Serving our customers and readers well is one of our top priorities and, to be honest, over the past couple of months that hasn’t happened.

I can clearly point to two reasons for this but, at the end of the day, the fact that our customer and reader service has not been up to par is troubling for me and for our staffs.

Two factors that play the biggest role in this shortfall are COVID and our decision to outsource some of our tasks to a call-in center that works with newspapers on subscription services.

First, the pandemic.

As we all remember, COVID impacted all of us in different ways, but one result of the pandemic was the migration of people who worked from home because of health restrictions.

Though the pandemic is over — at least officially — many of those who left the office to work from home are still right there.

That can create problems for walk-in customers or readers. For example, there might not be someone ready to record a classified ad or an obituary or to finalize a subscription payment.

The folks that do those jobs are still on our payroll; they’re just not in the office. Which, let’s face it, if you are a customer can be pretty darn frustrating.

Those who are in the office feel your pain. We feel helpless because all we can do in those situations is take a phone number or the information and ask those who deal with a particular issue — such as subscriptions — to give you a call. That situation doesn’t lend itself to satisfaction.

Faced with a dwindling team without enough people to handle the volume of phone calls for EO Media Group, we turned for help to a call center that works with other newspapers on subscription services.

The handoff has not been great. Phone-system glitches have hung up on callers trying to choose an option. Staff members trying to transfer calls have run into confusion on who to transfer to. Not all of the necessary information was provided to the new call center team. It’s been a rough go.

All of this, in short, combined to create a customer and reader service storm of frustration.

We are working hard now to iron out the bugs in the circulation system and the call center. I believe we will have most of our challenges fixed within a very short time.

I urge our customers and readers to be patient with us and remember we understand and appreciate their frustration.

Our readers and customers are the key to everything we do. That’s why I wanted to be straight up with all of them in this column. We’ve run into some challenges but we are already on the road to fixing them.

So, hang in there with us.

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