If an e-mail falls in the forest, will a newspaper hear it at all?

Bruce Springsteen is not the only one "searching for his beautiful reward."

Just ask all the publishers whose newspapers have built Internet services. The beautiful reward for them is revenue -- preferably profit, preferably soon, if not now.

And in getting it, they want minimal hassle.

Or, ask all the visitors of those newspaper Internet services. The payoff they seek is more fundamental: ways to find the content they want, communicate with each other and interact with the newspaper.

And they want minimal hassle

Or, ask the advertising clients. They want compelling presentation, customer engagement and qualified leads. And they want easy, personal service from the newspaper company. Oh, and guess what?

They want minimal hassle.

Are these "beautiful rewards" mutually exclusive? They are, if a publisher's wishes for profit prevent a paper from meeting those reader and advertiser expectations, which boil down to two words: customer service.

Specifically, Internet customer service.

OK, that's three words.

However, without "Internet" as a modifier, the industry could argue it has well-established, even robust support mechanisms already in place for advertisers and readers.

Using a telephone, you can readily call up your hometown paper and order a classified ad, or change your delivery address, or argue with a reporter about a story.

But how easy are those same activities on-line? Add the I-word to "customer service" and the level of newspaper companies' commitments seems to shrink even as the phrase itself grows.

Some integration, too much separation
Something's missing here.

At the recent Interactive Newspapers conference in Atlanta (see NewsInc., March 1, 1999), the whole concept of Internet customer service took a back seat to profit searching, editorial content and marketing issues.

On the final day -- a weary Saturday morning -- back-to-back sessions on transaction models and integrated marketing scarcely touched customer service issues. The speakers focused on getting people to a site, not on providing the services and transaction support that will keep them coming back.

Though streams of strong words about the value of "integrated marketing" flowed freely, the silence about integrated customer service was deafening.

Rare is the newspaper-owned World-Wide Web site that allows visitors to conduct the entire transaction of placing a simple classified ad -- including content entry, hyphenation and justification, scheduling, costing and payment -- without having to log off the Web and pick up the phone.

Lack of tools isn't an excuse, though tight integration between web forms and classified ordering/pagination systems is a recent phenomenon. Current technology does support full-service classified ad ordering on-line.

One such product is AdOnTime from FutureTense Inc. of Acton, Mass. AdOnTime permits classified advertisers to enter, format and schedule ads, get prices and maintain their own account information -- all on-line. (One of the few papers on board with AdOnTime is the 435,000-circulation Arizona Republic in Phoenix.)

The widely accepted practice among newspaper sites, however, is to accept ad inquiries by e-mail and complete the transaction off-line.

Technology also exists to integrate web pages and the forms they present to customers so that once gathered, they can be acted on by telephone call centers. But newspaper sites are slow to adopt it.

Spanlink Communications of Minneapolis offers WebCall, in essence a web front-end to a customer service telephone call. With WebCall, you press a "Talk to a Real Person" button on a page on the site. The button links to a web form which can collect up to 15 pieces of information about the customer.

After the site visitor sends in the form, the information in it is sent to a database. There it is put into a queue to await the next available customer service agent in the newspaper's call center, who can review the data on-screen and call the customer back.

WebCall automatically dials the number provided by the customer. The rest of the inquiry can be handled at once, over the phone.

Talk about delivering qualified leads: The newspaper's call center knows what the customer wants, in considerable detail, and knows how and when to call.

WebCall has been available for more than two years, but no newspaper is using this application -- yet.

"Actually we have sold it to a couple of [newspaper] customers, but they haven't put it in yet because their sites aren't far enough along," said Kristen Jacobsen, a Spanlink spokeswoman.

It's true that this application is web-enabled only halfway, to the point where data are handed off for voice callback. But it has the potential to save customers (and call centers) time, especially on complicated orders.

Putting sites to the test
Customer service is a two-way transaction, and the Web could make exchanges easier. But it's not working that way.

Even when falling back on the most straightforward form of Internet customer interaction -- electronic mail -- newspaper sites and their staffs vary widely in the timing and quality of replies.

Ask and ye shall receive. Sometimes. Eventually.

That's the message -- albeit unspoken -- delivered to "Customer X" in an informal, unscientific assessment of several newspapers' e-mail responsiveness.

The Cole Papers, acting as Customer X, wrote an e-mail message to 10 newspapers of various sizes around the country, each chosen at random. The message was a simple question about mail subscription rates.

The chart shows the results.

One of the newspapers evaluated, The Vindicator of Youngstown, Ohio, does not publish an e-mail address for customer inquiries. Of the nine others tested, three still had not replied six days after the inquiries were sent. And none of the sites took advantage of widely available "mailbot" technology, which can provide automated confirmations that the message was received.

