I think a website tells a good bit about a company–but not necessarily what one wants to know.
Pizza Hut and Dominos in Japan both have websites. The Pizza Hut one is ugly, half broke, down randomly, and only even though it asks for my username and password twice, for whatever reason they dropped using SSL for the first time, so there’s essentially no security. Dominos has a professional-looking webpage that runs perfect, and has way too many options and screens beyond what any reasonable human would need.
Pizza Hut pizzas are good. Dominos pizzas suck goat butt.
Gee, Sunspace, I gave similar customer feedback to the people who held my last 401K: “your webpage has a part dedicated to international investors, yet the forms do not accept non-US adresses, it is not possible to communicate with you guys by email, the only phone numbers listed are 1-800 which do not accept calls from abroad; other companies 800 numbers accept calls from abroad but the caller calls for the ‘international’ part of the price; after a US-based coworker was finally able to extract a non-800 number I’m having to call you at 10pm because you only work Colorado hours. Not my idea of international-oriented.”
Anything that’s worth doing is worth doing well. Pet peeves:
no contact information. Why is it usually so difficult to find the contact information on big-company webpages?
if you just use www.companyname.com (or the .country equivalent) you get an infinite flash loop; you can’t get anywhere unless you know the rest of the address
tiny letters. Not everybody has a 19" monitor
lack of product information, when applicable
no HR information for big companies
Several bars in my home town have webpages and they’re better than some corporate ones. Contact info, hours they’re open, menu… one of them even updates the menu if they’ve run out of an ingredient!
Even for customer oriented companies, having to keep up call centers seems to be pretty universally viewed as the Work of the Devil. I believe that the reasoning is that:
The kind of people who usually do call for support or whatever are idiots, and take up lots of person time where you’ve got an exact 1-to-1 relationship between a paid employee and the number of customers he can make happy (whereas a single programmer, for instance, can make a program that will sell to millions of people.)
The people who work in call centers tend not to be the best and brightest, themselves (no offense to Dopers who have been suckered into such a job.) As such, they tend to be a source of problems, and pretty much are off the promotion-ladder.
99% of customers never call for support. Meaning that if you had a product that only had six developers, and sold to a million customers, you have to keep a call center ready to handle 10,000 people (over the life of the product) which may mean that you have to hire 100 people to sit in a call center. Even given that the developers will have a higher wage than the call center people, 100 people adds up pretty quick. So you’re going to have to spend anywhere from ten to fifty times more than the development cost in keeping around a bunch of troublemakers, just to deal with the stupidest and most annoying 1% of all customers. And of course this means you have to charge the customer ten to fifty times more for the product even though 99% of them will never need it.
Linux and other freeware, pretty much are able to stay free simply because supporting a team of three of four developers isn’t that hard. The big expenses are support centers, litigation, and advertising. You lop those all off, and you can drop 99% off the price of the product, merrily.