It is March 2013. I am sitting in the small back office of our first warehouse in southwest Denver, holding a cordless landline phone in one hand and a half-eaten breakfast burrito in the other. The phone has rung four times in the last hour. None of the calls have been from customers. Two were from a service that wanted to sell us "search-engine optimization", one was from a guy who insisted we owed him for a dumpster rental we had never ordered, and one was a wrong number for somebody named Patricia.
I put the burrito down. I look at the phone. I look at the wall behind the phone, where there is a slightly-yellowed business card with our number printed in tasteful Helvetica. I think about how many actual customers have called this number this month, and the answer is "two, and one of them just wanted me to read him our website out loud." I think about how my time would be spent if the phone simply did not exist. And then I do something rash.
I unplugged it
I literally unplugged the phone, walked it out to the storage closet, and put it on a shelf next to a box of old IBC dust caps. I came back to my desk and sent an email to our entire active customer list (about 90 people at the time), telling them that effective immediately, the only way to reach us was email. I explained why. I apologized for the abruptness. I told them my email response time was less than an hour during business hours, which I was now actually able to commit to because I would not be interrupted by Patricia's wrong number ever again.
I expected to lose customers. I expected angry replies. I expected at least one indignant phone call to the (no longer answered) line.
What actually happened
The first surprise was that nobody objected. Not one customer. The second surprise was that response time on quotes dropped from "by end of day, mostly" to "within an hour, basically always." The third surprise was that the same customers who had previously called us with vague spec questions started writing those same questions out in email — and the act of writing the question out forced them to be more specific, which meant my answer could also be more specific, which meant nobody got the wrong tote because they had said "the small one" over a bad cell connection.
Within six months, three customers had separately told me that the email-only policy made it easier to get internal approval for our orders, because there was a paper trail their purchasing department could audit. One actually said, in writing, "I love that I never have to play phone-tag with you." That was, and still is, my favorite piece of feedback the company has ever received.
The cost of not having a phone
It is real. There are still people who reach our website, get quietly annoyed that there is no phone number, and bounce. We can guess at this from the analytics, but we will never know the exact volume of business we have lost over the years to that bounce. My guess is that we have lost five to ten customers a year to it. Twelve years in, that is sixty to a hundred and twenty potential relationships.
I think it has been worth it. The customers who write in instead of calling tend to be more thoughtful, more specific about what they need, more patient when there is a wait, and more loyal. They become repeat buyers at a much higher rate than the average phone-call customer at a comparable industrial supplier. The businesses that need to talk to a salesperson on the phone before they will commit are not, in my experience, the businesses we are best at serving anyway.
I have been asked to bring the phone back several times
Once a year, somebody on the team gently raises the idea of getting a phone line again. The argument is always the same — we are leaving money on the table. They are not wrong. But I always say the same thing back: "Show me one tote we sold this year that the buyer would have skipped because we made them write in. I will replace it personally."
Nobody has taken me up on that yet. The phone stays in the closet.
— Aldo Ramírez, IBC Denver