Posts Tagged ‘Client Relations’


Do Modern Businesses Still Appreciate a Phone Call?

Tuesday, January 12th, 2010

Today there are so many ways for an individual to avoid human contact. Why bother calling information when you can look up an address on your iPhone? There’s really no need to call Domino’s when you can go online, click on your favorite toppings and pay with your credit card. And let’s face it, it’s so much easier to shoot off a text than to risk getting stuck in a 20 minute conversation with somebody you’re kind of “meh” about anyway.

If the modern world is all about immediacy and accessibility, then why bother using the phone at all?

Well, there’s an integral part of human contact and interaction that’s lost when you BadDay@Workcircumvent the conversation. It may be “easier” to send an email, but you’re leaving the recipient’s interpretation up to chance. Heinz Tschabitscher discusses email communication in his blog post, What Can Be Misunderstood Will Be Misunderstood.

“The lack of nonverbal clues makes it easy to misinterpret something,” says Heinz, “but we’re not careful enough to avoid these misinterpretations because email feels so instant, easy and accessible…”

In client services, not only can you best gauge the client’s mood on the phone, but you can help ensure that they will correctly interpret your own.

The ideal choice is to make the call. In the India PR Blog, Palin Ningthoujam writes that

“You can explain issues and things in proper and in length over the phone than on email.”

On the phone you can explain yourself fully and deal immediately with your client’s needs.

Best of all, you’re in complete control of how you express yourself and by proxy, how you represent your company. Don’t risk the relationships you’ve built with your valued customers just because you choose the “easy” email over the personal phone call. They are your clients; this is your business; and they deserve it.

Do you prefer to send an email or place a call when interacting with your clients? As a client, how do you feel when you receive a call from an account manager or client services representative? Depending on which side of the conversation you’re on, how do think these interactions affect the business relationship? Please share your ideas with the readers of BurrellesLuce Fresh Ideas.

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Posted in Client Services, Public Relations, Technology | 4 Comments »

Does Your E-mail Send the Wrong Message?

Friday, December 18th, 2009

by Lauren Shapiro*

“Can you email me?”message in a bottle

How many times a day do you hear that question? In BurrellesLuce Client Services, we hear it quite often and rightfully so; we are officially citizens of a digital era, habitually bound to the confines of the written word. When you study computer-mediated communication (CMC) or for purposes of this blog… email there are a lot of big words and complex theories to sum up a very simple concept – How you type your message is equally important, if not more important, than the actual message itself.  

Unfortunately for most of us, we have yet to find the Emily Post of netiquette. However, we do know there are many variables that can contribute to an email going bad. The most overlooked (and most dangerous) is the misinterpretation of email tone. Studies show that email receivers tend to experience a neutrality effect: Recipients often interpret positively toned emails as neutral and neutrally toned emails as negative.  This makes our job as email senders very difficult and forces us to be mindful of how others will read our message.

It is extremely important to take a step back and re-read your email from the receiver’s perspective and then edit to ensure that the positive nature of your email comes across clearly. In a post on www.sitepoint.com, Alyssa Gregory discusses how a poorly toned email can easily be misinterpreted. This misinterpretation poses a threat to the budding e-lationship that is being built.

Whether it’s in PR, marketing, or client services, what steps are you taking to help ensure that you are effectively communicating with your constituents? What steps can we take as an industry to help promote good communication?

*Bio: Soon after graduating from the Richard Stockton College of New Jersey, in 2006 with a B.A. in communication and a B.S. in business/marketing, I joined the BurrellesLuce client services team. In 2008, I completed my master’s degree in corporate and organizational communications and now work as the supervisor of BurrellesLuce Express client services. I am passionate about researching and understanding the role of email in shaping relationships from a client relation/service standpoint as well as how miscommunication occurs within email, which was the topic of my thesis. Through my posts on Fresh Ideas, I hope to educate and stimulate thoughtful discussions about corporate communications and client relations, further my own knowledge on this subject area, as well as continue to hone my skills as a communicator. Twitter: @_LaurenShapiro_ LinkedIn: laurenrshapiro Facebook: BurrellesLuce 

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Posted in Client Services, Public Relations | 3 Comments »

The Importance of Customer Relationship Management

Friday, March 6th, 2009

by Cathy Del Colle*
According to Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, “customer relationship management (CRM) consists of the processes a company uses to track and organize its contacts with its current and prospective customers. CRM software is used to support these processes; information about customers and customer interactions can be entered, stored and accessed by employees in different company departments. Typical CRM goals are to improve services provided to customers, and to use customer contact information for targeted marketing.”

“While the term CRM generally refers to a software-based approach to handling customer relationships, most CRM software vendors stress that a successful CRM effort requires a holistic approach.[1] CRM initiatives often fail because implementation was limited to software installation, without providing the context, support and understanding for employees to learn, and take full advantage of the information systems.[2']“ 

Having access to all of our client’s information from any computer in the office has proven to be essential at BurrellesLuce. We use an application called Siebel as our CRM tool.  Siebel has allowed our staff to react to a client’s recent inquiry quickly, as well as revise their account efficiently, all while updating the account activities in one location.  Getting into the habit of using a CRM program certainly pays off in the end.  It’s a permanent record of client activities. 

