Talk About Bad Form… Reynolds & Reynolds Dealer Sites

As a Consultant, it’s part of my initial review to submit a few test leads through a dealer’s web site. Obviously, the goal is to see how the lead is handled once it hits the sales staff… but when a dealer’s site fails to even generate the lead, you really have to ask yourself what’s going on there.

To find examples of such an issue, just look up your closest dealer pushing a Reynolds & Reynolds dealer web site. The contact forms on R&R sites are - and have always been - the worst in the industry. How any dealer could put up with such trash is truly perplexing to me.

Honestly, if a Consultant gets turned off in the midst of trying to submit a test lead, what kind of behavior would you expect from customers? It’s only through past trial and error that I now know how to “properly” submit a Service request on a Reynolds & Reynolds dealer site, and no matter what department you’re requesting information from, the forms look like they were created by an entire legal team (not so much a crack legal team as a legal team on crack).

Let’s take a look at a Tarrytown NY Honda dealer example so we can really dive into this torture.

For starters, this form showcases one of Reynolds’ signature marks: grouped data passing below the fold. For more than a decade now, web designers have followed the mantra of placing important user interface items within the top half of the page, so that the site does not have to rely on a user’s interest level being high enough that they would scroll down for more information. We’re talking about homepage articles and ads here, not forms. To think that a simple request form would take up 600+ pixels of vertical space is preposterous… you’re begging your customers to lose interest in such a long and tedious-looking form.

And what makes Reynolds & Reynolds’ forms so long? The fact that they want users to submit all kinds of useless information. This is the kind of form that would be designed by a Sales Manager. “Oh yeah, I want their home address too. That would be good.” You don’t create user interfaces based on what you want from the user - you create them by walking the fine line between what you require to work the lead and what a user will stand to submit without hesitation. Asking Service customers for their home address in an appointment form is pointless for many reasons, the biggest being that Service leads almost always result in a successful appointment, at which time you’ll have plenty of opportunities to get their address information.

But these two gripes are just the appetizers, and to be fair, there are a few web vendors who suffer from both of these deficiencies. But I promise, this next bit is signature Reynolds.

See those two errors that occured? The first one’s for mileage. “Please Enter A Valid Mileage”. Well, my speedometer says 28,000, and that’s what I wrote… seems pretty valid to me. I guess it’s too much to ask for Reynolds to put a specific error message adjacent to that field which states, “Only numbers are allowed.” If they did that, it would be easier for the user to recognize that a comma dividing the thousands is an illegal character. Not that any mileage form should be that strict, but at least tell the user what they did wrong.

The second error is for an invalid appointment date. Really? I suppose it’s quite likely that my appointment would be invalid, considering the fact that nothing in the form tells me what days the dealership is open, what the department hours are, or what kind of format I’m supposed to use for the date (I’ll tell you: it’s 01/01/2001, and nothing else will suffice). Let me tell you something Rey Rey: you won’t be building web sites long enough for “08″ to roll around the next time, so a four-digit year is not something you should be concerned about. There are other form fields in the HTML language besides “input”… give them a try some time if you’re going to be that anal retentive about formats.

Forcing your customers to utilize these contact forms is classic shoot-yourself-in-the-foot business as far as I can see. It’s like spending $50k in advertising to get customers to your lot, and then when they get there, telling them they have to go in through the A/C duct instead of the main doors.