Newspaper Customer Service Nightmare!

Email to "Customer Service" said:

The problem was fixed with the help of a Jihan P., copied on this email, of senior management. I reached her by dialing a wrong number, xxx-xxx-2020 and then asking for a senior manager. Do you think that should have been necessary? I don't. And to keep my account, as well as help the New York Times with an operational problem, I feel that I should get a statement credit. Perhaps the lack of certain key words in this message will take this message out of robotic response.

If you think I'm frustrated I am. And scorching angry. The Times makes it impossible to get a problem rectified. You have blamed the problems on:

1) Cookies and cache;
2) Abuse of the account, called "metering"; and then when the problem replicated internally
3) The matter was not referred to the "team that manages the TimesMachine website" for days (as reported to me by 1-800-xxx-4367.

Please satisfy a long-term, 32 year customer (and 52 years of you count my years living with my parents.

jbgusa (xxx) xxx-4033

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JBG said:

And periodicals and other customer-service heavy organizations wonder why they are losing business?

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JBG said:

One of the newspapers I subscribe, The Times (won't be more specific) has a service that produces, in real-feel, newspapers going back to before the Civil War. The way it works is each page is replicated exactly as it was printed. Let's say you pull up the November 12, 1923 and see an article which interests you, "Incensed People Join in Demonstrations Hostile to Von Kahr" underneath the banner "Hitler Forces Rallying Near Munich...". So you click on the article, which is supposed to open a separate PDF of that article, the first and continued page. Instead, starting about a week or two ago, clicking the article would bounce you right back to the full page, so to read it you would have to manually magnify the page. And then manually navigate to the "continued" page.

After calling "800 number" I got one helpful person who we'll call "Jay." We figured out that all issues prior to December 31, 1922 worked fine; after January 1, 1923 the glitch occurred and he replicated the problem on his end. I put all this is writing, with links (I won't send because that would identify the newspaper). During my many calls and emails, the problem was variously blamed on a) cookies and cache (I tried the site on a computer that had never gone on the newspaper site); b) my browser (I tried the site on all three major browsers); and finally "metering", a nice way of saying overuse of the account, i.e. more than 100 article downloads a month (this is far above my use of the account).

In short, I could see I was getting nowhere. Yesterday, I called the headquarters number, and randomly picked an extension which to leave a message. The person called me back and said his department "couldn't help me." I demanded a supervisor and got a highly placed manager. The problem was fixed within about four hours.

Then I received a response from "customer service" which said "Hi Jim,

I completely understand your frustration with this. I am still waiting to hear back from the TimesMachine team on what exactly the issue is.

Again, I'm sorry we have yet to fully resolve this issue for you." And this after the problem was fixed. I responded to that message:
And periodicals and other customer-service heavy organizations wonder why they are losing business?

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JBG said:

One of the newspapers I subscribe, The Times (won't be more specific) has a service that produces, in real-feel, newspapers going back to before the Civil War. The way it works is each page is replicated exactly as it was printed. Let's say you pull up the November 12, 1923 and see an article which interests you, "Incensed People Join in Demonstrations Hostile to Von Kahr" underneath the banner "Hitler Forces Rallying Near Munich...". So you click on the article, which is supposed to open a separate PDF of that article, the first and continued page. Instead, starting about a week or two ago, clicking the article would bounce you right back to the full page, so to read it you would have to manually magnify the page. And then manually navigate to the "continued" page.

After calling "800 number" I got one helpful person who we'll call "Jay." We figured out that all issues prior to December 31, 1922 worked fine; after January 1, 1923 the glitch occurred and he replicated the problem on his end. I put all this is writing, with links (I won't send because that would identify the newspaper). During my many calls and emails, the problem was variously blamed on a) cookies and cache (I tried the site on a computer that had never gone on the newspaper site); b) my browser (I tried the site on all three major browsers); and finally "metering", a nice way of saying overuse of the account, i.e. more than 100 article downloads a month (this is far above my use of the account).

In short, I could see I was getting nowhere. Yesterday, I called the headquarters number, and randomly picked an extension which to leave a message. The person called me back and said his department "couldn't help me." I demanded a supervisor and got a highly placed manager. The problem was fixed within about four hours.

Then I received a response from "customer service" which said "Hi Jim,

I completely understand your frustration with this. I am still waiting to hear back from the TimesMachine team on what exactly the issue is.

Again, I'm sorry we have yet to fully resolve this issue for you." And this after the problem was fixed. I responded to that message:
And periodicals and other customer-service heavy organizations wonder why they are losing business?

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JMaximus said:

Because angry old men can't easily read hundred-year-old news articles without having to scroll?

Yeah... I bet that's it... :roll:

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JBG said:

And periodicals and other customer-service heavy organizations wonder why they are losing business?

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JBG said:

I am hardly an "angry old man." I pay over $900 a year for the privilege. They are raising their rates as of February 2020.

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