I had to call a company this morning whose employees almost invariably treat me like I'm an idiot.
It's not that there's one cranky employee, or that I happened to catch one normally friendly employee on an off day: every single interaction I have with the (multiple) staff in this business is unpleasant -- and has been over the course of a few years. And it's not just me: friends have reported the same experience. These staff talk down to their customers in a way that leaves a bitter taste... and a lasting, unfavourable impression.
Customer service issue, or PR?
In some organizations, the PR department is charged with managing relationships with certain key stakeholders and the media, and customer service is left to the "customer service" experts.
And while there are plenty of aspects of good customer service delivery that require the attention of the customer service experts, your stakeholders' experiences in dealing with front-line employees have a huge impact on your organization's public relations.
In PR, our responsibility is to build and nurture healthy relationships with people and groups who are affected by what our organization does: customers, employees, community neighbours, donors, beneficiaries, government, interest groups, investors, mainstream and new media influencers, just to name a few.
We work in a wide range of environments, for a wide range of causes, to deliver on a wide range of objectives. But fundamentally, it comes down to this: our job is to give people reasons to want to do business with our employer/client in some way.
What makes you want a relationship?
It's not beautifully-written and designed annual reports, it's not flawlessly-executed special events, and it's not entertaining and informative speeches -- though, for some audiences, those can help.
At their core, good relationships are built on respect -- whether they're between two people, or between a person and an organization of some kind. So if your company's various audiences don't feel respected, anything else your PR department does will fall short.
How do you recognize respect when you see it, hear it, or feel it? It looks, sounds and feels like consideration.
And how do you show consideration?
You listen, and you respond based on what you've heard in a way that shows the other person their experience matters.
When someone listens to you and responds in a way that aims to improve your experience, you feel respected.
In companies, good PR starts on the front lines
Front-line staff (store clerks, helpline operators, volunteers - anyone who interacts with your publics day-to-day) have the ability to affect your audiences' impression of your organization every minute of every work day. Their handling of your audiences' concerns/business/issues/opportunities will have far more impact on how people feel about your organization than many of the corporate communications materials you produce.
For the PR department, that makes front-line managers and staff key partners in the organization's public relations function. You want to know what they're hearing from your audiences, and you want to ensure they're equipped to deal with issues and opportunities alike. You want to know what their personal job-related issues and ideas are, and you want them to know their issues and ideas matter.
Why?
Well, first of all, because it's nice. But secondly, because it's good for business. Your front-line folks are an audience too: and they need to be respected if they're going to want to contribute to positive relationships -- with the company and with its customers.
Sour employees = sour customer experience
It so happens that I'm stuck with the company that motivated this post, for the time being, at least: they provide a particular product I've become accustomed to and don't want to give up. But my behaviour as a customer has changed as a result of the poor treatment I get at their head office: I access the product in a different way, which cuts into the share of my spend the company gets.
The difference between the company getting all my investment and getting only part of my investment is literally the cranky attitude of the employees who answer the phones.
That's a clear bottom-line impact of customer service on my relationship with the company, and that company's bottom line.
If I were in that company's PR department, I'd want to get on that. One cranky employee is one cranky employee; but a whole staff of them, to me, suggests an organizational problem.
Bitterness doesn't just turn up overnight, and it isn't dispelled overnight, either: but as anyone who has had relationship troubles can tell you, the best place to start repairing an injured relationship is to listen.
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Showing posts with label customer service. Show all posts
Showing posts with label customer service. Show all posts
Tuesday, November 22, 2011
Wednesday, June 30, 2010
Air Canada shows impact of customer-facing employees on PR
This isn't another I-hate-Air-Canada blog post - there are many of those already (don't believe me? Google it).
This is a blog post about how a company's customer-facing employees are just as important to its PR as its PR people (if not more).
The back story (OK, a bit of a rant)
On Sunday evening, my family and I had the misfortune of having to fly home to Winnipeg from Ottawa. (For the record, that's a misfortune because of the circumstances of the travel, not the destination!)
It was a terrible night weather-wise in Toronto, which was the site of our connecting flight. Terrible weather is out of the airlines' control, and I completely understand that flights sometimes have to be delayed as a result. But how an airline handles its customers when things get hairy has an enormous impact on how they see the company.
Our flight to Winnipeg was originally scheduled to leave Toronto at 9 p.m. Because of weather-related delays elsewhere, our Ottawa-Toronto flight arrived late, and we were worried we'd miss the connection. We asked about it as we exited the plane, and were told to ask the customer service agent who'd be waiting for us at the top of the jetway.
