Customers Are Tired of Grazing Your Required Fields

I have just spent most of the morning filling in a form. Not an especially long form –maybe a dozen fields—but it took forever because each field was mandatory and each required me to open a different application, email or paper file to get the necessary information.

The form in question was to get access to a corporate system for one of the people on my team. In a simpler world I would have made a call or sent an email and requested the access. But ours is not a simple world. In fact, in our efforts to simplify different bits of it (with things like forms), we’ve actually made it more complex because forms require data management and data management requires applications and applications require databases and all of that is complicated.

Marketers love forms. We make our customers fill them in every time they want us to call them, send them something, change a price plan or even to fire us as suppliers. We make our sales people fill them in if they want marketing material or to have something changed on the website.  And to get even, the sales team makes us fill in a form to request a data pull from the CRM system.

I don’t dispute that forms have their place and do, by enforcing uniformity and consistency, make some things much simpler. But forms also send a message that goes something like this: “I can’t be bothered to think like you do, so I’m going to make you think like I do.”

Now that’s friendly.

If we count all the forms our customers and prospective customers fill in at our behest, that’s the number of times we’ve told them we aren’t interested in how they think and sent a clear message that their time is far less valuable than ours. And for every one of them who puts up with that and submits the form anyway, there are dozens, maybe hundreds who abandon it or never even start it in the first place.

The natural response of most marketers faced with something scary like a high abandon rate is to hire a consultant. And there are plenty out there who will happily take on your business. Just fill in the form and someone will call you right back…

Has anyone figured out a way to let customers create their own forms?

BizMarketer is written by Elizabeth Williams
I help companies have better conversations
Drop me a line at ewilliams@candlerchase.com
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