If you want to do business with me...

[mdlbear]

... your best bet is to provide a company web site that gives me the information I need, lets me bookmark it, gives me a form I can fill out to perform my transaction, and lets me bookmark that so I can come back to it if I get called away from my desk.

If you make me look for your phone number and call you, I'm going to start

Comments

[technoshaman]

/me wonders who this paragon of 21st century relations might be.... so he can avoid it.

[mdlbear]

It's a life insurance company. Mass. Mutual, in particular.

[aerowolf]

To be fair, life insurance is one of those "heavily regulated" areas that seems to have a huge amount of confusion as to best-practice. However, they almost always require a full two-way conversation between agent and policyholder to make any changes, simply because our Great and Wonderful State Legislatures have decided that we don't have any clue what we're doing as customers and so we have no choice but to go through a middleman who's required to do certain things (like 'make sure we know what the potential consequences of our actions are'). (that, and they need to make sure that only the owners of the policies can take any actions to change the values of their policies, or even get information about the policies they hold

[mdlbear]

I was noticing that. The fact that one is supposed to go through an agent -- and in fact through a particular agent, who didn't answer his phone -- is a complicating factor that I hadn't really considered when I started the process. I ended up enraged where I might have been cynical and grimly amused.

[randwolf]

One of my best online shopping experiences was with Motorola's on-line store. I was stunned. I mean, a cell phone marketer? But they took the order without fuss, explained the shipping options, notified me when they shipped, the item arrived on time.

[wyld_dandelyon]

One wonders if you were ordering a Rube Goldberg machine?

[mdlbear]

Done that -- ThinkGeek is the kind of company I enjoy doing business with.