customers

Baidu recently unveiled a tool allowing companies to submit their customer service phone number to the Chinese search engine index. 

How many times did it happen to you when you want to contact a company customer service but do not know or find any phone number? Baidu strives to make your life easier with easily returning you the hotline you look for.

What is Customer Service Hotline in Baidu?

With this search feature, Baidu revealed a useful tool that displays a company hotline in prominent positions in the search engine results pages when users search the customer service phone number.

For instance, if you want to look for Qunar Customer Service phone number (Qunar is a very popular travel search engine in China), you would type “去哪儿客服”on Baidu, “去哪儿客服”meaning “Qunar hotline” in Chinese.

Baidu displays a special “hotline box” that shows Qunar’s customer service phone number. Users can therefore call directly that number or visit Qunar’s website by clicking the phone icon to find more information.

Why to Submit my Company Hotline to Baidu?

Below are the main reasons why you should submit your customer service phone to Baidu index:

- Customers: When your customers search your hotline phone number, you help them find useful information quickly.

- SEO: The hotline box is displayed in a prominent position in Baidu search results page. The clickable icon redirecting to your website will potentially drive traffic to your website, especially if your site does not rank high in Baidu. On the contrary, if your customer service page was already well ranked on this query, you may see a decrease in terms of visitors as users will get their answer without visiting your page.

- Free:  Submitting your hotline to Baidu is free, and moreover, if you advertise about your customer service on the search engine, it means that people will therefore click less on your ads, so you will save some money.

- Competition: thousands of companies already submitted their hotline to Baidu index, including large firms such as Bank of China, China Southern Airlines, and Haier. If your competitors have their customer service phone number in Baidu index, it is a good reason to submit yours too!

How to submit my Customer Service Hotline to Baidu?

If you want to submit your customer service phone number to Baidu, you should meet some requirements, such as having a contact page on your website, a unified national telephone, and a Baidu account. 

Here is the link to submit your hotline to Baidu: http://open.baidu.com/coop/kefu.html

You must fill  in contact information, notably keywords that will trigger your hotline box, your customer service phone number, your company name and the destination URL. Baidu says it will review your application within 5 days before approving it.

Note: It seems that Baidu did not submit its own hotline!