That agent told us to go to the same gate for the same time as she'd provided the man in line in front of us, who'd given a different flight number. I asked her to confirm that was right; her response: "Here, I'll write it down for you."
We arrived at the gate she'd indicated, and it was indeed boarding another flight. I asked the woman working that gate, who told me her job was to load that flight, and that I'd have to find the departures board to get my answer; she was also too busy to tell me where that board was.
As I looked for the departures board, I saw another employee on the phone at a gate which didn't have any flight listed. I stood there for a few minutes while she pretended not to see me, and was then told "Look, I can't help you. I was just passing by here and needed to use the phone."
I found the board, and our gate. When our flight finally boarded an hour late (not Air Canada's fault: remember, weather), it was approximately 10 p.m. When our flight actually pulled away from the gate for our flight, it was midnight.
In between, our Airbus 320 full of hot, cranky customers sat at the gate, without air conditioning on, waiting. And waiting.
Every 20 minutes or so, we'd get an announcement over the PA system reassuring us that the delay "shouldn't be too much longer now" or something to that effect. At one point, they added that we were just waiting for the pilot.
Waiting for the pilot?
After well over an hour, another pilot who was on our flight to travel home to Winnipeg after a 15+ hour day of his own came on the PA, and explained that our pilot's previous flight had been diverted to Ottawa due to Toronto weather, and they'd only found this out as we'd finished boarding.
More than an hour earlier.
While we were grateful that someone had finally respected us enough to tell us what was going on, the content of his announcement was infuriating: somewhere along the line, someone had decided that while these poor suckers on the plane were going to have to sit through a very uncomfortable couple of hours, it was better to leave them all there on the plane than to go to the trouble of letting them off and then re-boarding.
It's not like we'd pushed away from the gate and would have to drive back in: the gate door was open, and we could easily all just have walked off. (At least, that's how it seemed to us as we got progressively angrier: if there's some Transport Canada regulation preventing it, they could have done themselves a favour by telling us that.)
A woman sitting behind me began to sound panicked about an hour into the wait, telling the flight attendants she was about to pass out from the heat. Their response: "We'll be coming through the cabin shortly with a water service." The temperature in the plane got so hot that when the pilot did finally arrive and turn on the air conditioning, we could see the condensation in the air, like when you exhale on a cold night.
The best timing of the night award went to the flight attendant who, immediately after the announcement that we were waiting for the pilot (without explanation yet as to why he was delayed), came through the cabin offering headphones so we could enjoy the on-board entertainment system while we waited... for three dollars. Credit cards only, please, we don't take cash. I'm not making this stuff up.
What does all this have to do with PR?
I attended a presentation years ago at an IABC International Conference in New York City, by a Swedish PR guy who talked about the role of customer service in defining your company's brand.
He gave an example that struck home, and has remained with me since. He pointed out that his wife doesn't love him because he issues a news release every morning at breakfast extolling his own virtues: she loves him because of the way he treats her. He shows concern, he takes out the garbage and helps with the kids, he is interested in her and what interests her, he makes her laugh -- it has little to do with messaging or positioning or tactics.
His excellent advice: corporate PR departments need to realize that our customers' relationships with our brands work the very same way. As he put it, if your customers are having a bad experience of your brand in your stores or at your events (or in your airplanes), nothing you can say in a news release is going to change their perception of the brand.
So, pack up the PR department and go home?
Of course not; rather, his advice was for PR to realize that our customers have far more interactions with our front-line employees than they ever do with the products of the PR department -- so we should prioritize employee communications in our corporate communication strategies.
Employees who understand their role in defining the company brand, who understand what customers need, want and expect, who are motivated to give those customers a good experience, and who are empowered to do so, will have a far greater impact on your company's reputation than anything else your PR department will ever do.
It's entirely possible that there were reasonable explanations for all the decisions my fellow travelers and I cursed Sunday night; but even if there were, no-one told us. So our impression of Air Canada's customer service was set.
Customers are a fickle bunch. Over the years, I've had plenty of uneventful (i.e. good enough) flights on Air Canada, and have even experienced excellent Air Canada customer service for myself (a flight I try to forget, on which my then-infant daughter threw up all over me and flight attendants did everything they could to help me and mitigate the mess for my fellow travellers).
