I embarked on a quest (okay, more of a jaunt) to find out just how easy or difficult it is to find a contact phone number for a given company. Sounds easy, right? Try it yourself.

Let’s start with something in the small business realm. Let’s say Yahoo hosts your website. Try finding a support phone number on their website. Good luck and Godspeed. I would be stunned if you can find a number and accomplish something—anything—in an entire afternoon.

More than a decade ago, a mentor and former publisher of multiple Thomas Publishing entities commented to me that—even with the dazzling possibilities of the web—companies did their best to distance themselves from customers. He was right then and, unfortunately for business, he’s right today in far too many instances.

Rockwell Automation is a shining example of the good. Getting to a support phone number is two levels down from their home page. National Instruments beats that by 100% though, with contact phone numbers available in just one click.

Autodesk, one of the world’s top technology companies and leading engineering software providers, so far has me four levels down just to get general contact numbers. Parker Hannifin, on the other hand, has an 800 number right on their homepage. Impressive. Click on ‘contact,’ though, and you’re presented with a popup form containing sixteen—count ‘em: sixteen— fields to be filled out, plus a checkbox for good measure. If such a contact window makes it past your popup blocker, will you use such a form? If so, have you ever received a response after all your data entry work—within a reasonable period of time? What about the other side: have you ever received the data from such a form and done anything productive with it?

Try Googling ‘CRM Market.’ The first response is a sponsored Microsoft link entitled CRM Best Practices and Solutions. Sorry, guys. Seminars or not, how can I possibly consider Microsoft a leader in CRM considering countless hours spent on-hold, sitting beside a smoking, crumpled wreck of an operating system. (Okay, I usually wrecked it, but that’s not the point.)

Glass houses come into play as well. Pick your favorite publication, engineering- or consumer-related. Go to their homepage. See how deep you have to go to find a contact number for anyone in editorial, for example. Some great examples exist; along with many that will make you wander off, muttering about a given publication being in the business of communication.

Let’s say that you don’t even want to talk to a live person, a perfectly reasonable scenario since that live person is often 8,000 miles away and barely speaks English. Let’s say you just want to find something on the website of a Fortune 500 company. Major corporate websites are nations-broad and oceans-deep. In some cases, your kids could advance from daycare to college in the time it takes to find detailed specs for a single product. That brings us to live website help. I’ve actually had a few productive, positive experiences with such live, on-website assistance. Live help, however, on the dozen or so manufacturing-related websites that I just checked is simply non-existent.

A million-dollar CRM implementation is worthless if you can’t contact a live, coherent human being on the other end—one who knows the company, departments, products, sales and support channels, and the ins and outs of their website.

Comfortably Numb applies. Hello, hello, hello? Is there anybody out there? Just nod if you can hear me…