Customer service managers sometimes look at Dave Radanovich like he has two heads, but that's all part of teaching them the importance of effective communications. Columbia
Gas's vice president for communications plays the role of enterprising reporter in crisis-scenario training with his call center personnel. They wonder out loud why he asks so
many darn questions and why he so doggedly persists. "They have to understand why [PR people] are as thorough as they are," says Radanovich.
It's all part of Radanovich's plan to better integrate PR and customer service, and educate service reps on how communicating the wrong facts can have dire, if not explosive,
repercussions in the press. We're not talking metaphorically, either. One Columbia Gas competitor faced a disaster on several fronts a few months back when a house in the metro DC
area blew up due to a massive gas leak. "When you're a company that handles public safety like we do, you have to make sure that everyone is singing from the same hymnal," says
Radanovich.
Putting the "Service" Back Where It Belongs
By the very nature of what they do, customer service workers are working as communicators as much as their publicist cousins -- working the phones, soothing tempers, making
impressions and building corporate image as they go along. But they have a more quantifiable impact on customer loyalty. And they are more likely to influence a customer's
perception of a company than a slick marketing campaign or a story in The New York Times. They are also part of the reason Seattle-based bookseller Jeff Bezos was selected
as Time magazine's 1999 "Person of the Year:" He has long been a paragon of customer service excellence.
Yet "customer service" still remains an oxymoron in popular business culture, even more so now that the bottom has fallen out of the Internet economy. Call centers are often
staffed with second-rate employees who couldn't cut it in other departments. Training is often minimal and perfunctory. Telephone hold times are long; customer patience is short.
RFBinder Partners VP David Kalson calls the disconnect between customer service and PR that exists in so many business environments a "huge opportunity wasted." It usually
takes a considerable crisis to alert company leaders to the need for some integration of the two, he believes. "Customer service people are an important litmus test as to how
things are going out there in the community. They need to be part and parcel of the crisis management program you have in place," he says.
It was a customer service person who helped Rick Jones avert a potential PR disaster a month ago. Jones manages public relations for Appriss, a service company that notifies
victims of violent crime when their attackers are released from prison. A clerical error that occurred in Cleveland resulted in Appriss neglecting to inform a former victim of a
particular offender's imminent parole. The oversight was picked up by a local news broadcast and customer service, not public relations, got the call. Immediately, Jones contacted
the last-to-know victim to apologize. He concedes that the error might have transformed an overlooked victim's grievances into further media coverage without quick action. He also
agrees that there are plenty of customer call centers out there that would not have passed the information along to the PR department.
Jones used the experience to generate more detailed policies about how Appriss's customer service department should handle media inquiries. "A year ago we didn't even know who
half our customer service people were," he says. "Now we're taking a few of them with us to sit in on training sessions with police departments...to show them how [the process
works.]"
Communicating Through Tech-Speak
PR Director Beth Torrie who works for Fatwire, Mineola, NY, a content management software- maker for blue-chip corporations, knows that good customer service translates into
powerful PR. That's why she works to improve the interpersonal skills of the "techies" who drive her company's business. When Torrie came on board a year and a half ago, she
estimates that 90 percent of the company's account managers, i.e. most of those who work with customers installing software, lacked reliable communications skills. "A lot of them
felt very insecure about writing an email and talking to someone's boss," she says. "These are the people working with clients like IBM on a daily basis."
So Torrie put together a customer service training program, enlisting the help of John Murcott, Fatwire's VP of professional services, a veteran public speaker. Torrie's
presentations cover the basics of customer service, from tone of voice to the minutiae of non-verbal communication. They proved especially beneficial to account managers from
various cultural backgrounds who weren't familiar with American business etiquette. She estimates 30 percent of Fatwire's employees are from overseas.
Torrie has hosted five sessions so far, recording them onto digital video and storing them to the company's intranet so employees can view them any time. Not only have they
cost the company nothing, she's also been getting at least one client compliment per week about the quality of customer service, filtered back to her through grateful account
managers. She posts the compliments on Fatwire's site for all to see.
Torrie attributes her proactive thinking to her mother, who worked in communications for Nabisco for several years and ingrained in her the connection between customer service
and sound PR policy. "Even if you're in the business of $100,000 software, it's still important to have people who care about you at the other end of the line," she says. "And
it's a lot easier to get good publicity from your really happy customers."
(Contacts: Dave Radanovich, 412/572-7190; David Kalson, 212/ 593-6400; Rick Jones, 502/ 815-3855; Beth Torrie, 516/ 328-9473)
"Like Beth Torrie, Sara Stutzenstein knows that converting tech-speak into easily understood language is no easy task. That's why the public relations manager for Web host
company Interland helped write the voice-mail prompts that customers hear when they call the company's help desk. It's all part of a renewed effort to incorporate customer service
principles into every aspect of the organization. "Our largest source of referrals is based on word of mouth, and that happens when customers are happy with the caliber of service
they get," she says.
(Sara Stutzenstein, 404/720-3738)