Probe your customers; it brings them back

I mentioned recently that I had cancelled the home delivery of my paper. I spoke to two people at the paper when I called, and of course they asked why I was cancelling. I told them I didn’t think I was getting my money’s worth, and they accepted that answer.

But that’s where it stopped.

If I were running the paper, I’d make sure there were some follow-up questions. Had they gone a little deeper, they would have found out:

• I didn’t care about their national and world coverage, which I get online.
• Filling the “Area” section of the paper with stories about every single high school team in the county does not constitute area news (that’s why there’s a separate “Sports” section).
• The coupons they distributed were largely useless to my family’s demographics.
• If they were going to rely on the New York Times’ wire service to provide their articles, they should have borrowed their crossword, too.
• Their editing was atrocious.

Even if they didn’t do anything about it immediately, they’d have a lot more information at their disposal when it came time to reformat. Presumably, someone could then contact all of the people who had cancelled and let them know of the changes in hopes of getting them back.

And don’t even get me started on their clunky, user-unfriendly, hey-I-took-an-online-Dreamweaver-class web site. It’s just an electronic version of the regular paper, but even more poorly edited. If they were serious about keeping readers, they should offer us tailored newsfeeds. Give us a list of the features they offer and let us select the ones we want to see. Set it up like a Google homepage. I sign in to my account, and get the real area news (no sports), the “Opinion” section, maybe some Classifieds. Set up an RSS feed for weather changes, school closings, etc. They do offer a section for people to blog, post photos, etc., so on some level, they recognize the importance of involvement from their readers. They should take it a step further and host Town Hall-style e-meetings. Get a local councilman, City Planner or business owner on to field questions; tie into the local college and have some online lectures; get with the Arts council and have an electronic gallery opening.

I’m not holding my breath.

I think the real problem may be lethargy. When you’ve been the only option for so long, you tend to coast, which leads to entrenchment, which leads to apathy. I did tech support for five years, so I know of what I speak. Plus, customers are annoying, so who cares what they want?

The accountants, that’s who.

By way of contrast, when we had our house rewired, the electrical company called to remind us of appointments, confirmed arrival times, did several walkthroughs with us during the process, and called after the job was completed for a satisfaction survey. Would I recommend them? Hell, yes. My paper? Not so much.

Oh, speaking of entrenched thinking: I ordered fish and chips for lunch today, and the waitress asked if I wanted fries with it. Huh?