Hi, I'm Burt Bellows, and I work for Area Circulation.
I am the Director of IT, and I'll do my best to address the things mentioned on this forum.
Having a complaint ratio of zero would be wonderful, but unfortunately it's nearly impossible, especially when you have an incredible volume of customers.
It seems to me we are doing very well, with only four complaints I've been able to find on the web in my initial search. Considering the hundreds of thousands of customer contacts we have each year, and the twenty years we've been in business, I'm pretty happy with the numbers.
Also of the four complaints listed, one was outright retracted by the customer when he actually contacted our customer service department.
The others were fallacious in the presentation of data. I checked each one by our records and via the voice recordings we make, and all had some manner of withheld or incorrect information that would mislead the reader from a proper understanding of the situation.
Ironically, some of the complaints on this site stem from our attempts to prevent customers from misunderstanding our product presentation.
Please understand that Visa and credit card companies in general, will stop doing business with companies that have a chargeback ratio of greater than 1%. Please see this 1991 article for more information:
http://www.allbusiness.com/sales/int.../274887-1.html
In particular note that mail order companies and telemarketers suffer much more than the average retailer due to lack of a physical presence in the personal contact arena.
Misunderstandings and buyer remorse cause for a much higher percentage of chargebacks, but we still have to stay below 1% to keep working with credit cards. Historically speaking, we have been way below 1%, and even lower than the mail order percentage mentioned in the article.
But back to the several complaint in this forum stemming from our ongoing work in keeping chargebacks and complaints to a near zero level!
To make 100% sure our customers understand everything they have been told by our sales person, before we close the sale, we transfer them to another department that summerizes the details, and asks the customer if they understand. It's a strange thing, but memory is not very accurate, and we've discovered that the best way to make sure someone actually understands the summery, is to ask them to repeat it back to us.
We record that conversation and store the file for several reasons, but the main idea is to shoot for 100% customer satisfaction by taking this final step to insure a proper contact has been made.
During this process, I have noted myself how our reps can feel the customer often wanting to 'make the deal and be done'. Going through all of the legalities and details is quite frankly tedious over the phone. But it's necessary because we have a higher standard to achieve over a signed document deal.
I would like to change all of this and create a web solution where we direct the customer to our site and have them read and sign electronically.
But in the mean time, talking a lot of details over the phone without losing the customer's attention is a tough thing to do, and talking faster than normal is human nature. You can feel some customers desire to 'can you hurry along here, my son just spilled milk and I need to get off the phone', or the fact that they don't have an hour to chat with someone about magazines.
So yes, we talk fast and record conversations, and we ask people to repeat information so they remember it. If you can show me a better way, I'm listening! We are constantly trying new things to make our success rate high, and customer satisfaction at 100%.
Part of the problem is also that the deal we offer is so good, some people get it, and then realize later they really can't afford it. We work with those people and do anything possible to help.
One of the web complaints was from a woman who frankly admitted she saw the plan was such a deal she wanted in, but later realized she was a very young woman in a start up job, who really couldn't afford the payments.
We tried to help by spreading out her payments, and cut them back by two thirds. We always strive to help people. The last thing we want to do is strain someone's budget.
That last statement has some real financial practicalities to it. Why are we so helpful and want good happy customers?
Ideally the answer is profitability, and that is exactly the situation here.
Feel free to look into the magazine subscription by phone industry (it's huge), and you will find that we barely break even on a first sale. Some companies actually lose money on the first sale.
We make our money by having happy customers who renew with us.
That's it in a nut shell, and it's the best reason in the world for our company to treat everyone well and keep them happy.
I don't mean to drag on forever. I just want to offer the facts up so you can have another perspective on what we do and why some people complain.
We have had affiliates that we cut off contact with because they did not do as well at making customers happy. We don't want problems, we want a lot of happy customers who love to get 5 magazines a week for $3.64!
We give airline tickets and other gifts, and in the end a customer spends $900 for 5 years of high quality subscriptions coming to them every week.
Once established, we sweeten the deal with other offers to make them even happier, and quite frankly, two airline tickets to Paris or London (many other places also), cost a lot more than the subscriptions purchased.
But even without the gifts and offers, the subscriptions themselves are almost too good to be true. The best deal I can find for 'People' magazine, for instance (a great deal by the way), was $2 a week.