Of course, this is a quick, unscientific sampling, but it points to a problem: Would a customer who called those newspapers on the telephone be put on hold for more than 24 hours? Doubtful. Yet that's the message sent to any customer whose e-mail goes unanswered.

One of those papers was the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. When contacted by telephone to ask why the original e-mail went unanswered, customer service agents first checked with supervisors, then asked that the inquiry be sent again by e-mail.

After the second e-mail was sent, a customer agent called back to report that it had been received and forwarded to a supervisor for handling. Hours later -- and almost a week after the original request -- Customer X still had no prices for mail delivery of the paper. (The ajc.com web site does provide a form for ordering home delivery, but it does not include answers to the mail subscription question.)

All of the other newspapers tested replied to the original message. Four answered within a few hours; the remaining two took two days and five days.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch replied in two days. That's about a day longer than usual -- and with good reason, said Sharon Safron, customer outreach manager. The Post-Dispatch is gradually converting to a new circulation and customer support system from Neasi-Weber International of Northridge, Calif.

During that conversion, Safron said, order forms and other hard-copy replies to customer inquiries are being adapted from paper to the computer system. That conversion isn't without its hiccups.

"We probably would have replied the same day under normal conditions," Safron said. "But the attachment [with subscription rates and ordering information] we included on our e-mail reply to you had to be converted from paper forms.

"It's a work-in-progress at this point."

Safron said the paper's goal is to be responsive to customer needs -- something the new system will address -- regardless of the medium of the original inquiry. If it's a phone request, Post-Dispatch agents would call back right away. If it's a snail-mail request, the paper would reply in kind. If it's an e-mail inquiry, a reply e-mail would be on the way that day.

Besides improving overall responsiveness, the new system captures customer profile information, including Internet-friendly data points such as e-mail addresses.

"The system gives us the means to document all our customer contacts," Safron said. "It's a means of having a history file on every customer we have and knowing who those customers are."

Competitive information rarely available
Though some newspaper sites post robust content on the Web as one way of providing advertising support, at least as many don't even have their ad rate cards on-line.

The industry is making progress on this front, however. Many newspapers collect a wealth of demographic and market information about their communities to support ad sales and provide background for content decisions.

The Houston Chronicle puts that information -- and answers to questions frequently asked by advertising customers -- at the fingertips of site visitors. Its AdSite (http://webadv.chron.com/a/adsite/) is a clearinghouse of information for Chronicle advertisers in all media.

The site includes full descriptions of Chronicle advertising products and services, deadlines, special-section and event calendars, Houston-area demographics and rate cards. It also has web forms that advertisers can use to ask detailed questions.

Putting up the AdSite was not a snap decision, according to Telisha Perry, business development sales manager.

"About two years ago, we held small, intimate focus group discussions with local ad agencies," she said. "No one from the Chronicle was there. But the moderator asked, 'If the Chronicle could be the No. 1 media outlet, everything you wanted in media, what would it be?'

"The list was long -- what we were doing wrong, what we were doing right and what we could do better? But we kept hearing over and over that the paper had a wealth of knowledge for advertisers, but trying to get that information was just so difficult."

The Chronicle folks agreed, and decided to put critical decision-making information for advertisers in a place where they could find it 24 hours a day, Perry said. The Web was a natural home for that information.

"Building the site took about six to nine months," she said. "We picked and chose what we were going to put on there. The most important items were readership and market facts sections."

Not all newspapers are as forthcoming about their ad rates across media as the Chronicle. Publishing rates, especially for on-line ads, might be a sticking point with any sales force that lives by negotiation.

Not so at the Chronicle, Perry said. "Of course, there's always room for it, though we don't call it negotiation. We call it custom or package plans for advertisers.

"The Chronicle has always been very funny about rates. It has always pushed fair rates across the board -- none of this under-the-table rate stuff."

Since AdSite went on-line, the Chronicle has received advertising agency inquiries from Japan, Paris and London. Those agencies saw the AdSite market information on the Web, and their interest was piqued, Perry said.

In the last third of 1998, AdSite averaged almost 16,000 page views from more than 1,800 unique domains per month.

But has the site boosted the bottom line?

"I can't say that we really did it to increase business," Perry said. "We just wanted to make doing business with the Houston Chronicle a little easier."

-- Jay Small

FutureTense Inc., (978) 635-3600; e-mail: info@futuretense.com;
Neasi-Weber International, (818) 895-6900, e-mail: debib@nwintl.com;
Spanlink Communications, (612) 971-2000; e-mail: mktg@spanlink.com.

See also E-mails yield few responses.

From THE COLE PAPERS, March 1999, Copyright © 1999, All Rights Reserved.