News Limited has advertised a role key to their implementation of newspaper subscriber migration. The role, Change Manager – Subscription Migration Project jobs in Sydney NSW 2000, was advertised a couple of days ago.
Migration is separate to T2020 but does form part of the overall goal of T2020 – to make newspaper distribution more efficient for the company and more viable for newsagents.
Migration when first announced in South Australia some years ago was flawed. News did listen to newsagents and adjusted their plans. This was especially important to retail / distribution businesses that rely on newspaper home delivery payment traffic to support viability of the retail operation.
This latest advertisement for a change manager shows that Migration in NSW is close. It also provides timeline guidance on the project. The ad included this information about the role:
This position will lead the development and implementation of a change management plans in support of the Subscriber Migration project. The primary focus will be developing and coordinating the implementation of the change management and communication plans to facilitate the collection and migration of subscriber data from Newsagents to News Ltd.
The change manager will work closely with senior stakeholders within the business as well as with newsagents and their state organisations to analyse issues, develop approaches and deliver change management outcomes in line with defined program objectives.
Great news, this should make life so much easier for busy newsagencies, as well as help cash flow.
We encourage new (and existing) customers to go on subscription.
Only downside is we have to accept publishers delivery fees.
Great news. It’d be even better if they would do something in Victoria first. About 60% of our bottom line comes from delivery but it’s impact on our retail is negative. Account payments are not the drivers of traffic some think they are. The sooner we can separate retail from delivery the better we will become at retail. 100% subscriptions is absolutely a step in the right direction.
Jenny your last sentance says it all and that is definantly the down side of the whole idea . At the moment i charge what i want which i should say is a fai rprice and customers are more than happy to pay it . If i was to charge what ever it is i am ment to charge well it just would never happen i have to cover way to many ks to get to each customer .
Shauns, I wonder though can you save money with staff costs if you don’t have delivery payments and stop/starts coming into your shop.
I always have two staff open shop on weekends, not because the shop is busy, but in case the phone rings or a customer comes in with a delivery problem. I know that I can cut my wages bill on other days also but I don’t want to lose shop customers because of home delivery customers.
And who knows maybe publishers will give us a better deal!
How are others doing with the suspension of teachers Saturday/Sunday Telegraph home delivery for Easter weekend?
Doesn’t make any sense to me and come Saturday morning the phone will ring many many times by teachers who will be expecting their weekend papers and will be annoyed at us for not delivering them!
It’s tempting to deliver papers to them and wear the cost but then that’s a bundle of papers taken from shop on one of our busiest days of the year.
KMc I think you’ll find Victoria is on the move.
the news ltd handling of the teachers subs is terrible. luckily we only have 2
Peter, it’s not terrible it’s disgusting. I am still having calls from teachers not on our lists for delivery and I can’t phone on their behalf because it’s a minimum 20 mins to get thru. They have had tecnical issues for at least 4 months now!
escalate to your area manager, my issues were resolved quickly. The call center people are clueless and a waste of time even when you do get through!
Is it just me or are other newsagents still sitting on phone to customer service trying to make a simple enquiry about a home delivery customer for a minimum 20 mins? This ‘busy period’ they are experiencing has been going on for months! Asked rep to pass this on which I’m sure has been done but nothing has changed. What no do other newsagents call? How can you run a business when no-one will take your call !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Jenny
Same here 40 minutes.
I was told that they can`t keep staff because of all the abuse from customer and newsagencies
I only have a handfull of home delivery customers for news the rest are all mine so i don’t fully understand why you would have to ring in the first place ?
I have given up calling.
I simply email my rep and let her take care of it.
You can email customer service on customersupport@heraldsun.com.au however they take 4 days to repsond.
Pity they got rid of the HWT customer service staff in Melbourne, they actually knew what they were doing.
Thanks Dean, I call my rep but it’s not good enough if I can’t chase a problem up myself. We have a lot of home delivery customers and it’ important to sort problems out as they arise.
Would prefer email but no good if you don’t get a response.
I have read a lot of positives about the pre-paid subscriptions method of customer home deliveries. I have also read a few issues of the Teachers fiasco – and yes I had the same issue, which took just under 2 months to resolve.
I would like some feedback on two issues
1 How often do people audit their weekly customer subscription list to their home delivery system to ensure the correct papers are being delivered, the correct payments are being made by News Ltd and indeed you are able to verify the total payment to the account, and
2 How many account issues do you find as a result of the above- we have anything up to 5 errors each week – I must admit some are in favour of News Ltd but the fact is that their subscription system just cannot be trusted in terms of correct payments.
These two points should scare you – if they don’t you must have more money than … Circ One is unstable as was evidenced by the recent communication concerning the Kid’s Mini Books huge error! The time taken to manage the subscription customers is enormous and just because there is no chasing customer payments doesn’t mean it id s easier and financially better. Just think the larger the run, by territory consolidation, will exacerbate the need and accuracy for the audits.
