Karen McEnroe

Director of Fulfillment, Hearst

By Bill Mickey
Monday, March 30, 2009

McEnroe has lead a comprehensive effort to drive automation and improved customer care in the fulfillment operation.

Hearst has been getting well-deserved press for its prowess in the digital arena of late—especially with its subscription conversions and email address-building efforts. Yet behind the scenes in fulfillment and customer service sits a department led by Karen McEnroe that’s perpetually tweaking service operations to wring every last savings while vastly improving customer experience.

Much of the efforts McEnroe pursues are designed to drive customers online. “You have to make sure the customer experience is user-friendly. When I took over, I put myself in the shoes of the customer,” she says.

Accordingly, McEnroe shifted a high percentage of the customer service business online, and away from phone-based services. Three service lines were transitioned to automated transactions: Missed issues, stop auto-renewal and credit cancels. The automation push overall has reduced service costs by 50 percent, saving Hearst $250,000 per year.

McEnroe and her team also overhauled the FAQ site—a fundamental, but often overlooked, customer service function. The effort here, again, was to enable customers to answer their own questions online, rather than calling customer service.

Now that the customer care sites have been re-engineered to more effectively address customer needs, more than 500,000 subscribers are paying bills online. “Fulfillment is a very expensive cost,” says McEnroe. “But it’s not just to handle problems. We have to find innovative ways of handling customer needs.”

McEnroe has gone as far as keeping edit teams abreast of fulfillment and customer care service features to better integrate promotion opportunities. “We have provided them with information to promote our customer care sites. We’ve tried to use some standards that made sense across the magazines.”

To succeed in the fulfillment world, McEnroe says that, like any job, passion goes a long way. Also key is fostering partnerships with the departments that intersect with fulfillment. “Understand the fulfillment side as well as the publishing side. Work as a team or a partner. If you solicit that, they’ll be more enthusiastic. I’ve also tried to have this sense of teamwork with the service bureaus.”

VITAL STATS
Overall automation has reduced customer service costs by 50 percent, realizing a savings of $250,000 per year.

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