A marketing perspective on the editors' forum: It's partly about customer service

We've just spent a good portion of the past two days at the American Press Institute with 31 of our industry's most insightful and caring practitioners, discussing newsroom ethics, standards and leadership. The occasion was a forum sponsored by API and the American Society of Newspaper Editors entitled "Newsroom Reporting and Editing Standards." The discussion was remarkably candid and wide-ranging, and touched on almost every aspect of the challenges newsroom leaders face every day.

One substantive conversation revolved around accountability - how corrections and clarifications are made and tracked, how information is verified, and what processes newsrooms have in place to accommodate reader input into the news report.

Horror stories have been told, including one in this forum, about citizens trying to reach someone in a newsroom. They are thwarted by an automated telephone menu or voicemail with no bailout, or they are bounced from one person to another, never receiving a return call and ultimately never having the chance to speak to someone with a pulse. This has certainly been my experience on more than one occasion when trying to call a reporter, and I'm aware of similar anecdotes at papers where I've worked, so I'm not surprised that no readers felt empowered to call about inaccuracies in a Jayson Blair story.

What may be a surprise, however, is the cost to our brand that's implicit in this.

At its root, this is a customer service issue. Consider the reader who calls with a complaint. This is someone who feels disappointed by your newspaper, and cares enough about the product to alert you to a problem so you can remedy it. This is your most valuable customer. Most customer-service training would urge you to respond first to a call like this with a sincere "thank you." Instead, through the kind of benign neglect practiced by some newsrooms we run the risk of treating these customers as ignorant and irritating, thus demeaning their value to us. And here's a crucial statistic: Customers who have a good interaction with a company typically tell two to five people about it. Customers who have a negative experience typically tell between 10 and 20 people. So you may be earning a lot more negative buzz than you think.

Good customer service is in no way incompatible with good reporting. Rather, it's about respect for the people who think enough of your product to choose it every day from among all their options. There are some easy steps, outlined below, that can be put into place to help remedy the immediate problem. Most of the items on the list are procedural. To some they may seem so basic as to be not worth restating, but from the stories I've heard about consumers trying to get through to newspaper newsrooms, perhaps a refresher course is appropriate.

1. Publish in the same place in your paper every day, and on your Web site, as complete a list as you can of how to reach everyone at your paper and who's responsible for what. Assign someone to keep it updated. This maximizes the chances that the caller will try to reach the right person on the first try.

2. Every caller should be able to reach a live person during reasonable calling hours if he or she wishes, and should be able to do that from the FIRST voicemail box or automated menu he or she encounters. Your voicemail system should be set up with bailouts that go not to more voicemail but to a desk that's staffed at all appropriate times, where the phone will ring until it's answered (preferably after three or fewer rings).

3. If you must transfer a call, make sure it connects with its intended recipient rather than a voicemail box. If you must put a caller into someone else's voicemail, ask the caller's permission first, and try to give the caller that person's direct contact information for the future.

4. Customer service is everyone's responsibility. If further action on a call is warranted, try to keep the ball in your court. Offer to take a message, call back with further information or an answer to a question, mail an engagement form, whatever the appropriate next step is, but offer to be of service even if it's not your job, rather than making the customer do the follow-up.

5. Audit the process once in a while. Call your paper from the outside and see how easy or hard it is for a citizen to reach someone in your newsroom.

6. Spend some time with the people in every department who answer the phone: receptionists, department assistants, classified and circulation customer service reps. They're typically very low on the totem pole, and in some places we don't train them or pay them very well. Certainly we don't ask them often enough about what happens in their jobs, and they can probably provide valuable insight into where your inbound calling system might be breaking down.

7. Set the tone from the top that customer complaints about unreturned calls will be taken very seriously. We talked in the forum about the need for clearly articulated and enforced standards; this is a pretty straightforward one.

8. Finally, make an outrageous promise: you guarantee that every call or e-mail will be responded to in some form within one business day. Yes, this is a huge shift in emphasis for most organizations. Yes, it will take a lot of initial effort to find ways to make it happen, and yes, it may take a long time before this is part of your culture. But the very best customer-service organizations have made this a practice for years. It is an achievable goal.

More and more, customers of any organization expect seamless service, and anything less is seen as deficient. To make this even harder for you, your organization will never be able to quantify the phrase "outstanding customer service." Only your customers can provide that definition. However, exceeding those expectations is the key to building priceless customer loyalty. Are you giving your best customers your best service?