Did I mention The Book? Its focus is blogging in business and I'm up to here in research right now. I've decided I'll post some site reviews and let you have a tear at them as well. But the first is one that does the heart good. Here's the entry so far:
The real test of any corporate blog comes when the company is under fire and here Chris shows how to do everything right. Listen to this.
On Friday, the SF Chronicle's consumer-rights columnist ran a piece about complaints from Wired subscribers that they were getting threatening letters from a collection agency when they let their subscription lapse.
He then goes on to explain how it happened, including the admission that it was Wired's pown fault, and acknowledges the role of another paper in the process
This was really distressing to hear for all sorts of reasons, not the least of which is that sending letters from a collection agency for $12 is a poor way to treat customers. But the good news is that it has clarified a problem that we can fix, and for that we're grateful to the Chronicle.
Then he talks about what the company is going to do and what is involved..
As Joe Timko, the circulation manager, said in the piece, we're going to stop turning over accounts to collection agencies (although these agencies weren't authorized to do anything other than send badgering letters, the wording sounded pretty serious). Although I had heard these complaints before, I had always assumed it was bad behavior from third-party agents, which are a declining fraction of our subscription business. The bad news was finding out that this was actually our own doing (even if it affected just a small percentage of our subscribers); the good news is that this means we can stop it immediately, as we've now done.
Second, we're going to make it much clearer which subscriptions are automatically renewing and which aren't. We're not going to eliminate the option of an automatically-renewing subscription, because many subscriber prefer those, especially with credit card billing (the only checks I write these days are to renew magazine subscriptions, which always seems like an anachronistic hassle), but what's important is that we ensure that the unsubscribing procedure be quick, simple and painless. No AO-Hell run-arounds.
Right now, it's not nearly clear enough how to do that (or even to find out if you have an automatically-renewing subscription or not). This week, I'll start working with the Conde Nast circulation department on improving that. Transparency is the key.
Read the rest of it. business blogging doesn't get any better than that.
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