What Does Your Phone Number Say?
My previous post was about telling your (global) audience about your business in global terms. Today, all day, my daughter and I have been trying to fax a horse stud in South Africa. She’s booked to go there for a working holiday but is having no success with responses to recent emails. The owners may be away on leave but there are no autoresponders to let people know that. We tried faxing this morning our time and the first time the phone just rang and rang. The second time the answer machine answered but at no time did the fax kick in. They have a shared telephone/fax line.
We looked up their time difference at World Clock because we thought they might have the fax switched off at night-time and found that it was 1.45am their time, so elected to wait another 7 hours till it was 9am their time. Then we tried constantly for the next 2 hours to get a fax through - to a continually engaged line. Perhaps they also use it for the internet, which isn’t much use to us if they’re not answering emails either. This is very frustrating to say the least and I can’t help but wonder how seriously they take their business, especially when promoting to a global audience. What would be a good way to handle this for the business owner?
- I didn’t mention it but they hadn’t included their country code either on their website or forms - just their local area code. And yet it’s obvious they want to have people from overseas come and participate. Save your visitors some trouble and give them that information, i.e. +27 and then the rest of the number.
- If you go away on leave set up an autoresponder for your emails so that people know why you’re not answering, and put a message on your answer machine.
- Don’t switch off your fax machine at night time - people from overseas aren’t always going to know what time it is where you are before they attempt to fax you.
- If you share the same line for phone, fax and internet, perhaps restrict your online time to 2 or 3 times a day, in shortened periods so people can get through.
So, if you’re running a business where you are wanting to attract global interest and contact, don’t make it hard for them to contact you or know how to get hold of you. In the meantime, we’ll keep trying as we do need to get hold of these people. KMT
Addendum: One of my team members in SA saw my blogpost and contacted me, asking how she could help. She rang the people for me and it turned out there was a number of things working against my daughter and I. There had been electrical problems due to storms. The lady’s fax was broken. Their main email address wasn’t working. Fridays are often not a good day to contact businesses in that country as many pack up after 11am and don’t come back on duty till the following Monday. I was then contacted and advised of a second email address I could contact them on. All I can say is that perhaps they could have let people know on their website - but perhaps they didn’t have access to that either, who knows?
global business, autoresponder, world clock
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