But Sunday night, as my now-three-year-old looked at me, eyes glassy, little face red as a tomato and hair soaked with perspiration, and said "We coming down for a landing?" before we'd even left the tarmac, none of that mattered.
Unfortunately for the companies which serve him/her, a customer's impression of a brand is only as good as his/her most recent interaction with it. So PR folks are well-advised to make sure employee communications is at the top of their strategy list.
This is a blog post about how a company's customer-facing employees are just as important to its PR as its PR people (if not more).
The back story (OK, a bit of a rant)
On Sunday evening, my family and I had the misfortune of having to fly home to Winnipeg from Ottawa. (For the record, that's a misfortune because of the circumstances of the travel, not the destination!)
It was a terrible night weather-wise in Toronto, which was the site of our connecting flight. Terrible weather is out of the airlines' control, and I completely understand that flights sometimes have to be delayed as a result. But how an airline handles its customers when things get hairy has an enormous impact on how they see the company.
Our flight to Winnipeg was originally scheduled to leave Toronto at 9 p.m. Because of weather-related delays elsewhere, our Ottawa-Toronto flight arrived late, and we were worried we'd miss the connection. We asked about it as we exited the plane, and were told to ask the customer service agent who'd be waiting for us at the top of the jetway.
That agent told us to go to the same gate for the same time as she'd provided the man in line in front of us, who'd given a different flight number. I asked her to confirm that was right; her response: "Here, I'll write it down for you."
We arrived at the gate she'd indicated, and it was indeed boarding another flight. I asked the woman working that gate, who told me her job was to load that flight, and that I'd have to find the departures board to get my answer; she was also too busy to tell me where that board was.
As I looked for the departures board, I saw another employee on the phone at a gate which didn't have any flight listed. I stood there for a few minutes while she pretended not to see me, and was then told "Look, I can't help you. I was just passing by here and needed to use the phone."
I found the board, and our gate. When our flight finally boarded an hour late (not Air Canada's fault: remember, weather), it was approximately 10 p.m. When our flight actually pulled away from the gate for our flight, it was midnight.
In between, our Airbus 320 full of hot, cranky customers sat at the gate, without air conditioning on, waiting. And waiting.
Every 20 minutes or so, we'd get an announcement over the PA system reassuring us that the delay "shouldn't be too much longer now" or something to that effect. At one point, they added that we were just waiting for the pilot.
Waiting for the pilot?
After well over an hour, another pilot who was on our flight to travel home to Winnipeg after a 15+ hour day of his own came on the PA, and explained that our pilot's previous flight had been diverted to Ottawa due to Toronto weather, and they'd only found this out as we'd finished boarding.
More than an hour earlier.
While we were grateful that someone had finally respected us enough to tell us what was going on, the content of his announcement was infuriating: somewhere along the line, someone had decided that while these poor suckers on the plane were going to have to sit through a very uncomfortable couple of hours, it was better to leave them all there on the plane than to go to the trouble of letting them off and then re-boarding.
It's not like we'd pushed away from the gate and would have to drive back in: the gate door was open, and we could easily all just have walked off. (At least, that's how it seemed to us as we got progressively angrier: if there's some Transport Canada regulation preventing it, they could have done themselves a favour by telling us that.)
A woman sitting behind me began to sound panicked about an hour into the wait, telling the flight attendants she was about to pass out from the heat. Their response: "We'll be coming through the cabin shortly with a water service." The temperature in the plane got so hot that when the pilot did finally arrive and turn on the air conditioning, we could see the condensation in the air, like when you exhale on a cold night.
The best timing of the night award went to the flight attendant who, immediately after the announcement that we were waiting for the pilot (without explanation yet as to why he was delayed), came through the cabin offering headphones so we could enjoy the on-board entertainment system while we waited... for three dollars. Credit cards only, please, we don't take cash. I'm not making this stuff up.
What does all this have to do with PR?
I attended a presentation years ago at an IABC International Conference in New York City, by a Swedish PR guy who talked about the role of customer service in defining your company's brand.
He gave an example that struck home, and has remained with me since. He pointed out that his wife doesn't love him because he issues a news release every morning at breakfast extolling his own virtues: she loves him because of the way he treats her. He shows concern, he takes out the garbage and helps with the kids, he is interested in her and what interests her, he makes her laugh -- it has little to do with messaging or positioning or tactics.
His excellent advice: corporate PR departments need to realize that our customers' relationships with our brands work the very same way. As he put it, if your customers are having a bad experience of your brand in your stores or at your events (or in your airplanes), nothing you can say in a news release is going to change their perception of the brand.