Enuff said.
Jenny, News actually had a recorded message on their subscription line regarding no delivery of teachers papers which was good, I refered any complaints to that number. On bad thing was one teacher who is not in a delivery area, she picks her papers up from our sub, she gave them a serve as there was no DT for her and walked out with a SMH and didn’t and refused to pay. We provide this service with our sub agent as a favour to the teacher and News but she has abused the sub agent once to offen. I spoke to our rep yesterday and pointed out not only is our sub out of pocket but this Teacher has crossed the line and we will no longer provide this service to her. This is now the 2nd teacher in 3 months that we now refuse to sevicce to.
Harold we do ours now on a regular basis but of some concern is News keeping records of their customers. We had a case with a customer who we collected the money for on behalf of News for the DT after she defaulted on payment, we contacted News and informed them, they advised to stop delivery which we had already done. Two months later we recieved another sub for the Australian for the same person.News blamed this on tele marketing done by an outside contractor, but surely News would have some form of cross reference before sending out subscriptions.
Harold @ post 15.
Once a week on a Tuesday morning I do a Subscription reconciliation after downloading Publishers Subscriber Credits Total file for the week and running the software to electronically reconcile with my Home Deliveries.
Usually find the exceptions report spits up the same ones each week (3 or 4) mainly due to address variations between what I have recorded and what is on Publishers db. Takes about a minute to locate on Publishers downloaded file and confirm names, subs # etc. Address variations are always minor typos.
On the rare occasions I find have not been paid for a delivery, a quick email to Publisher usually solves the matter. If the subscriber should have been suspended etc and software has missed in the daily download of stop/starts, then I haven’t lost much. I would point out this a rare event indeed.
The whole trick is to be disciplined in doing the reconciliation weekly.
Time taken all up < 4 minutes a week on an electronically reconciled csv file of 3000 lines.
Reality for me says I can't agree with your assessment of the end result of client Migration to the Publisher.
The time spend on a fully migrated customer base is a mere nothing compared to what we used to go through maintaining Agent Collect accounts.
It's nothing to be scared of at all.
Dennis Robertson
Gregg, I too like the recorded message , but the majority of our customers, Fairfax and News, prepaid or not, phone or come to our newsagency when there is a problem. Some phone Fairfax but not many call News. This is why we need to be able to make contact with the publisher at the time, no customer is going to wait in my shop for 30 mins while we call News, and for newsagents who have shop and home delivery they can’t take staff away from the counter for that long. This wasn’t a problem 6 months ago so why is it now? When all News accounts are migrated this problem will only affect the customer and publisher, not me, but if this ridiculous wait continues it will affect my business as no one will get thru to get new home deliveries organised.
Harold, I know we should check our subscriber credits weekly but no we don’t. I do find the odd mistake charging/not charging customer.
We do check our credits closely for News promotions.
Denis @ Post 18
May I ask the validation software used to run the reconciliation?
There are a couple of things that I would be interested in knowing how you manage with the automated reconciliation
1 the reconciliation of the amount paid by the customer and the gap paid by News Ltd as neither value is included in the CSV
2 the reconciliation of Carrier Collect to Office Pay notation in the CSV – errors have been encountered with initial information directing the payment type being incorrect only later to be detected
I agree there’s nothing to be scared of except the time is so long (manually done at present like the majority of Agents) to ensure everything is OK.
Denis @ Post 18
May I ask the validation software used to run the reconciliation?
There are a couple of things that I would be interested in knowing how you manage with the automated reconciliation
1 the reconciliation of the amount paid by the customer and the gap paid by News Ltd as neither value is included in the CSV
2 the reconciliation of Carrier Collect to Office Pay notation in the CSV – errors have been encountered with initial information directing the payment type being incorrect only later to be detected
I agree there’s nothing to be scared of except the time is so long (manually done at present like the majority of Agents) to ensure everything is OK.
Dear People
Please ignore Post 21 as the system said the first one was not accepted due to wrong CAPTCHA Code – Mark it lied to me!
17 cents per day – no more needs saying
james is that 17c per day for delivery or for the 25% of the cover price also?
Harold @ post 20
1 the reconciliation of the amount paid by the customer and the gap paid by News Ltd as neither value is included in the CSV…………………………….
Harold, the amount paid by the Subscriber to the Publisher doesn’t interest me, just the amount that News Ltd pays me. This is listed on the csv file, along with all the throw numbers (for the week) and type which I can easily verify to my software data.
2 the reconciliation of Carrier Collect to Office Pay notation in the CSV – errors have been encountered with initial information directing the payment type being incorrect only later to be detected………………………………….
Harold, I don’t recognise the language you are using (Carrier Collect to Office Pay notation). It must be a case of different states using different methodologies to pay Subscriber Credits to Newsagents.