That's one magazine. Take that to 5 (if you can find such a deal for them!), and you have $10 a week, and you will find the math over five years is $2600!
But with us, you can CHANGE to any other magazine on our huge list any time you like. AND we give you gifts, etc.
I can't think of a business where you can make money and give people such incredible low costs and flexibility.
With our customer success rate, I can even say that if you want to talk to me in person, I'll give you a call and see if we can't come to a complete understanding.
Just reply here and give me an e-mail address so I can get your phone number privately, and I'll give you a call.
I am also including (it's my habit to always offer more now after working here for... 5 months as of this week) another reply to one of the other four internet complaints I found. It may be useful if there are any more questions.
I walk through what I did in my IT 'discovery' after talking with a customer who was called mistakenly. That shouldn't happen, but is, I've discovered, unavoidable when people change cell services or move to other locations.
The only fix would be for the phone companies to hand out a single number for each person, much like a social security number, and tie that number to the actual cell or landline. There are multiple problems with that scenario, with privacy being the chief issue I can't see past. But if a phone number is given to another person, we will contact them accidentally if our customer has not given us the change of information in time.
Here is my other response:
I am the Head of the newly created IT Dept., and after seeing this report as I was checking into a greater web presence, I talked to the owner and decided it may be time to start responding to public complaints like this.
As a newcomer to the company, I've had to spend a lot of time getting to know the IT systems, the people, and especially the work flow/Data aspect.
After four months of absorbing the incredible amount of information here, and getting to know the people, I was surprised to find this report after trying a google search on our company.
It was then I discussed the possibility of having a non prejudicial look at the logistics and policies, as well as how effectively they are carried out in practical day to day situations.
I'd like to report to you my findings, and give you my personal opinions regarding the company, and my understanding after doing the research.
What did I do?
I went as far as performing QA on our people by calling in under false names and going through the processes. I bugged every manager from sales to collections, from QA to Renewals, to find out what we do when a customer has a problem. I found out much more than I wanted to know, honestly.
After digging deeply , I was surprised at the statistics (as I said, this is not my area of expertise, so I didn't know what to expect). Of hundreds of thousands of yearly contacts with people, over a three year period we only had 120 BBB complaints. That percentage is amazing in light of facts like Sears at one time led in BBB complaints, simply because of it's huge customer base.
That amounts to 40 complaints out of perhaps 150K contacts. I expected a much higher percentage.
I was also surprised to discover the lengths at which the company goes to insure that the customer is fully apprised of the terms of the agreement, and every detail regarding the prizes and various gift offerings.
A new customer is given the information, and if they agree, are transferred to another department that makes sure they are told again, recording the conversation for future reference, and actually asking the customer to repeat back the information so they know the exactly what they are agreeing to.
After reading a few of the complaint e-mails we get daily (very few, another surprising fact given our volume), I saw patterns.
First, it was apparent that many people, upon hearing the incredible price of $3.6 or so per week for 5 magazines, seem to do what I would do, i.e., really just want to get the deal and get off the phone, not really paying attention to the full details.
I listened for several hours to our reps (not all at once, but over maybe a month), and discovered that they pick up on this, and talk very quickly to try to get through the things they need to say legally, so the poor customer doesn't lose patience.
I could go on about how the laws have actually caused more problems than they have solved, but I also understand the necessity of them to avoid consumer scamming.
Because people tend to hear the deal and want to get off the phone, the company transfers the person to another Dept., where they are asked the pertinent questions regarding the agreement. Specifically they are asked to repeat back the monthly payments.
Since these are all recorded and saved for years, we can go back and listen to the recordings, and play them for the customers. And for the few that do complain, it is almost universally true that they cannot believe the recording exists with their own voice agreeing to and repeating back the details of the agreement.
One of the basic 'deals' is very simple on paper, but confusing to some people, so here it is. For around $3.64 or so a week (we have other deals), you get 5 magazines per week, for 5 years. Wow... That's less than a dollar per mag, and we are talking high quality nation wide subscriptions.
We have a deal with the magazines we work with, and to get these great deals for our customers, we have to meet certain criteria.
The magazines are looking for long term customers to increase their subscription, and therefore advertising value.
The long story short, is to make this incredible deal happen and for everyone be happy in the end, we ask for customers to pay the $900 total (5 mags times 52 weeks, times 5 years), within the first year in monthly payments of around $74.
