RSPB : Migrating enquiries

Contact management benefits from page management.

The Site

RSPB, the UK’s charitable Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, sets out to persuade visitors not to leave the site.

RSPB makes its Contact us page accessible from utility links at the top and bottom right of all pages on its site. However, below the headline ‘Before you contact us’, the page introduction urges would-be correspondents to use the site first because “We’re currently receiving a massive amount of correspondence from our website, which means that sadly we just can’t reply to everything…. So to help us avoid disappointing you, please try some of our self-help options below”.

The page then offers, in order: two quick links to topical popular subjects; a keyword search, with the heading “Searching saves you time and us money” (that can be spent “helping birds and wildlife”); two more ‘hot topic’ links; dedicated telephone numbers (for membership enquiries, advice etc) under the heading ‘If it’s urgent, please call us’: links to animal welfare organisations ‘If you have a sick or injured bird’; sets of links under seven categories (for example, Birds and wildlife, Membership, Media and press) to customised versions of the online contact form.

The Takeaway

RSPB is addressing explicitly an issue that is integral to a fundamental role of a website: how to manage the stream of contact messages and enquiries it generates. RSPB’s first action is to admit the limitations on its capacity to respond – managing expectations – before offering a range of on-site ways to get an answer from it without having to go any further. Its mutual benefit argument – save yourself time and us money – hits a persuasive note with its constituency. The lower options help boost the efficiency of contact handling – managing enquiries – by channelling them by topic.

Managing content is critical – the site has to be able to deliver what the contact page promises – and some aspects of RSPB’s contact system are probably not best copied by more commercial or governmental organisations: they can hardly admit to being unable to address all correspondents, for example. But most of the ways of managing the feature to optimise its performance both for users and the organisation have wings for everyone.

First published on 16 June, 2009