“I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!”
That quote from the 1976 movie Network sums up my frustration. I’m an old former newspaper editor, and frankly, trying to contact or access today’s newspapers — print or online — drives me crazy. They’re forcing me to quit reading them.
I still like to read a page of newsprint, feel the texture, rub ink on my fingers, smell the pulp, get my news fix. Or, with today’s prices and my fixed income, I settle for digital, like 57 percent of those adults who tell Pew Research they often get their news online.
Unfortunately, I have difficulty getting through to someone to help when I don’t get my paper, or when I can’t access my digital content.
I can talk to robots, but they don’t listen. I can talk to a real person (my wait time is usually less than 15 minutes), but I don’t think she listens, either. She’s not from around here.
Take the New York Times, for example. Friends gifted me a year’s digital subscription for Christmas. A great gift. Just one problem. I already had a subscription.
That’s a simple fix, I thought. Add the gift to my current account. Two years paid up, right? Nope.
After the NYT website robot couldn’t help, I contacted the customer service bot, listened to more bot options and eventually got bot-transferred to a real person.
She asked my name, account number (that I couldn’t access), email address and the secret code she emailed. I said I wanted to add my gift to my current account.
“I’m sorry, I can’t do that,” she said.
Say what?
“My department can’t do that. You’ll have to talk to the gift department,” she said.
“You don’t understand,” I said. “I want my gift tacked on to my current subscription. Your department.”
“I’m sorry,” she replied. “That’s a different department. We don’t have anything to do with them.”
“Let me talk to their robot, then.”
She ignored me. “You’ll have to cancel your subscription and switch email addresses to accept your gift.”
I did.
Weeks later, however, I suddenly could not log into the New York Times digital account with my new gift subscription. Now it says my password is incorrect. It’s not. Of course, the subscription I had canceled won’t let me access news, which is the only reason I want the NYT. Somehow, the system has my previous account mixed up with the new account. I’ve decided to talk to the friends who gave me the gift and just cancel the subscription for good.
Harrumph!
Take the Oklahoman, my local paper, for example.
I’m two years paid up. (A different circulation episode.) I take the discounted print edition Sunday and Wednesday, with 24/7 digital access.
I can’t access it.
I changed passwords. It didn’t work. I talked to their robot and selected a menu number from one to five. I got bot-transferred again.
Then, I talked to a real person who I doubt knew Oklahoma City was in Oklahoma.
“I can’t access your digital content,” I said.
“I’ll change your password,” she said. It didn’t work. “Change your username. Use a different email address.” It worked.
I tried it the next day. It didn’t work again. I talked to a real person four times. It still didn’t work. I gave up.
Harrumph! I thought circulation and hits were priorities.
Customer service should be customary
As a former editor of an eastern Oklahoma daily, I remember a subscriber waking me up on a Sunday morning. He didn’t get his paper. Call circulation, I said. They’ll bring you a paper.
As I mellowed over the years, I would get out of bed and take a caller my newspaper. We had more than 20,000 subscribers, and fortunately, only one every so often was brazen or mad enough to call the editor at home on Sunday morning.
One time, the mayor called. Twenty minutes later, I rang her doorbell. She answered, and her mouth dropped open when I handed her the paper. “Thank you,” she said sheepishly.
A big problem with today’s newspapers in my view? Customer service.
In my experience, subscribers usually didn’t quit the newspaper because they didn’t agree with something. They dropped it when they didn’t get it — in print or online — after they paid for it. Of course, today, newspapers are bleeding circulation to online platforms, and their own online platforms can be clunky at best. And then there’s Jeff Bezos.
Tom Peters, co-author of the 1982 best-seller In Search of Excellence, said customer service boils down to two things: listening to customers and common courtesy.
I’m not sure he’d talked with robots back then.
He quoted a corporate IBM vice president: “If you get satisfactory service today from the corner gas station, your local department store, or your friendly computer company, it’s a bloody miracle.”
Peters said, “We’ve come to accept the fact that the average level of service in any industry, in any service industry even, is just plain vanilla rotten.”
He said that 42 years ago.
I believe today’s newspapers — print and online — have appointed their phone robots, computer bots and service reps from Timbuktu as the voice of their papers to dissatisfied customers.
They’re forcing us to quit reading newspapers — even though we don’t want to.
