Request for Information - Then 20 Questions

When I come across this sort of stuff, I wonder how they actually improve sales by making it difficult for (potential) customers to reach them. Usually I just back out of their web-page and go somewhere else.

It depends on the site. If it is just a general interest look or downloading a specific application note or catalog then thats fine, but for anything more a call or visit works wonders (location dependent of course). It is common place so people are used to it and quite a handy tool in some ways (such as monitoring site downloads and the types of people looking at the site).

I notice also a "security question" in which I have to decipher and almost illegible scrawl of letters and numbers. What security??

To prevent automated spambots from filling in vast numbers of these forms and overwhelming the site.

What do others think about the 20-questions.

Ok as long as you only have to do it once and have the ability to opt out of receiving any of their product literature via email. I hate the sites that require you to refill in the form every single time you want a data sheet, even when you are still on the same session (ie trying to download data sheets one at a time in one go).

I don't know how many countless Identity form's I've filled out before gaining access to CAD files, Data sheets, or other literature. Generally I've only had to fill out one form per company. I try to always use the same user-name/password for all the "similar" sites.

I do completely understand why the company would want to monitor the information people are pulling from their site. I use hundreds or parkers CAD files for their Hydraulic fittings, and absolutely Love the fact that they offer that service to the "general public" for free. Every once in a while I actually spec in a parker fitting too... Yet more often than not it ends up being a Brennon, or some other local house I buy them from.(I just prefer to buy local whenever possible)

In the end, I think its completely reasonable that a company will ask who is using/downloading their proprietary information from the internet. Generally if you are a paying customer, that information would come alongside the product when the purchase is made.

When I do this, it's generally followed within the hour by a phone call from the closest rep. Now I leave other people's phone numbers.

Preferably phone numbers of other vendors.

I've searched out alternate connection paths to a number of such companies, and sent them a short e-mail explaining why I was going to buy an item (or more) from their competitor, who at least permitted me to access technical information needed in order to compete a product design. A fairly recent example was a distributor of fasteners that wanted a half page of information before I could even learn whether they carried a common machine bolt with the head / drive style I needed. Mind you, this was not even a manufacturer with potentially proprietary designs, but a distributor!

If I don't want to be contacted by companies after I've visited their site I just enter random information. Any character string followed by hotmail.com works for the e-mail & as long as the phone number is in the right format it will quite often accept '##### ######' or something similar.

". . . as long as the phone number is in the right format . . ."

There's a related pet peeve. I have run into several sites which have extensive forms to fill out, and when you've hit "Submit" it comes back with a notice that you need to change or complete some portion. That's fine if I've actually missed a blank, but I had an instance where the only accepted format for the phone number (US) was XXX/XXX/XXXX, which is far from ordinary practice, and took me several guesses to discover. That very same site demanded the date as MM-DD-YYYY; normal US practice would swap the hyphens and slashes, so this was frustrating to discover by entering guesses until it finally accepted one. And then came the clincher: the site would NOT accept my street address. Apparently, whoever programmed this mess had never encountered a Wisconsin address, and the format didn't match their preconceptions. I'd have been willing to enter it differently, but then the mailing label would have been wrong as determined by US Post Office in my area!

Even more recently, I had similar problems on a US government site. This was one with security procedures (and I believe appropriate and justified ones, given the sensitivity of the information to be exchanged). The phone number, it turned out, had to be run together, with no blanks or dashes, but it didn't furnish that information until it had rejected the hypehnated entry I'd made. Other entered information required hyphens, slashes, or spaces (but with no example offered until AFTER rejection). Each failure forced me to start over, with the site blanking all of the entries I'd made, and requiring me to go through the security protocols ab initio even though I was still connected in the same session. When I mentioned this a few days later during a conversation with an actual human [after 24 minutes of navigating voicemail menus!] she said, "Oh, yeah, we hear that a lot." "Is it going to get corrected?" "We've tried, but that's done by a different department, and they haven't responded for the last few years." From the offhand matter-of-fact voice, it was apparent that no one cared, and likely no one has bothered to ask again in the last year or two.

My favorite are the long information forms that you get all filled out, and the form decided your phone number is in the wrong format, and rejects that data, but doesn't bother to bring in that previously typed data into the form, forcing you to make the decision to fill it all out again, or tell the company to bugger off.

I hate them... despise them.... wish they all would die... Due to the lust for my personal contact information by so many sites, I have become one of the multitude that makes up bogus information to give when I'm just looking for information... I have a number of dummy e-mail accounts I use for the sole purpose of collecting follow ups from sales reps and other annoyances caused by the trail of identity I leave behind in my internet wake... Of course all of this is moot as the web will begin to crash over the next year and then it's going to go the route of analog tv... see here and here

I hate this kind of thing. I end up getting email or sales calls from people selling stuff I have 1. only a casual interest in 2. no interest at all in because the website showed that they don't have the stuff I want. 3. stuff I am interested in but not right now.

Invariably, if I do business with companies that have sites like this, it is in spite of the intrusion, not because of it. The combination of making the data hard to get and the intrusive sales pitch puts me right on the edge of not wanting to do business for these reasons alone. In my eyes, it can take a good product and make it look bad.

No company will release stuff to the general public that is truly proprietary unless they have signed NDAs. The online forms do not qualify as NDAs, in any way shape or form. It's not that they need this data to protect their data. The only reason they make you jump through these hoops is to get your personal data so they can try to sell you stuff.

If I can possibly avoid it, I do not use these sites. I'd far rather deal with companies who value the customer's time.

I agree that it's definitely annoying, but I'll gladly fill it out if I can get a CAD model from them, instead of pulling out my micrometer/tape and spend 4 hours modeling it myself with less accuracy. (not to mention lugging whatever the part is up to my desk and back to the warehouse) I suppose my case is somewhat less than ordinary though, I'm generally pulling data for parts which are already sitting in our warehouse on a shelf.

If its a company which I have no/little intention of using the parts, or currently have no interest in the parts, I generally won't bother filling out a form, or much less bother navigating to the site in the first place. If I need a data-sheet, I need a data-sheet, no way around it.

If I'm looking to buy a new/unknown part (rarely the case) and I need to compare data-sheets from various vendors, I'm probably less likely to buy from the vendor that makes me jump through their information gathering hoops, unless their part is super superior to the others, and then its still an annoyance... but I'll do it none the less.

Quite right, if I'm searching the web for a product & have a list of possibles I will quite often just reject the ones that want me to fill in their forms. That means they have lost a potential sale.

Another problem is those of us who have two part last names. If I were Dutch for example, I might have a last name of van Pelt. Some of these forms will reject it.

I will fill out a form once... maybe twice... after that FORGET IT!! My time is too valuable to play word games.

Bill