So you pay for a year, and then it's done, over, finito. You get 4 more years of 5 magazines a month, already paid for. AND, you can change which magazines you get at any time, from a huge list of nationally known magazines covering every walk of life (visit our site for a current list, but get ready for eye glaze as you read from it).
Now it doesn't end there, because there is always more to offer. The magazines are willing to really go off the charts cheap, for customers willing to extend that 5 years even farther. You can count on the fact that sometime before your 5 years are up, we will call, find out if you are happy, and ask if we can give you an even better deal. We give prizes and offer anything we can find or think of to make you glad you are our customer.
That's the way it goes for most of our customers, and it's the bread and butter of our business. We get people magazines, for CHEAP!
However, there are things that make life difficult for us, and we try to work with them. For instance, telling someone the magazine companies will get those out between 8-12 weeks, is a tough one. It's a fact easily forgotten when the bill comes, and no magazines are in your hands yet. This is in my mind the greatest difficulty for people who see in very practical terms. I've paid you, where is my magazine?
And why some people don't hear the $74 for the first year, I blame genetics. Once I hear a deal, I'm done, lets shake, and move on with life. Don't waste my time, you sold me, it's over.
Before my current career as a network Admin, I was in sales for ten years. I am very aware of how memory is very emotional in nature. An extreme instance is a personal photograph that a friend of mine saw, who absolutely declared it was a fake. It turns out we don't remember facts, but our perception of facts. Our minds also tend to fill in non-existent details. A web search on the subject was enlightening. A month after the fact when you get a bill and no magazines have shown up, you forget you are paying off 5 years in 1 year, and you think maybe you were ripped off because here you are paying for something not yet in your hand!
I've seen the company bend over backwards, losing money in many cases, just to satisfy the customer, who was completely in error.
I spoke with several of our affiliates, and across the board they all agree. We lose a lot of money we shouldn't, to keep good relations.
We are very sorry to hear complaints, but some of them are clearly so outrageous, it's just matter of time before in calling hundreds of thousands of people that you find someone who takes out their frustrations in a way impossible to deal with.
The few BBB complaints we get for instance, more often than not, come from customers who are so upset they won't talk to us. We would love to make them happy, but some people are simply not in a place in their lives that they can deal with one more possibly negative contact.
Area Circulation is a fine company that strives and succeeds in customer service beyond my expectations. I'm more than willing to put my personal reputation in with the quality of the company, and especially the owner.
In my 48 years of life, I've never been happier at a job. I find myself daily amazed at the way the owner treats his employee's, and his demeanor in the face of challenges other men would easily lose their tempers.
When customers complain, he's right there on top of it, always trying to massage the system into a perfectly running, living system that can respond to every kind of person.
Unfortunately He's overworked and busier than anyone I've ever met. That is one of the reasons I volunteered to see what we could do to help our customers get a proper view of us on the web.
Our initial website was out sourced and quite frankly needs a lot of work. I've taken that task on and within a few months intend to make a lot of additions and changes. I'd like our customers to be able to change their magazine subscriptions online rather than calling in.
I'd like to get some fun stuff out there, and let people know we are an open minded company that just want to perform a service that you really can't beat.
I'd like to create a chat forum where managers can respond to suggestions and comments, and I'd like to make our web site something people would even want to use as a home page (I'll have to be creative for that one).
Since I'm now a full fledged supporter of ACI (Area Circulation Inc), I can say we are really sorry for anyone that slips through the cracks and becomes unhappy for any reasons.
We want more customers, not less. We want people to want to recommend us to their friends. That's how we make money... upset people don't help us at all, and we don't want anyone to be upset.
We recently contacted an IT admin accidentally, in that his new phone was an old customer who had missed some payments. By the time we were done talking to him, he went from being downright angry for our call, to asking to get in on the deal. In his case the magazines he liked were very expensive, and it cost him less to pay for 5 years in one year, than his current monthly subscriptions were!
Now I can relate to that.
I'd like you to relate to that too, and add you to our happy customer list.
In the mean time, I'm going to get back to web development, now that I've built a great disaster recovery plan and made our network secure and more efficient. Your data is safe, secure, and backed up on and off site.
Good things are coming!
Sincerely,
Burt Bellows
Area Circulation
Director of IT
It looks like one of those "Get Rich Quick" websites that go on for miles and miles.
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