Last week I had posted a question regarding redelivery of misses/service complaints to customers. As the industry looks at cost-savings opportunities, newspapers are exploring the option of holding re-deliveries until later instead of a guaranteed re-delivery time. The 2007 Facts, Figures & Logic publication reported that 71 percent of newspaper had a guaranteed delivery time with a median time of forty minutes. Here’s the question:
As we become more conscious of various costs associated with complaint delivery, have you changed your replacement time guarantee so that you might deliver several complaints in a given area at once instead of redelivering as soon as the complaints come in? Do you practice other methods to handle these types of complaints, i.e. provide the e-edition instead of the hard copy? Contact the carrier and require him/her to make the redelivery? Utilize field helpers (perhaps retirees strategically located throughout your market) to make the redeliveries? Do you charge your independent contractors when such an incident occurs?
The following is a sampling of responses to the question:
“At the present time we are still delivering the calls as they come in, however we do not guarantee re-delivery within a given time window. Our practice is to call the carrier first for the re-delivery and then fall back on our DM's if we were not successful in reaching the carrier. At the present time, we do not charge them for the incident but we are currently taking a hard look at that option. We are also looking into "field helpers" in certain areas furthest from our office. We ALWAYS deliver the paper to the customer the same day unless of course they call after business hours and leave a voice mail. In that case we get it to them asap the next morning.”
“Guarantee replacement in 30 minutes until 11:30am using 2 PT recovery drivers from 8am – 12 noon. Customers have the option after 11:30 am of credit or redelivery with the next day’s delivery. The Carrier is charged $.50 per missed delivery.”
“We do a variety of resolutions regarding redelivery. Our current service error ratio is averaging 1.15 for daily and 1.45 on Sunday as service is the foundation from which we grow and we place a huge emphasis and investment in that aspect.
Because we have a paid E-Edition, that is the first thing we offer. The second is to deliver to the customer workplace, within our three county market and we do so by contracting with carriers located in specific geographic areas to accomplish. We also utilize the original existing carriers responsible for the error. Or even home delivery advisors to accomplish the task. We do charge our carrier force, $3.00 for each “carrier controllable” service error that occurs that they do not redeliver within the hour. We also provide incentives to them for providing perfect service as well. Occasionally we use next day delivery but that is only at the customer request.
“Our delivery deadlines are currently 6 a.m. M-F and 7 a.m. on the weekends.
We redeliver from 6 a.m. till 5 p.m. M-F and till noon on the weekends.”
“Our complaint time here is from 5:30 pm to 7:00 pm and we try to have the papers delivered to the customers all at the same time, usually from 6:30 to 7:00, if there are more than three complaints, they go out when it hits three. The longest time a customer will have to wait is an hour and we offer them credit or the paper tomorrow and credit to save on man hours and gas. The e-edition is close to being ready, it will be another way for them to get the paper. We currently don't charge for the complaints, but have the right to in their contract. We have two people that come in at 5 to handle our service calls.”
“We don’t handle complaints as soon as they come in but we do offer the e-edition as a first option. We’ll contact the carrier in the AOZ/RTZ only to have them make the redelivery, but 70% of our redeliveries are handled by field helpers. Carriers are charged $2.00 for each complaint”
“Over the last three months, we are averaging 3.87 daily and 5.55 on Sunday. Even though this is much higher than we want to be, this is a decrease of nearly 75% over the same period last year.
We offer redelivery in our core market (68% of our HD) within one hour. We will redeliver, if a customer calls us between 6 a.m. and 10 a.m. seven days a week. We also charge the carrier profit plus $1.00 daily and profit plus $2.00 on Sunday. We have tried having carriers redelivering their own missed papers, but they would not get there or took a very long time, so we have not offered this in about six months. Too many customers called and yelled at us for the carrier’s lack of urgency or response.”
“We are an afternoon paper Monday through Saturday with a press time of 11 a.m. and a delivery deadline of 5 pm. Our Sunday press time is 2 a.m. with a delivery deadline of 8:30 am. Our CPT for the year 2006 averaged .469; .66 for 2007; and .70 thus far in 2008. We are located in "rural America." We have approximately 100 walking carriers, mostly youth, delivering to approximately 4850 subscribers each day, and 28 motor routes traveling over 2,300 total miles each day to deliver to approximately 6950 subscribers. We will re-deliver misses in our "city zone" the same day. Subscribers outside of our city zone have the choice to receive their missed paper the following day, or receive credit for the missed paper. We have a rewards program for all contractors based upon misses/complaints. We do not currently charge the contractor for missed deliveries, however we are considering this option due to rising fuel costs and the need to keep the contractors focused on delivery.”
“The newspaper charges agents $1.00 per daily miss and $3.50 per Sunday miss. The agents can recoup these charges if the complaint was not their fault, or if they take steps - which we verify - to eliminate repeat complaints.
“We have not changed our complaint recovery practices. We contract agents as recovery contractors to redeliver within 75 minutes between 6 and 11 a.m., and pay them a per piece fee. The recovery contractors may lease a company cell phone for a weekly fee charged on their invoice; many do.
“We use ChatterBox's pagin module to dispatch the messages to the field. The module scrapes the information from our Atex customer database, calls the customers back to verify redelivery, and updates the Atex host based on the outcome of the calls.”
“We charge the carriers the profit on the paper plus $1 if we re-deliver the paper. I'm sure others charge more to cover the expenses.”
Several folks were concerned with the fact that customers were taking a back seat to cost savings and felt that this practiced led to home delivery cancellations:
“Encouraging customers to contact carriers directly, making exceptions for anything imaginable is the norm. Why we would think for a minute that we want our carriers to be our spokesperson when a customer is criticizing their actions is beyond me.”
“The advent of outsourcing of call centers, the encouragement of asking customers to contact someone else rather than us to save money is quickly becoming acceptable. We have decided in general to sacrifice our customer service issues to save short term expense. I believe this approach will result in further circulation declines as we erode the one thing we had an advantage in providing. Look at other industries declines once they decided to sacrifice customer service. Dell and Gateway computers are a prime example. Once leaders in their industries, they quickly declined as they outsourced most customer service to India.”
“Why we would push a print reader to an e-edition when they have a service issue is very short sighted and destructive in my book. One thing I did change to save expense, I upped the carrier complaint charge to $3.00. I use the same rate to pay other carriers to handle redeliveries. This has worked very effectively.”