Customer Service – the Art of Not Saying No

Eye Street Solutions has a strong commitment to customer service.   Some people may think about customer service in terms of retail returns or IT help desk support, but it’s a key factor in content management, especially if the clients you serve aren’t web content professionals. 

The team at Eye Street interacts with hundreds of different clients across a large federal agency.  All are subject matter experts in their field, but have varied levels of web experience.  Most of them publish as “other duties as assigned” or to meet a requirement.  They are task focused on getting their material posted with the least amount of hassle (to them!).

To manage expectations, we have published service level agreements. Each request is evaluated against the agency’s written policies and procedures as well as federal laws and guidelines (such as Section 508 / accessibility). If there are any issues with the content package, it is sent back to the client for further review.  Once the package is complete for processing, it’s assigned to a team member and an estimated publishing date is sent back to the client.

This process works well for routine updates as well as new information that follow established protocols, such as posting a publication.

What gets tricky is when the request comes in that isn’t routine.  Many times by the time it gets to the web team, there has been a lot of time and effort that has been put into the package without any recognition of federal requirements, the agency’s policies or procedures, or web writing best practices.  It’s easy to say “no” but that isn’t effective.  They need training or further education.

We know the training objective – training/refreshing the content provider on federal requirements, the agency’s policies or procedures, or web writing best practices while getting the content fit for publication.

For federal requirements, they will need to modify their package (say, provide a timed caption file for their online video).  We’ll send them a link to a training video to help them complete this step. Requirements are easy. They have to be completed before anything can be posted.  Through this process, they will be aware of federal requirements for future postings.

For policies and procedures, the discussion is more nuanced. For instance, their proposed information may be organized by how the office is structured, not by topic.  We see from research and our metrics that the American public doesn’t look for information by how the agency is organized but by the topics that interest them.   We’ll help them classify their information, while training them about how to classify new materials in the future.

Following web-writing standards is the most difficult as many times we are working with final cleared content.  Getting materials cleared is a herculean, time-consuming process that we can’t revisit.   What we can do is restructure, reorganize, as well as add sub-headers, bullets and images to help bring clarity to the information.  As well as giving them tools to write for the web in the future, we also offer to help out earlier in the clearance process before the information is final.

This training process is quick, customizable and meets the objectives.  We meet the client’s mission while producing materials that are friendly to the end-customer, the American public.  And it’s all done without having to say “no.”