When Viewers Talk, Scripps Listens

BY JON LAFAYETTE

In a third floor office at the company's Knoxville, Tenn., headquarters, ten Scripps Networks' staffers do something fairly radical in the world of television: They interact with viewers. It's about all they do, in fact. They answer questions, provide information, keep track of which shows people like and which ones they flip past. They often wind up telling the programming execs what viewers want to see on the air.

?Viewer services is one of the keys to our close personal relationship with our viewers,? said Scripps Networks president Ed Spray. ?And we want to continue to build on that.?

Not a bad strategy for a company whose bread-and-butter programming ? on such networks as HGTV, Food Network, Do-It-Yourself and Fine Living ? is of the how-to variety and whose viewers seek more information than pure entertainment.

Indeed most of the questions fielded on the third floor range from, ?What color were the draperies in that show?? to ?Where can I get that dress the host was wearing?? Occasionally, a query is a bit off the wall. One viewer, having seen HGTV's Bed and Bath Design series, wanted to know, ?What's the difference between a bathroom, powder room and rest room?? A Food Network watcher once said, ?I was watching the Iron Chef and he made a soup using an ingredient called shark fin. What is shark fin??

Viewers even have inquired as to the marital status of particular hosts.

Of course, there's a serious side to interacting with viewers. It's led to Scripps's programs being renewed and rescheduled, new programs being launched and it has even contributed to the creation of a new network.

In 1997, HGTV started using a more lifestyle-driven format, recalled Robyn Ulrich, one of the founders of the viewer services department and now VP of marketing for Do-It-Yourself. Calls and e-mails came flooding in from viewers who said they still wanted more step-by-step how-to programming. ?Since HGTV wasn't going to program in that direction, it became more and more important and more apparent to Scripps that we needed a network to fill that need.?

Hence, in 1999, DIY was launched. It's now in 13 million homes.

Scripps's viewer services department does an impressive amount of communicating, handling roughly a million inquiries thus far. Each month, it handles more than 10,000 e-mails apiece for HGTV and Food Network. The newer networks are gradually adding to the workload. DIY's total has jumped to 1,000 a month since it started covering the enthusiastic world of scrap booking, and Fine Living, launched this year, already draws 75 a month.

Viewer services also e-mails newsletters to those who opt to subscribe. HGTV has a list of about 1.5 million, Food Network has 600,000 and DIY is up to 100,000.

This little dynamo has humble roots. When Scripps launched HGTV in 1994, the network invited viewers to write in with comments or requests for information.

?In the first week, we got about 40 letters,? said Ulrich, who was director of new media then. ?We didn't anticipate getting mail even though we had an address up, and we thought, oh my, we've got to figure out what we're going to do here.?

?It just landed in Robyn's area,? said Tammy Esser, who worked for Ulrich and is now director of viewer services. ?It didn't fit anywhere else, and she and I just took it upon ourselves.?

There was no sophisticated software base to help store information. ?We did it on a yellow notepad, keeping track of guests' contact information,? Ulrich said. ?If we didn't know an answer, we always wrote a viewer back. To this day, we never have let anybody go unanswered.?

At first, other Scripps staffers were conscripted to make sure the mail didn't pile up. After a few months, a part-time employee was hired to answer letters and to research the answers to questions by asking producers about details of their shows.

Getting cooperation from outside producers could be tricky. ?These are producers who produce for many other cable networks and are not used to supplying information like we want it, whether it was paint color, or product names,? said Ron Feinbaum, VP and GM of the Scripps Networks' websites. ?So we had to train the producers to work with us to supply the information. And to this day, I think we have a good relationship with all the producers, and they understand that if they work with our networks they've got to, in return, supply a certain amount of information back to us.?

As the volume of mail increased, Ulrich and Esser attempted to create a phone center for the network because answering letters was so labor intensive and expensive.

?We did a time study back in '96 and came to the realization that it was costing us $5.34 to answer one viewer mail,? Esser said. ?So we stepped back and looked at the bigger picture to determine whether we could answer some of the questions in a more timely manner.?

One solution was to get viewers to request information over the phone.

?We tested an 800 number, and that too got flooded,? Esser recalled. ?We realized in a hurry that it would be very expensive in the long run because once [viewers] had us on the phone they wanted to talk to us further about how they're redoing their home and what the weather's like and what they've done to their garden and what they're planning to do to their garden.?

At that point, they figured that if viewers were willing to write and call if they wanted information, ?maybe they'll just call on their own dime ? and sure enough they did.?

Now websites and e-mail account for the bulk of the activity. ?More and more information is becoming available online,? said Esser. ?The Internet has been a godsend to us really. It's made us more lean and mean, and we're able to answer these people faster. Everybody still gets an answer. If you e-mail us you get an e-mail back, if you call us you get a call back. That hasn't changed.?

Sometimes, Scripps's personal approach catches viewers off guard. One viewer sent a rude note saying he didn't want to get any newsletters. (He was getting them because he'd entered a network sweepstakes.) After he received a personal reply, the man wrote back and apologized for his tone. ?He was surprised someone actually wrote him back,? Feinbaum said.

At the same time viewers are getting information about Scripps's network programming, Scripps executives are getting valuable information about what viewers want. And they aren't shy either. One time, HGTV shifted the show Simply Quilts from its 9:30 a.m. time slot. ?You'd have thought we'd started World War III,? Esser said. ?People were coming out of the woodwork, I mean they were upset, they were angry, ?I can't believe you did this.? They were calling; they were writing.?

To make a long story short, the show's time slot was restored. ?So maybe it wasn't the best decision,? she said. ?But it was the voice of the viewers that put it back to where it is.?

Viewers also have offered practical advice. One time a group of viewers noticed that a lamp wasn't being wired properly. In fact, they informed Scripps; following the show's instructions could cause a fire. The network checked it out immediately and the viewers were right. The segment was reshot and the edited tape was broadcast the next time the show aired.

The viewer service team also let Scripps know it had a potential hit on its hands after a five part series on scrap booking aired on DIY. ?We were inundated with requests,? Ulrich said. ?They wanted more.? Sure enough, a 65-part series was ordered. ?So that was totally generated out of viewer services. And that happens quite a bit, actually.?

Today, in fact, a viewer services representative sits in on network brand meetings. Their job is to offer feedback to network executives and to make sure the right amount of information is provided to viewers.

Some viewer feedback is also routed back to show producers. ?But we really try to keep that under wraps,? Esser said, ?because that could tie back in to negotiations when it comes time to renew their contracts with us.?

Now that most communication between the networks and viewers is handled electronically, automation is a greater priority. ?There's a product that we use that's rule-based and searches common words,? said Feinbaum. ?It's pretty near perfect.?

Automation also allows Scripps to make more use of the viewer database it's compiled. ?We've built a very nice database of names and addresses,? Feinbaum said. That comes in handy when cable operators roll out VOD and use Scripps network content. ?When we launch VOD in, say, Cincinnati, we will go into this database of names and cut out the zip codes that correlate with where we're doing VOD.? Viewers who receive e-mail newsletters in those ZIP codes get an extra page urging them to try the new VOD service.

?The MSOs love it, and our VOD people internally love it, too.?

And there are other uses for the data.

?Our corporate office called us and was looking for an Iron Chef fanatic for its annual report,? Feinbaum recalled. ?We were able to search our data base for people who had written in about Iron Chef.?

Sure enough the team found someone who was having an Iron Chef party at his house. ?They shot the party and put it in the annual report,? he said. ?We were able to help the brand and the E.W. Scripps company as a whole.?