With the holidays upon us and companies intensely interacting with customers, responsive, positive customer service becomes tantamount to driving revenues and keeping consumers coming back.
In the past, the role of PR in achieving optimal customer service has been relegated to major crises. But two developments have changed the PR-customer service connection. First, it used to be said, “Customer is king.” Now, the customer is “king of the universe.” And with the advent of CRM systems and other customer-facing tools, it became possible to know thy customer inside and out. Second, social media is dramatically changing the way in which we listen to and interact with customers. In addition, social media is transforming the way in which PR interacts with other parts of an organization.
Nowhere is that transformation as dramatic as in customer service. Already, a number of organizations have joined customer service with PR in the inbound/outbound effort to listen to and engage with customers.
As it stands now, however, there are barriers to this relationship. Sam Ford, director of customer insights at Peppercom and a research affiliate with MIT’s Convergence Culture Consortium, has been studying the new listening techniques spawned by social media, and he notes a basic difference in philosophy between PR and customer service: “Traditionally, PR wants to engage with people as much as possible, and customer service wants you off the phone as fast as possible,” says Ford.
But with conversations now decidedly two-way thanks to blogs, Twitter, Facebook and the like, Ford says that a number of companies, including Southwest, JetBlue and Comcast, are simultaneously creating new PR/customer relations synergies and entering “unknown” territory.
PR/CR FLYING HIGH
“Our emerging media team is fused with PR and customer relations,” says Paula Berg, Southwest’s manager of emerging media. “But it’s not a terribly formal relationship and we’re still figuring things out as we go.”
Berg’s background in PR helps make the relationship work. She started at Southwest 10 years ago writing letters for customer relations. Later she moved into PR, and that combined training has proved to be beneficial. “I’ve molded our social media program around that experience.” Berg says. “The most important thing I’ve learned is that good customer service is good PR.”
An example of how PR and customer service mesh at Southwest is the company blog, Nuts About Southwest. “The verbiage on the blog says that it’s not a place for customer relations,” says Berg.
Nuts is clearly a PR play, a place where Southwest can engage its fans, disseminate news and be a incubator of new ideas. “But every day decisions are made on which conversations to allow and which to forward to customer relations,” she says.
Berg can see the day when there are more formal systems and strategies in place. One idea, she says, is to populate the blog with answers to frequently asked questions, such as baggage or upgrade queries. “If we can front-load the blog with those conversations, we could prevent letters going to customer relations, and it would cut costs,” says Berg.
IMAGE CONTROL
Southwest is a company that makes customer service a part of PR (and vice versa) because customer service is really about image, says Emily Yellin, author of the book Your Call Is (Not That) Important to Us (Free Press, 2009). In the book, Yellin takes a hard look at the customer service efforts of a number of companies. The best CS programs have a common theme: the optimal customer experience.
“The customer experience starts with the first time you hear about the company and beyond the transaction,” says Yellin. “PR is integral to that customer experience. It’s projecting the image of the best customer experience one could have.”
On the flip side, customer service talks to customers every day, says Yellin, and if there’s no link to PR, the company image can go south very quickly.
NO SILOS ALLOWED
Indeed, customer service and PR operating in their own worlds is a major problem, says Ford. Invariably, customer service is buried below a number of company units, two of which are marketing and PR.
“With the way many companies are organized, no one knows what to do with customer situations that cross boundaries,” Ford says.
It’s an institutional problem that’s hard to solve, says Ford. But a diverse group of forward-thinking companies, including Zappos, H&R Block, Comcast and Southwest, are making some fundamental changes that allow for better communication between PR and customer service.
POWER SURGE
Puget Sound Energy, a Peppercom client, is another company that is working from the ground up to fuse PR and customer relations, says Ford.
Recognizing that their customers were increasingly going online for information, the company decided to make its online presence a fundamental part of its monitoring and outreach efforts.
What is impressive, says Ford, is PSE’s determination to develop a long-term strategy to make the successful shift to digital platforms. The company addressed internal planning, communication and organizational structure to prepare the digital transformation.
“Its Twitter and blog presence now go through corporate communications,” says Ford. “PSE tracks all customer service issues online and have created pipelines with customer service to alert them to issues and to reach out to customers to connect them with customer service.”
A MODEST PROPOSAL
Whether other companies are willing to take a similar leap remains to be seen. When giving presentations on her book, author Yellin offers the audience this scenario: What if the head of customer service was paid second only to those in the C-suite? What if customer service reps were paid on par with those in IT, marketing, PR and divisions? “That would give status to the customer that they have never had before and customer service an important spot at the table,” she says.
Or perhaps baby steps should come first. In the coming months, social media pros like Southwest’s Berg will continue to set boundaries and standards for PR and customer service. Together, the two disciplines will transform the way organizations listen and respond to their customers. PRN
CONTACT:
Sam Ford, [email protected]; Paula Berg, [email protected]; Emily Yellin, [email protected].