If you’re doing the reconciliation manually, you have plenty to be scared about I would think. Electronic reconciliation is the only thing I have known since becoming a Newsagent in 2003.
Dennis Robertson
Yes Dennis – differences. This is what migration will resolve for Eastern Seaboard newsagents.
I cannot undertsand why any newsagent would call a publisher to resolve a subscriber’s question. There could not be a less productive activity for your valuable time. The concept is simple: newsagents take care of the full freighters, publishers take care of subscribers. Period. In the process of delivering newspapers to subscribers our customer is the publisher. The recipient of the newspaper is nothing to with us. We act only (eg redeliveries ,stops & starts, etc) on the request or instruction of the publisher.
azeem, It`s call customer service.
even though it is a pain in the neck.
Dennis
It would appear there may be differences, as you state, which makes no sense whatsoever to me given we are dealing with the same parent company.
In NSW we do not receive any numeric values for any payments/credits to our accounts – except he value amounts on the weekly Statement/Invoice where figures are scattered all over the place. These values have been requested in the past but no results to date.
Do I assume that you have no customers who pay you and that you are totally paid by News Ltd.? If so that leads to the second point of Carrier Collect v Office pay defines by News Ltd as follows
1 Carrier Collect – The customer pays the delivering Newsagent a certain amount per week subject to which one of the differing 34 (there are more than this but that’s all the ones I have) Telegraph subscriptions to which the customer has signed to. Additionally, News Ltd pays a gap payment to adjust the Newsagents credit to the due amount for the delivery, e.g. we have subscription where the customer may pay to any of the following amounts (subject to delivery types) $6.95 p/w, $6.90 p/w, $$5.59 p/w, $4.95 p/w, $2.20 p/w etc, etc, etc A gap is then paid by News Ltd on top of these payments to Newsagents accounts
2 Office Pay – The customer pays News Ltd for the entire subscription and the Newsagent is reimbursed on their weekly account. I am assuming (bad word) that this is the only type of News Ltd delivery you do, i.e. you do not issue customer accounts. Unfortunately we have found errors with these types of payments in the past but as we do not receive the CSV with value amounts, as you do, we have no option but to check manually.
No wonder we can’t understand each other – I think you have the more simple method of operation
EXACTLY ACT Newsagent, great minds think alike! The most important part of our business is customer service. Doesn’t matter who the customer pays for their home delivered newspaper we are making our living from them and we should look after them. It’s not always black and white and you just do what you have to to resolve issues. And not only should we not have to wait so long on the phone to speak with ‘customer service’ nor should News LTD home delivery subscribers or teachers.
I agree with Azeem on this point the publishers have made it crystal clear that the deal between their customer and me the delivering newsagent is none of my business.
Take the teacher subs why would I try and sort that mess out really?
If you came into my business I am 100% positive you could not fault my customer service that is if you choose to be my customer and not the publishers.
Harold @ post 29,
“Do I assume that you have no customers who pay you and that you are totally paid by News Ltd.?”
For all News Ltd titles, that assumption is 100% correct Harold.
Dennis Robertson
Jenny,
Haha, love your style.
The good thing about post migration if you are Distribution only is that you can do as you please in respect of how much you help Subscribers. If it gives you pleasure to look after some Subscribers, or indeed if you feel it just comes with the territory, then alls good and why not help them out if you believe it helps your business. Reading your post, you already know that.
If you find a Subscriber being unreasonable, then because News Ltd have insisted that client ownership is theirs, then you could let the Subscriber ‘enjoy’ the experience of trying to phone the person who maintains their account.
I made a conscious decision at the time of Migration to let News Ltd handle all Customers so that if nothing else, I thought there would be a consistent approach (one source), resulting in clarity for Subscribers. However this does depend on the level of training provided to CS operators.
Dennis
Dennis Post 32
Our deliveries are a mixture of fully paid by News Ltd, fully paid by customer or part part by customer with gap from News Ltd.
I was reading your information that you do not prodcuce accounts for anyone – you are fully paid by News Ltd for all home deliveries.
May I also ask if you are using Circ One (2010) or the Connect System (2008) as this would explain the differences in the CSV content; a backward move in Circ One release.
Dennis Posts 32 & 33
In NSW there are several ways in which a News Ltd account can be paid.
