After A String Of Temporary Bosses Newtown Gets A Permanent Postmaster

By John Voket

She commutes in from the greater New Haven area…for now. But by the way incoming Postmaster Cathy Zieff talks about her new job, she is falling in love with Newtown.

“I can’t really describe it,” Ms Zieff told The Bee during a visit to the Commerce Road facility that serves Newtown and Sandy Hook. “I feel like I found an office where I fit. I feel like I belong here.”

The new postal boss will be formally installed in a brief ceremony Friday, August 3, at 2 pm — refreshments will be served and the public is encouraged to attend.

Ms Zieff may look familiar to regulars at the postal facility because in 2010 she served as one of about a half-dozen interim bosses handling management on Commerce Road during the past few years. But she hopes to be the last postmaster on this assignment for some time to come.

“The staff here has had management that is either moving in or moving out, which requires the staff and carriers to constantly adapt to different management styles,” she said. “I hope to give them a break by staying a while.”

Ms Zieff’s goal is to give  her staff of roughly 40 on site “a boss they can count on, and consistent answers to their [management] questions.”

“I want to make this more of a place where they look forward to being, and be more comfortable as employees,” Ms Zieff said. “I think they will see that I bring more of a coaching [attitude] than having them feel they are always being scrutinized.”

Her staff, from carriers and rural route drivers to service associates and maintenance workers, encompasses a range of experience from two to more than 40 years. And her facility supervisor Rich Crowther lands near the middle of that range at almost 25 years on the job.

Ms Zieff came to the postal service about 16 years ago after a successful run operating her own retail candy and nut shop in Milford. She started as a carrier in Ridgefield, and stepped up into an associate supervisory program in 2001, where she learned about the back office part of the operation at the busy West Hartford post office.

She was soon awarded her own supervisor responsibilities there before being transferred to Stratford.

Hoping For Newtown

After Ms Zieff’s final supervisory assignment in Stratford, she was promoted to postmaster in Kensington in 2006. From there she was transferred to North Haven, over to Darien, and then landed in an interim slot in Newtown four years later where she first made the acquaintance of the local staff.

“At that point I said if I could ever get back to Newtown I would take it,” she said. “So when the permanent position opened up I went for it.”

The local position offers a lot of similarity as well as consistency from her previous posts where facility size and staffing needs were very close to what she is managing in Newtown.

While the lobby and post office boxes are open 24/7, her first clerk arrives each day around 5 am, and most if not all her staff is gone by 6 pm weekdays. The service window is open from 9 am to 5 pm Monday through Friday, and from 9 am to 1 pm Saturdays for all mail and parcel services, passport applications, and PO box rental assistance.

Ms Zieff believes that since she has done almost every job she asks her staff to do, it helps give her empathy for the day-to-day concerns or challenges of the various jobs she oversees.

“But it also reinforces the level of experience I bring to the position,” she said. “Everybody here knows what they have to do and I have to say they seem to do it well.”

The postmaster’s first focus will be enhancing what she believes is already a very good customer service record on site.

“My focus has always been on the customer — it’s something I bring from having owned my own business,” she said. “While I’m on the job, I’m going to do everything in my power to improve each customer’s experience.”

That said, Ms Zieff believes that “staffing the window” still poses the greatest challenge, where she has to balance processing work waiting for carriers with customers walking through the front door to ship packages, buy stamps, or apply for passport service. At the same time, she wants to help customers learn how the USPS is shifting many of its counter services to convenient home-based services via the web.

“At usps.com, they can manage mail, shipping packages, changing their address, and putting their mail on hold,” she said. Ms Zieff is also training on the new Every Door Direct Mail (EDDM) service, which is rolling out targeted direct mail opportunities for small and large businesses.

‘Do What’s Right’

The new postmaster acknowledged that her employer has been in the media a lot lately, and sometimes not in a good way. But ultimately she believes the postal service is a “sustainable system that will outlive us all.”

“The most important things are to revamp, stay strong and, most importantly, do what’s right by our customers,” she said.

Ms Zieff is digging into a couple of significant customer service issues in her first few weeks on the job by addressing the need to help rural route carriers and their customers connect when needed for service beyond the roadside mailbox.

“Newtown has the most rural routes that I’ve seen. And these rural carriers are very customer service oriented,” she said. So she is in the process of evaluating many of the locations that might require rural carriers to come to the house, versus leaving or picking up deliveries at the roadside.

“We’re talking about individuals that may be disabled or face other mobility challenges, and those with home-based businesses that do a lot of parcel pickups and deliveries,” she said. “Maybe they don’t want to leave an important pickup out by the side of the road.”

She sees each contact with a postal customer, whether it is at the counter on Commerce Road or out on the fringe of the Paugussett Forest, as an opportunity to “strengthen our contacts and build better customer relations.”

To illustrate how far she will go to help a postal customer, Ms Zieff only needs to recall her first day on the job when she was called to a rural location because a customer accused a carrier of breaking an expensive mailbox.

“I saw the door was broken because a piece had broken off, so I contacted the manufacturer myself, explained the problem, and they zipped out a new part to her immediately, which fixed the problem,” Ms Zieff said. That customer showed up a few days later, and saying she was thrilled that someone went as far as to see her mailbox was fixed and operating properly.

On her off hours, Ms Zieff enjoys photography, birding, gardening, and kayaking. She already has plans for installing a garden at the Commerce Road site — “…just a nice place where our staff can go and relax or have their break,” she said.

Ultimately, the new postmaster said she is “looking forward to a long and positive relationship with the residents of Newtown and Sandy Hook.”