorrect. Please try again. Or your member status is waiting for approval”

OK, maybe I made a typo entering my email address, not very likely since I usually use saved data and an auto-filler to enter my information so I signed up again and it told me, “Please correct the following error: Your Email is already registered in our site.”

Since there wasn’t a typo in my signup and I had not received my confirmation email I looked for a link to send the confirmation email and I couldn’t find one.

Then I looked for a contact page or a link to support and guess what I couldn’t find one.

This is a site I was looking at to promote if the quality of the service was good but since I couldn’t test its service I just said forget it because I had already wasted enough time on the site.

But then in my email, later that day, I received an email from them that said this:

You are receiving this message because you are a valued member of (Removed by me). Removal instructions are below.

Hi Randy,

Congratulations and welcome to (Removed by me).

We know you’ve already received your login info when you joined yesterday, but we wanted to personally let you know that you’ve made a very, very wise decision by becoming a (Removed by me) client.

Then it went on some more finally ending in this:

To remove yourself from this list - you must delete your(Removed by me) account.

So, they are telling me that they are going to keep sending me email unless I log into an account that I can’t log into because I never received the confirmation email from their site and they have no contact information on the site. Plus they are telling me, “They know” I received information that I never received. At least this email gave me a way to maybe contact them by sending to the email address it came from but I haven’t received a response yet.

Remember this is a company that is supposed to be able to handle the technological needs of my tracking but they can’t even figure out how to set up a resend on the confirmation link or set up a support desk.

Would you want to do business with them?

Now on to number two. This is a product that I purchased but my access didn’t work to the product. Not an extremely expensive product but it was $197.00 and I couldn’t get to the download. They did have a support desk and I submitted a ticket, make that a number of tickets and I never did get access to the download so I requested a refund for the product I never received.

Guess what, I never received the refund and I never received the product. They kept telling me that it was a problem on my end. Now anybody that has know me for any length of time will tell you that if the problem is on my end I will fix it. I know for a fact the problem wasn’t on my end because I tried to get to the product from a number of different computers (Windows and Macs) with a number of different browsers and I never got to it. I wrote this off as another internet marketer that is more interested in their wallet then they are in their product or their customers.

But guess what that wasn’t the end of it just recently I was billed for annual support on the same product that I never received! Now this is just insulting. They did refund the support payment and gave me access to a downgraded version of what I purchased but so far I haven’t received access to the actual product I purchased.

So what is the major take away from this?

For me it is never do business with these two companies again.

For you it should be:

Make sure that prospective customers can contact you either through a contact form or a support site. If you don’t you might be losing customers and you could also be creating a bad reputation for yourself.

If a customer asks for a refund give it to them. What would you rather have another couple of bucks in your pocket with someone calling you names and blogging about how bad you are, or a customer that just might purchase from you again?

The answer is, yes! Getting customers can be a lot like herding cats.

Let’s define what herding is. Herding is trying to force someone or something to do what you want. Like cowboys herding cattle in the old west.

If you have ever dealt with cats you know that cats do what they want to do and if you try to force them into something they will probably just get mad, hiss and be done with you.

Customers are the same way. Don’t try to force them to do something. Just like cats if you try to force them to do something they will do exactly what they want and it probably won’t be what you want them to do.

For example, there are a lot of people that will tell you to put a squeeze page in front of your sales page. I know I am not alone in this but if you try to force me to go through a squeeze page just to see a sales page 99% of the time I won’t sign up to your list or buy your product and I definitely won’t promote your product if I have to send people to a squeeze page instead of an information page about your product.

The way I see this is, what are you hiding? Is your product so bad that you have to get me on your list because you know I won’t buy it? Why should I sign up to buy something? If your product and/or your sales page is any good you will get me as a customer and then I will be on your list as a qualified targeted buyer instead of someone that isn’t interested in your product but only signed up to see the sales page and unsubscribed with the first email you sent.

Yes, you can build your list by setting up this squeeze page but you really need to test this and see how many sales you might be loosing. I can guarantee that you are loosing sales because of this. Customers are just like cats and they don’t like to be herded.

Instead of trying to force people to do something you are much better off enticing them to do something. For example if I try to chase a bunch of cats in to a corner, how much success do you think I will have? Just imagine cat cats jumping over me and each other trying to go anywhere else than the corner I am trying to force them into.

Now tell me what happens if I take the same cats and open a can a cat food and place it in the corner. Guess what? I just got all the cats in the corner because that is where they wanted to be.

Customers are the same way. If I really need something and I have two sites to choose from one site has all the information readily available and at the other site and I have to sign up to get some information then guess which one will get my business? That’s right the one with the information and not the one with the squeeze page.

Don’t get me wrong, there are a lot of good uses for a squeeze page, if you are an affiliate marketer they are a must, but this situation you are trading information for the sign up, you are not forcing people to signup to see a product you are selling. If you are selling a product don’t try to force me to do anything before you give me some information on the product you are selling or I (and others) will be like those cats and jumping over people to get away from your site.

If you want to get me on your list then put an opt-in on your sales page or have it float in and offer me something of value to join your list but DON’T MAKE ME SIGN UP TO SEE A SALES PAGE! You will loose me as a customer and a joint venture partner and I am sure, I am not alone in this feeling.