So, pack up the PR department and go home?
Of course not; rather, his advice was for PR to realize that our customers have far more interactions with our front-line employees than they ever do with the products of the PR department -- so we should prioritize employee communications in our corporate communication strategies.
Employees who understand their role in defining the company brand, who understand what customers need, want and expect, who are motivated to give those customers a good experience, and who are empowered to do so, will have a far greater impact on your company's reputation than anything else your PR department will ever do.
It's entirely possible that there were reasonable explanations for all the decisions my fellow travelers and I cursed Sunday night; but even if there were, no-one told us. So our impression of Air Canada's customer service was set.
Customers are a fickle bunch. Over the years, I've had plenty of uneventful (i.e. good enough) flights on Air Canada, and have even experienced excellent Air Canada customer service for myself (a flight I try to forget, on which my then-infant daughter threw up all over me and flight attendants did everything they could to help me and mitigate the mess for my fellow travellers).
But Sunday night, as my now-three-year-old looked at me, eyes glassy, little face red as a tomato and hair soaked with perspiration, and said "We coming down for a landing?" before we'd even left the tarmac, none of that mattered.
Unfortunately for the companies which serve him/her, a customer's impression of a brand is only as good as his/her most recent interaction with it. So PR folks are well-advised to make sure employee communications is at the top of their strategy list.
Wednesday, July 8, 2009
United Breaks Guitars
Halifax musician Dave Carroll's band Sons of Maxwell posted this video to YouTube two days go. So far, it's gotten more than 218,000 views there...
... and mainstream media coverage including Wolf Blitzer's CNN Situation Room tonight.
In the Creative Communications program at Red River College, we examine corporate mission statements and employee communications -- and our students learn how a customer's brand experience starts with his/her interactions with a company's employees. Brochures and websites and advertising and publicity activities are great, but if customers don't like the service they get from company employees -- especially in the YouTube era -- none of it will matter.
United's website provides a pleasant and customer-focused sounding "Customer Commitment" statement; United might take this opportunity to review that commitment with its employees all the way up the chain.
Thanks, Chris, for the heads-up!
... and mainstream media coverage including Wolf Blitzer's CNN Situation Room tonight.
In the Creative Communications program at Red River College, we examine corporate mission statements and employee communications -- and our students learn how a customer's brand experience starts with his/her interactions with a company's employees. Brochures and websites and advertising and publicity activities are great, but if customers don't like the service they get from company employees -- especially in the YouTube era -- none of it will matter.
United's website provides a pleasant and customer-focused sounding "Customer Commitment" statement; United might take this opportunity to review that commitment with its employees all the way up the chain.
Thanks, Chris, for the heads-up!
Friday, June 12, 2009
Driving the brand
On my way to work this morning, a truck belonging to a local company accelerated through a stop sign to cut me off.
It ticked me off – and it got me thinking.
A company’s PR department can do whatever it wants through media relations, or community investment, or social media – but if its employees don’t “live the brand” – that is, act in a way that reflects the organization’s commitment to customer service – the customer (or potential customer) won’t have a good impression.
Think back to the last crummy customer service experience you had, and how it made you feel about the company. Did you go their website to find out what good things they’re doing in the community, or for their industry, or for humankind? I doubt it. You likely griped about it to friends and family, as many would.
Good employee communications is fundamental to good PR.
Employees need to know what’s expected of them in their duties – that’s a given. But they also need to understand what’s going on in the company and its environment and, most importantly, how their role and performance contribute to the company’s overall success, to feel truly engaged and motivated to work hard.
Some companies don’t invest much in employee communications, assuming people will naturally link their performance to the company’s success and their own continuing employment. But the fact is, they often don’t; we’ve all heard employees on picket lines spreading vitriol about their employers and encouraging customers to go to the competition. They don’t think about how those customer dollars going to the competition will help pay their salaries once the strike is over – often, I’ll wager, because they don’t realize how their actions, customer loyalty, and jobs are inextricably linked. Making that connection at every possible opportunity is the #1 job of internal communications – and key to supporting a healthy brand.
A good PR department recognizes that employees are fundamental to a customer’s good brand experience. If your customers are getting crummy service on the front lines, or are getting cut off by vehicles emblazoned with your logo, it won’t matter how much care you put into your news releases or your beautiful annual report. They won’t want to do business with you, period.
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