The Star Tribune Company: Improving Customer Service With Online Forms

The Star Tribune Company, a news and information company serving the Minneapolis/St. Paul area, is a subsidiary of The McClatchy Company of Sacramento, Calif. (NYSE:MNI). The Star Tribune newspaper is one of the top 20 largest newspapers in the nation, with a daily circulation of 377,058 and a Sunday circulation of 671,275 (per Audit Bureau of Circulation report 03/04).

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Challenge:

The Star Tribune customer service department is always looking for ways to enhance their customer experience as well as ways to create internal efficiencies. The previous online solution for customers to submit inquiries and request actions, such as a vacation hold, was a single, unstructured form sent via E-mail. This solution was inefficient and resulted in the following problems:

• Insufficient information to complete requests

  Customers did not provide all of the information that was needed to execute their request or address their issue. As a result, the customer service department would have to spend the time to contact and reach the customer. While a time sink for the customer service department, it was also not a positive customer experience with multiple interactions.
  

• Manual responses to every inquiry

  To provide the desired level of customer service, The Star Tribune responded to every inquiry. Unfortunately, each inquiry required a manual response to be typed and sent.

• Requests submitted that shouldn’t be handled online

  Without structured forms for specific purposes, requests were submitted online that required live customer interaction. Customer service would then be required to contact the customer, if sufficient contact information was provided, impacting customer service levels and time to complete requests.

Solution:

The Star Tribune selected FormRouter to implement more precise forms, tailored to meet the needs of both their customers and internal processes.

• Using Macromedia HomeSite, the IT department built five separate secure forms targeting specific, common customer requests: Address Change, Vacation Hold, Subscription Payment, Delivery Problem, and Feedback
• Increased visibility by creating a graphical link directly from their Website home page to a customer service page with all the forms available from a single page
• Implemented required fields on each form to ensure complete information is collected to facilitate the execution of requests
• Added customized E-mail alerts that are sent automatically to customers when forms are submitted, informing them that their request has been received and will be handled

Benefits:

The new forms have been well received by The Star Tribune customers and staff. Results include:

• Increased customer satisfaction. Customer requests have tripled in volume with the higher visibility and easy to use forms.
• Increased customer service staff productivity. Through automated responses and complete customer information, the customer service staff is able to process three times the volume with no additional resources or time.
• Increased staff satisfaction. The employees love having a new solution to make their jobs better and are happy to complete customer requests faster. They find the solution very easy to use.
• Fast implementation. The Star Tribune was able to implement all 5 online forms in days.

Summary:

The Star Tribune wanted to improve their customer experience by providing easy to use online forms that customers would use on a frequent basis. Targeted forms that captured complete data enabled the customer service department to process requests timely and efficiently. Providing excellent customer service will impact the bottom line by retaining happy customers.