Chevron : Nipping enquiries in the bud

Careful placing of a scam warning helps customers and company.

The Site

Chevron, the US-based energy giant, has a Contact Us link at the top of every page of its website. A compact page provides a mix of links for different types of visitor, as well as general postal and e-mail addresses.

The second item is ‘Fraudulent Business Transactions, Information about known fictitious offers, scams and inquiries’. This links to a page saying that “people have been approached by individuals claiming to represent Chevron…”and giving brief details of frauds. These include the Free Gasoline Offer Scam, the Lottery Winner Scam and the Deceased Employee Inquiry Scam (a variant of the Nigerian Advanced Fee Fraud).

The Takeaway

Chevron is helpful to its customers in providing details of common scams and helpful to itself in putting the link to them on the Contact Us page.

If people are suspicious about an offer that appears to come from a respectable company, their first instinct will be to check with the apparent source. They are likely to go to the website, look for a phone number or e-mail address and – if the company is Chevron – find they do not need to make contact after all. A good bit of user-centred positioning means customers are finding the information they need, while Chevron is cutting off a barrage of phone calls or e-mails before it has been launched.

First published on 18 July, 2006