Ewals : Shortchanging contacts

A system for finding localised content is not extended to contacts.

The Site

Ewals, a Netherlands-based Europe-wide trucking company, provides jobseekers and reporters with better access to localised information than it does potential customers.

Ewals operates in 16 countries across Europe plus China and on its global website has standardised information pages for each location in a Countries section. Among the headings are Jobs, News and Contact, each of which when clicked shows current vacancies, press releases and company contacts respectively for the selected country. There are separate links for Contact, News and Jobs in the global navigation.

The global Jobs link, in the utility menu at top right, opens a vacancies page with a default display of ‘All’; a dropdown allows the list to be filtered by country. News is similarly configured. However, the Contact link, in the primary navigation, leads to an online form for requesting information (options are provided) or documentation. The page has no facility for locating contact details either for the company globally or its country offices, including giving no indication that such information is available on the site.

The Takeaway

Ewals global Contact page is clearly an attempt to manage initial or standard enquiries cost effectively by channelling them away from its switchboard. But its ‘request form or nothing’ approach risks throwing out the sales lead baby with the money saving bathwater by failing to optimise another online resource. While jobseekers and newshounds are provided with a quick country search facility at the global level for filtering vacancies or news the system is not extended to allow anyone looking on the site for local contacts to do the same. In fact, they could easily conclude there are none and either clog up the enquiry system with forms – or be lost to the company altogether.

Given the investment in neatly delivering localised country information that covers services, ‘values’, news, jobs and contact, it seems perverse that easy access to the contact element only is denied at the global level. At the least the Contact page should reveal the existence of country-specific details (why provide them otherwise?); better yet, help people find it by the same means already developed to assist in other areas.

First published on 18 November, 2008