Asking for a Phone Number You Will Not Use

The field nobody justified

Most enquiry forms ask for a phone number and most mark it required.

Ask why and the answer is usually that it seems standard, or that it might be useful, or that the form builder included it by default.

None of those is a reason. The question worth answering is whether you will actually call, and for a great many businesses the honest answer is only sometimes.

What requiring it costs

Three things, in increasing order of significance.

Effort. Small, and real on a phone where switching keyboards is a nuisance.

Hesitation. Some people are reluctant to hand a number to a business they have not chosen, because a number invites a call they did not ask for.

Abandonment. A proportion simply stop. They wanted to ask a question and are not prepared to be phoned about it.

That third group is invisible. They do not tell you why they left, and the enquiry never existed as far as your records are concerned.

The trust dimension

Worth taking seriously rather than dismissing as oversensitivity.

People have learned that giving a number to a business produces calls, sometimes persistent ones. Requiring it reads as a business planning to phone rather than answer.

For some categories this is acute. Anything where a customer expects to be pursued, anything expensive, and anything where they are only at the research stage.

Making it optional signals the opposite: that you will reply the way they asked, which is a small courtesy that costs nothing and is noticed.

A worked example

A firm of surveyors whose enquiry form required name, email and phone.

They replied to virtually everything by email, because the first response was usually a request for documents. They called perhaps one enquirer in ten, and always after an email exchange.

Making the phone field optional produced about a third more submissions. Roughly half of people filled it in anyway.

They lost nothing operationally, because the number was rarely used and was available for the half who provided it.

The extra third were people who wanted to ask something without committing to a phone conversation, which was exactly the audience the firm wanted at the top of its process.

The counter-case

Where requiring a number is correct.

Any trade where the first response is genuinely a call. An emergency service, a business that quotes verbally, or anything where an email exchange would take four days and a call takes four minutes.

Anything where you need to arrange access or attendance, which is difficult by email.

And a business with more enquiries than capacity, where requiring a number qualifies people willing to have a conversation.

The test is what you will do first when the enquiry arrives. If that is a call, ask for the number and say why. If it is an email, do not require it.

What the alternative looks like

If you remove the requirement, something has to fill the gap when you genuinely need to speak to somebody.

The answer is asking in the reply. An email saying you have a couple of questions and it would be quicker by phone, with a request for a number, gets one almost every time.

By that point the person has had a response, knows you are real, and has decided to continue. The number costs them nothing.

Which is the general shape of the argument: information is cheap to collect once somebody has committed and expensive to demand before they have.

Saying why you are asking

A small addition that changes how the field is received.

"Phone number, if you would prefer we call" tells the reader what will happen and gives them the choice.

"Phone number, so we can arrange access" explains a genuine operational need.

Either is better than a bare label, because a labelled field with no explanation invites the reader to supply their own, which is usually worse than the truth.

Asking how they want to be contacted

The version some businesses reach for, and it is worth thinking about.

A preference selector is honest and it adds a field, which is the thing you were trying to avoid.

The simpler equivalent: ask for one contact route, offer the other as optional, and treat which one they filled in as the preference.

Somebody who gave you a number and not an email has told you how to reach them without answering a question about it.

What to do with the number when you get it

Worth being disciplined about, because it affects whether people give it next time.

Use it for the enquiry it came with. Do not add it to a list, do not call about something else three months later, and do not pass it on.

A business that phones once about the thing somebody asked about is behaving as expected. One that phones repeatedly is why the field is treated with suspicion in the first place.

There are also rules about this, and the safest position is the one most people would consider reasonable anyway.

What people actually write in it

Worth looking at, because it tells you whether the field is working.

Forms requiring a number collect a predictable proportion of nonsense: repeated digits, obviously invalid sequences, and numbers that ring nowhere.

That is people who wanted to send the enquiry and did not want to be called, complying with the requirement rather than abandoning.

Which means the field is not producing contact details from those people. It is producing noise, while the ones who abandoned produced nothing at all.

If your enquiries include a visible share of fake numbers, that is the field telling you it is not wanted, and making it optional would convert the noise into either a real number or an honest blank.

The wider principle

1. Every field should have a use you can state.
2. Every required field should be needed to respond at all.
3. Anything else is optional, or asked in the reply.
4. Explain anything that might feel intrusive.
5. Use what you collect for the purpose you collected it.

Applied honestly, that removes two or three fields from most forms, and the phone number is the one it most often reaches.

None of this is an argument against phone calls. Plenty of trades do their best work on the phone and should say so prominently. It is an argument against demanding a number from somebody who came to send a message.

How many fields to keep in total is covered in how many fields before people give up.

Frequently asked questions

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