EXPERIENCE LESSON FROM A CUSTOMER PHONE CALL.

Last year, somewhere in between Thanksgiving and Halloween, I was working on a re-branding project for Silver Spider Knitting Ltd. — a Toronto based knitwear-manufacturing company, which also happens to be my current day job employer. The new logo proposals were made, copy re-written and I was in a back and forth email loop with the web developer to get the initial brochure website revamp. As I was juggling roles between a visual designer and design co-ordinator to pull the site, one morning I got a call from a person and the short conversation gave me a deeper insight to something I hadn’t thought about.

Here it is — the conversation.

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Me — Hi! Silver Spider Knitting, Good Morning. (The usual greeting)

Caller — Hi! Good Morning. I was wondering what your website URL is.

Me — Sure! It’s www.silverspiderknit.ca

Caller– Oh! Okay!

Me — (Out of curiosity) May I know your name and from which company are you calling?

Caller — Sure! I’m (so and so) from (so and so) company. We have done business with you earlier. I am a freshman onboard handling a new account. So, wanted to see some of your products from your online gallery.

Me — Great! Sir, is there a problem getting directed to our website? (I was concerned)

Caller (Now Client) — Well! Actually, I got your production manager’s email from my colleague and it read (so and so)@silverspiderknit.com. So, I typed in www.silverspiderknit.com, thinking that the website would be .com but nothing showed up. So, I thought I should call up and confirm with you. Your email ends with dot com but your website ends with dot ca. you see.

Me — Yes. I got that. Sir, do you mind me asking if you tried Google searching us? We show up at the top of search results. Just wondering if you did.

Caller (Now Client) — Yes, I did. Wasn’t sure if the link was yours (Casually). I thought it would be faster to call you guys up than doing my research you see. (Laughs)* Anyways! Thanks for your help in clarifying my confusion. Good day!

*At this point of time, the website looked like a piece of crap. The website lacked credibility. None of the social media platforms were set up. Honestly, I don’t blame him.

Me — No problem. Thanks for calling. Have a great day ahead.

The conversation ended and I couldn’t think enough of what just happened. As a company, Should your email’s and website’s domain extensions (.com/.ca) sync for a better UX?

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While still absorbed in the thought, I called up the IT person to check whether we owned the .com domain too. His ‘Yes we do’ gave me a sigh of relief. Now it was time for next steps. I narrated this experience to my team who agreed that we switch over from .ca to .com for the website domain extension in our next go live since all our emails had .com. At this hour of time, we hadn’t even hit the halfway milestone in our website’s construction timeline. I did not want more users to see error pages in our .com extension. So, I instructed the web team to re-direct .com to .ca for the time being. By the end of Dec 2015, we were ready to put our revamped website live. It was launched on www.silverspiderknit.com. Now my other concern was, what about our existing users/clients who have bookmarked us on .ca or have our old email signatures with .ca extensions? What about those users who know us as a Canadian manufacturing company and associate the .ca extension to this thought of branded as Made in Canada? I again asked the web team to switch roles and this time re-direct .ca to .com.

It’s been almost a year now and I haven’t got any such a phone call. But the thought about how important it is for a company’s email and website domain extensions (.com/.ca) to sync for a better UX still lingers in my mind. Another lesson, which I learned from this situation, is that the shortest or what appears to be the most insignificant conversation with your user might help you look into a UX issue from the users point of view. I treasure that.