Adding a way to be contacted feels like it can only help. It is one line on the website, it costs nothing, and it might catch somebody who would otherwise have drifted off to a competitor.
What that reasoning misses is that a channel is not a line on a website. It is a promise, made to everybody who sees it, that a person is watching and will reply. Break that promise and you are worse off than if you had never offered it, because now somebody has taken the trouble to tell you what they wanted and been met with silence.
So the useful question is not how many ways there are to reach you. It is which ways the people you want to hear from actually prefer, and which of those you can genuinely keep on top of.
What an unanswered channel really costs
Nobody on the other end concludes that you are busy. They conclude that you are not interested, or worse, that nobody is home.
It shows up in familiar ways. A chat widget sitting permanently on “we are offline, leave a message”. A WhatsApp number where the message shows as read and nothing comes back. A contact form quietly delivering to an address that belonged to somebody who left two years ago. A social page where the platform helpfully tells visitors how long you usually take to reply, turning your slowness into a published statistic.
Each of those is worse than an honest, shorter list. A business that offers a phone number and an email address, and answers both properly, looks more competent than one offering six routes in and watching two.
What each one signals
The telephone is still the first choice for anything urgent, complicated, or expensive, and a number answered by an actual person remains one of the strongest signals a small business can send. The cost is interruption, and that is a real cost. If you cannot answer reliably, a voicemail that promises a callback by a stated time is far better than a phone that rings out.
Email is the sensible default for most businesses. It leaves a record, it works when both people are busy at different times, and unlike most of this list it can be picked up by a colleague. Expectations are gentler too: nobody sending an email at nine in the evening expects a reply at five past.
A form lowers the barrier for somebody not yet ready to hand over a phone number, and it lets you ask the two or three things that save a round of back and forth. Its weakness is that it can feel like posting a letter into a hole in the wall, which is a matter of what the page says around it, and a subject of its own later in this series.
Live chat sets the highest expectation of anything here. Somebody opening a chat window is thinking in minutes, not hours. It is genuinely good when it is staffed by someone who knows the answers, during the hours it claims to be available. It is actively damaging the rest of the time.
WhatsApp is fast, informal, and in some trades now simply expected. Two cautions. It usually lives on one person’s personal phone, which means it is invisible to everybody else and goes on holiday when they do. And the line between work and life disappears entirely, which is fine until it is not.
Social messages arrive whether you invite them or not, so the decision is not really whether to offer the channel. It is whether anybody is checking it, and who that is.
Which ones your customers actually prefer
You do not need to guess, because you already have months of evidence.
Look at what arrives now. If nine enquiries in ten come by phone, that tells you where your customers are comfortable, and it probably tells you something about their age, their trade, or the urgency of what they need. If your inbox is full and the phone rarely rings, the opposite.
Then ask. The next ten people who buy from you, ask how they first got in touch and whether that was their first choice or the only option they could see. The gap between those two answers is where the useful information sits.
Think about who they are rather than what is fashionable. Trade customers ringing from a van want a number. Someone comparing quotes at eleven at night wants a form. An older customer base will use the telephone regardless of what else you offer. What a competitor does is not evidence, because you have no idea whether it is working for them.
Three questions before you add another
Can you answer it in the time it implies? Chat implies minutes. WhatsApp implies hours. Email implies a working day. If the honest answer is longer than that, the channel will make you look worse rather than better.
Who covers it when that person is away? Anything tied to one person’s phone or personal inbox has a single point of failure, and holidays are when enquiries go missing.
Does it leave a record somebody else can pick up? This is the question that quietly decides how well the whole thing scales. A conversation living in one person’s app is invisible to everybody else, and the point at which that becomes a genuine problem is covered later in this series.
If any of those makes you wince, that is not a reason to give up on the channel. It is a reason to sort out the answering before you advertise it.
Send yourself a message through every route you offer. Every form, every address on the website, the one on your Google listing, the one in an old directory entry, and the number on the van. Then see what arrives, where, and how long it takes. Most businesses doing this for the first time find at least one route that goes nowhere.
Say when you will reply, and then do
Being quick matters less than being predictable. Somebody told they will hear back within one working day, who then does, is satisfied. Somebody told nothing, who hears back in four hours, may well have rung somebody else in the meantime.
So put the expectation in writing, next to the form and in the automatic acknowledgement, and set it at a level you can hit on a bad week rather than a good one. If you do not work weekends, say so. Honesty about your hours costs you nothing and prevents the silence being read as indifference.
You are allowed to remove one
Retiring a channel is a perfectly respectable decision and almost nobody makes it.
If the chat widget has produced four conversations in a year and two of them were spam, take it off. If WhatsApp has become a way for three customers to reach one person at all hours, move them gently to email. Leave a redirection behind, whether that is a voicemail message, an autoresponder, or a line on the contact page pointing at the route you do watch.
Fewer channels, answered properly, is a better experience than more channels, half of them ignored. It is also considerably less work.
Where to start
Write down every way somebody can currently reach you, including the ones you have forgotten. The address on an old directory listing. The form on a landing page from a campaign three years ago. The generic mailbox that was set up for a project and never closed.
Then send yourself a message through every one of them and find out which actually arrive somewhere a person is looking. That exercise alone usually turns up one broken route, and a broken route is the most expensive kind, because the enquiries it swallows were from people who wanted to buy something.
Getting the email side of this working properly, on a platform that suits how you actually operate, is part of what we look after. If you are not sure which routes into your business are being watched and which are quietly swallowing enquiries, get in touch and we will help you work it out.