By Stephanie Seacord

This month’s topic is on managing your public impressions, specifically, the ones your front line people make on actual customers. What happens when a customer calls.

We spend much time in this space discussing media relations – who, when, where, how, what you say to them. But we often forget that media relations, traditional PR, is at best a second-order function. The reporters and editors only sometimes buy our products or services. In the case of a race team, one step removed from the sponsor’s sales contacts to begin with (although definitely PART of the sales and marketing team effort), media relations with the sports writers is a third-order effort to get the brand out there.

What about your first-order PR? What do your sales, reception and customer service people say about your company? Do they  support your image of quality, interest and dependability? Or are they sabotaging the efforts of every other person in line down to the shop floor?

I had an experience recently that put into focus something I had understood intellectually from past experience writing training materials and scripts for hotel reservations and front desk people. I re-examined that knowledge last October when I started doing PR work for Virtual-Agent Services (VAS), a company with an innovative way of handling inbound and outbound customer service calls. By the way, this industry now refers to itself as contact center management, which is a more accurate if less familiar way to look at what a “reservations center” does. VAS is innovative because they’ve found a way to partner with telephone companies so that they can connect customer service agents in small communities and deliver higher quality, skill and employee retention to their clients and the client’s customers.

My understanding of how well that approach – and others who take care with how their agents talk to customers on the phone – was underscored by an example so bad I took my original problem and my complaint about the specific incident all the way to corporate headquarters. Appropriately, the person I talked to there was in the “Escalation Department” (I’m not kidding – but it makes you wonder how often this happens and if this Department is the solution, or if fixing the problem might help more.)

Briefly, my problem was trying to get approval for a $100 rebate offered by Palm Pilot on a Magellan GPS unit for our 505. We filled out the form, sent all the documentation requested on the form, and were twice rejected on the basis that we hadn’t included our packing slip. Now first of all, the paperwork didn’t say anything about a packing slip; and second, there was no packing slip in the box. After the first rejection, I called the customer service desk at wheresmyrebate.com, the company Palm uses for some of these promotions. The gentleman (I chose this word deliberately) I spoke to asked me to fax him another copy of our receipt. Two weeks later, our request was rejected again. (Lesson one – make sure your customer service procedures don’t have loop-cycles in them.)

After another week of calling the number, being put on hold by the automated system and being hung up on (Lesson Two – make sure your ‘automated’ systems work the way you want them to.), I finally got a human voice. She started in on the packing slip routine again. Admittedly, I was a bit tired of this by now, and simply wanted the hundred bucks I was promised, but when I interrupted this ‘customer service agent’ to say I’d been through this before, the coupon didn’t say anything about it, etc. etc., she said in a totally bored manner, “Oh, here we go again!” I could have jumped down the phone line. When I said, “Hey! Let me talk to your supervisor, or my next call will be to my lawyer about consumer fraud,” she said “Do what you like, but if you interrupt me again, I will disconnect this call.” I beat her to it. And called Palm “Customer Care” and was given the “Escalation Department” number at corporate headquarters in California. The gentleman at Customer Care advised exactly how to get to a live human at that number, and said, “In addition to the rebate, make sure you tell them about the attitude problem.” You bet I did!

The Escalation Man put me on hold while he called the wheresmyrebate.com “Rebate Resolution” supervisor (Lesson Three – your customer service effort must be immediate. Just like media relations. The positive impression has an infinitesimally small shelf life and spoils quickly.). I re-faxed our receipt, for the third time, and will now give it a week for my check to arrive. By then I will have a better assessment of what I think of Palm, which will affect whether I buy more products from them. 

When we talk about the benefits clients receive from working with Virtual-Agent Services, we talk about the better service that results from employees who are considerate, trained, skilled and rewarded (the advantageous exchange rate with Canada, where most of these small community agents are located helps VAS offer competitive pricing). Perhaps the most important element, however, and the one that’s hard to measure except on a call by call basis, is Attitude. Ms. WheresMyRebate.com has a lousy attitude, which she inflicts on the customers her company is paying her to serve. The customer passes along the damage by not buying the products that led to having to deal with her.

Customer service is built on the ripple-effect, and depends on the Attitude generated, not just the resolution of the problem that prompted the call (or worse, the inflexible administration of your company’s Rules on rebates, refunds and exchanges.) Positive attitude on the front line (and that includes how every team member interacts with customers) is more important than anything else you do.

I first heard of the Business Trilogy when I was at Omni Hotels fifteen years ago. While I know the Dunfey brothers who founded the company operate by the philosophy religiously, I don’t know that they were the first to codify it. The rule is simple: treat your employees as you want your customers to be treated and the business stakeholder rewards (owner issues, revenues, etc.) will take care of themselves. When you engender positive attitude towards customers, you give them no reason to go away. It’s that simple (even though engendering that attitude takes much work and effort on your part.)

You can’t get any more Basic with your public relationships than that.