Most of us have spent time scouring websites to determine how to opt-out of marketing material and name sharing. Typically, this information is found in the company’s privacy policy. At Catalog Choice, our team reads countless privacy policies so you don’t have to. Some companies articulate opt-out procedures clearly and easily. (Thank you!) Other policies may direct the consumer to call the company but provide no electronic means of opting out. (Frustrating!) Some direct mailers still provide no privacy policy on their website. (Unbelievable!) Burying contact preference information and making it difficult for consumers to opt-out does not translate into better business. Quite the opposite. We’ve found only two companies—Uncommon Goods and Crate and Barrel—that link their preference center directly from their website footer. The feedback we get about these companies couldn’t be better. Choice is a customer service advantage.
Today, consumers are confronted with a proliferation of communication channels for staying in touch with marketers—mail, email, Facebook, Twitter, mobile. What if marketers looked at these contact choices through the lens of “How do customers want to hear from us?” What if they featured all choices prominently on their website instead of hiding opt-out procedures in their legal and privacy statements?
We think you’d find something that looks like a tool we’ve built for marketers that we call the Contact Preference Center. This feature seamlessly organizes all contact methods and frequency options in one convenient place, allowing consumers to pick how they’d like to hear from a company from any page on a their website. Our friends at UncommonGoods use this tool and here’s what they have to say about its benefits:
Implementing the Contact Preference Center has made it much easier for us to respect our customers’ wishes for how they want to be reached. Instead of making them engage in a frustrating hunt for a way to remove themselves from our mailing list, we show them what they want and give them a handful of alternative ways to keep in touch with us. It also provides us with an easy-to-use tool for customer service representatives to respond to opt-out requests, centralizing the system by which we collect them from both the call center and online customers.
We couldn’t have said it better ourselves. With the topic of consumer privacy heating up in Washington, there is no better time for marketers to take a look at how they facilitate consumer preferences. We think the Contact Preference Center is a model for how companies can make it easy for the consumer to express their communication and privacy choices.
