Web Sites from Hell: Verizon
If a picture is worth a thousand words, sometimes a video is worth ten thousand. Have a look at Josh Hallett’s screencast of a trip to the Verizon web site to perform the incredibly complex task of finding out what a phone line costs.
I’ll spoil the ending: he never does find out. Verizon, like so many of its telecom peers, is guilty of a horrible web crime: using the site to tell visitors that they want them to buy rather than helping them find what they actually want.
Verizon does even worse than that, though; while a link that says “pricing” but which leads to no pricing information at all is irritating, a link on a form for ordering service that is broken is just plain incompetent.
(I had a similar experience on AT&T’s site a few days ago, which has led to me moving all my telecom services to Comcast and cancelling my AT&T landline altogether. Nice work, web team!
It’s funny, isn’t it, that companies with the resources of Verizon or AT&T are unable to create working web sites that make it easy for customers to find information - the first step toward giving them money. And yet millions of tiny businesses across America can get this right.
Josh’s screencast, meanwhile, has kind of inspired me. Maybe I’ll start recording some of my really bad web experiences this way.
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John - by all means, be inspired! I always enjoyed “web pages that suck”, and I suspect you can find all sorts of fodder for this topic.
Oh, and I totally agree with you: the fact that AT&T, Verizon etc. can’t figure out how to do something so elemental as answer a simple question speaks volumes about their competence.
~EdT.