Yesterday I saw this sign over a bin in York
the message is clear - rubbish in this bin is going in a hole in the ground, you should probably check you don’t want to use the bin on the other side.
It reminded me of how it always pays to tell your customers why you are doing something, and work with them not against them to achieve common goals. .
One example of how we do this is On our contact pages - recently we have been playing about with the wording to tell people why we push them to on-line contact
Ultimately we are wanting people to contact online (if at all) because it’s cheaper, and cheaper means savings, it means investment can go where it’s needed, it means improved (and importantly maintained) services. So why don’t we tell our customer that?
At this point I can’t tell you if it works :) We will have to do some A/B testing on the form with and without the message - I can’t see it having a detrimental effect but as with everything we do we will measure and use the evidence to guide our decisions.