First Impressions

The other day I inquired about getting some help from a vendor I did not know so I went to their website to see what they offered and while it did address my need, it was a very boring site that was not well designed so that was strike one.

I submitted an inquiry via their online form however as I was curious to see if the company was just a victim of a poor web designer's effort or if they conducted themselves as poorly as their website presented them. The form worked without error so I was encouraged, but it wasn't secure so that was not impressive. Lets call this ball one in keeping with our baseball reference as the barometer of satisfaction.

What came next was strike two, three and game over!

The email server that they used to respond from was located in Germany (and we only deal with domestic vendors for security reasons) and the email was malformed and was one giant paragraph. I made them aware of the email server not being domestic, but they refused to believe me and took my time by insulting my professionalism and demanding that I prove to them my accusation, which I did gladly of course.

Now if they make a change, or not, it will never be relevant to me as they have shown that their website was not a mistake, it is actually an accurate representation of how poorly they do business and conduct themselves.

You can see how your potential customer's first impressions on how you do your business must be as positive as possible so that by the time that customer makes their first contact with your business they are already impressed by your homerun ability!