As long as you have a computer, you can answer a client’s question and/or confirm something for your company’s internal processes.  And if you’re meeting with a client in their office, you no longer need to call into your office to ask a colleague a question about that client’s account.  With remote access, you can log into your CRM program and review the account activity with them in person.  Now that’s customer service.  At BurrellesLuce, we’ve embraced this enhancement and have become a CRM company indeed!

*Bio: During my 22 years with BurrellesLuce I’ve heard and seen a lot in the way of media monitoring and measurement. I originally started as a sales associate specializing in fashion and higher education. Now, I am the SVP of client services. Over the years I’ve developed a close relationship with many PR and marketing professionals. When I worked in the nation’s capital, I sat on the board of Washington Women in Public Relations, where I also served as membership coordinator and, in 1995, as president. Today, I remain an honorary member of that organization. I continue to enjoy meeting with clients and assisting them in any way. LinkedIn: cdelcolle; Twitter: @BurrellesLuce; Facebook: BurrellesLuce

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Posted in Client Services, Public Relations | No Comments »

Digital Lemonade

Monday, March 2nd, 2009

Outing someone nowadays has an entirely different meaning than it did 10 years ago. Today, “outing” someone refers to revealing their true identity online.lemons.jpg Golly Homer, you mean people would have to actually be held accountable for what they say under their digital alias? This leads one to believe we have collectively arrived at a place that says it was once okay to be irresponsible. Hold that thought for just a moment …

The convergence of new digital modes  and economic amorality, combined with some good old-fashioned denial puts the media in a challenging situation. To cite a close-to-home example, the old-line media lost track of their advertisers’ need to connect with audiences and did nothing to stay connected to the last two or three generations who are linked to the world by digital tethers. Hence the old media groups are in a spiral trying to deliver the younger audiences to their advertisers who are no longer interested in +55 year olds.

With the financial markets being closed for the present – the economic amorality part, denies all businesses in crisis (media included) a life vest. Of course, they could have crossed the stream before they needed the life vest, but that is the denial part.

Just like with the “outed” it all comes back to lemonade or, to use another word, responsibility. So I ask, “Who are you responsible to?” Note, I did not ask, “Who are you responsible for?”

I am going to go out on a limb and say that a big part of our current problems are the result of this very semantic confusion. I have recently accepted the responsibility for the technical effort here at BurrellesLuce and in so doing my ultimate responsibility is to insure that our technology meets the needs of our customers and exceeds their expectations. The reality is that it is the IT team that is actually meeting the need, not me. IT’s customers are the sales department, the production department, and the finance department. What IT is responsible for is how it meets its responsibility to them.

What about the company’s customers you ask? In respecting the ability of the sales, production, marketing, and finance management to be responsible to their customers, the IT team can focus on IT’s customers. Meeting the needs of my customer requires having a belief that this will lead to my needs being met.

This is no small task for the “outed” generation. It is about an orientation to “you” from “me,” to “I respect your ability” from “I am better,” from lemons to lemonade.

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Posted in News Coverage, Public Relations, Social Media, Technology | No Comments »

You First

Monday, January 19th, 2009

Gail Nelson
An experience the BurrellesLuce Marketing team shares with many other marketing and public relations professionals is the task of figuring out how to serve our clients and our business goals through social media. As we continue to get our feet wet through hands-on experience – this blog is one tactic, as is Facebook and microblogging – we also listen and engage our audience through research. The goal: create a social media roadmap for the future.

What’s clear right now is the Marketing department simply cannot do it alone. (Is anyone else hearing the song, “I Can’t Do It Alone,” from the movie musical Chicago, in their heads right now?) Colleagues from the Sales, Client Service, Media Measurement, Content Management, and Technology areas are among the contributing authors to Fresh Ideas. Additional BurrellesLuce staff members, including myself, are active on Twitter.

Lately, some tweets hit close to home. Here’s one story I’d like to share: This month’s invoice stuffer (produced by the Marketing department) was devoted to our “green and easy” initiative – where we ask our clients to forgo paper invoices in favor of emailed statements. Promoting a green initiative via a print piece didn’t quite mesh with one client. The client, we’ll call her Mary, tweeted that she had opened her bill to find a color invoice stuffer on fairly heavy stock suggesting she go green. “You first, BurrellesLuce, you first,” she said.

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Because we constantly monitor and listen to various social media outlets, we found Mary’s tweet quickly. I used data from our CRM system to phone her (Twitterers: I couldn’t send her a direct message because she wasn’t one of my followers) and introduced myself as senior vice president of Marketing. I thanked her for sharing her concerns, and relayed how our mailing equipment malfunctions if we use lighter-weight paper. As more clients accept email bills, our plan is to cease mailing altogether and gain the environmental benefits listed on the invoice stuffer. I also encouraged Mary to contact me in the future should the need arise.

Within a few minutes of our conversation, she tweeted her thanks for the phone call. I follow Mary on Twitter now, and she follows me. Engaging in these types of conversations can be a little frightening at first, especially to non-millennials like me raised on the command-and-control battlefield of corporate communications. But with each interaction, we learn more about our clients and prospects and the value of social media. “You first” challenges are both easier for me to accept, and more rewarding.

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