1 Customer pays Newsagent direct along with all relationships – no dealing with News Ltd at all and a number have converted to this from subscription at a dearer cost but the customer service provided by us leaves News Ltd in our wake
2 Customer pays News Ltd and all dealings are with News Ltd though customers still prefer to contact us, for everything but account payment, as they cannot or won’t ring News Ltd because of the issues described elsewhere in this BLOG’s thread. News Ltd credit’s our account weekly – along the lines that you appear to be operating
3 Customer pays on account production a set subscription amount per week based on one of the 34 different categories that I currently have. News Ltd pay the remaining gap as there are weekly subscription payments such as $6.95, $5.95, $4.95, $3.40 all of which depend on what is being delivered. There are more categories than the 34 I have – so this is a bit of a nightmare. The common practice of customers contacting us also occurs in this option for the same reason as stated in the above point
It has dawned on me that I believe you are still working on the old Connect System whereas NSW is on the Circ One product. If I am correct, and you eventually migrate to Circ One, your ability to do automated reconciliation will no longer be feasible based on the content of the reworked CSV file.
Harold / Jenny: Your may want to call it customer service and I respect your sincere intentions. However in my view it is not healthy customer service. It is a wrong approach. In business you should provide good customer service for the purpose of earning a revenue stream which adequately compensates you for time and effort. One of the key flaws of the newsagency business model is that Newsagents have for too long compensated for the deficiencies of the publishers and their antiquated systems and policies. This has lead to a situation which is highly abusive of the good nature of newsagents such as yourselves. We are just papering over the cracks which publishers should repair. Furthermore this approach has increased customer expectations to well beyond a realistic and feasible level. The more we give, the more they demand. This kind of over servicing is costing the industry dearly and severely hampering our capability to move with the times. If we keep on doing the publishers work for them, albeit in the name of being nice to people, then they will never ever get off their lazy backsides and rectify the serious anomalies in the home delivery business.
ACT / Jenny: Your may want to call it customer service and I respect your sincere intentions. However in my view it is not healthy customer service. It is a wrong approach. In business you should provide good customer service for the purpose of earning a revenue stream which adequately compensates you for time and effort. One of the key flaws of the newsagency business model is that Newsagents have for too long compensated for the deficiencies of the publishers and their antiquated systems and policies. This has lead to a situation which is highly abusive of the good nature of newsagents such as yourselves. We are just papering over the cracks which publishers should repair. Furthermore this approach has increased customer expectations to well beyond a realistic and feasible level. The more we give, the more they demand. This kind of over servicing is costing the industry dearly and severely hampering our capability to move with the times. If we keep on doing the publishers work for them, albeit in the name of being nice to people, then they will never ever get off their lazy backsides and rectify the serious anomalies in the home delivery business
Customer receives bill in mail, phones me to say she pays the Telegraph (someone phoned her about a deal and she said yes), but doesn’t know where paperwork is or how much she paid them.
Option A – tell customer to phone Tele and sort it out then let me know if I am to wipe the bill
Option B – make a quick (except for 30 min wait to get thru) phone call to customer service, speak with them for 2 or 3 mins, phone lady back to tell her they have no record of this so yes you need to pay my bill and tell her if she wants the deal thru Tele in future she needs to call them (2 or 3mins)
I chose option B, I don’t believe that’s over doing the customer service Azeem, I believe that is sorting out an issue in a business that I own.
I also made a phone call in the same week, yes that’s right, 2 calls to News in the same week, on behalf of a teacher (we have about 40 teacher subs) who still isn’t receiving their paper. This customer came into my shop and told me she has made several phone calls and still no paper. I told her to leave it with me and I will chase it up when I had a minute. Again a long wait to get thru but problem sorted in a minute or two.
Is that doing the publishers work or retaining a long term customer for my business?
My issue with News is the bad customer service they are giving newsagents by making it so difficult to contact them.
Jenny, they’re not your customer, not with today’s model.
Mark, they’re not our customer with today’s model – true, but the customer doesnt think that – their perception/reality is that they are very much our customer. If we alienate these people how likely is it they will come in at all to see all the other wares we have?
Mark, I know that they are not ” my customer” anymore but I have been their newsagency for 13 years and they know if they have a problem I will sorted it
Which I know will have to change in the future but at the moment I just grin and bare it
If I spend 5 minutes or 30 minutes on the phone to News, who is going to serve the customers that are now queueing up getting impatient ?
Max, why do you speak to News when you have customers to serve? Tell your News customer you will get back to them as soon as practical and look after those in your shop. Most customers would understand that surely. In my case, as long as customers issues are resolved in a timely manner, they dont mind getting a phone call later.
Chris,
Please read it again. I can have a very sarcastic sense of humour !!!
I don’t ring News anymore. My customers understand this. I give them the number and get the customer to ring News.
I have a small shop ( sometimes only me working ) and no matter how helpful I want to be, I can not spend 5 or 30 minutes on the phone.
Orhers may disagree with the following comment – I do find the News staff very helpful. They are the ones who have to put up with a hopeless computer system and management who have no idea.
Azeem,
Wilst I agree with some of your points there are cases where I will help a News subscriber out with a problem, these people are usually the elderly or infirmed and no matter how many times you explain the process to them they only become more confused.
These are the same people who go out of their way each Christmas to send me a card, chocolates or a bottle of wine in appreciation.