Unbelievably bad Customer Support – management please step in!
I have been trying unsuccessfully to re-instate my magazine subscription. For some reason – I do not know why – it was cancelled and I could not get into the credit card details on the website to check whether it was up to date (My details have not altered in a few years).
I do not know if Customer Service is staffed by a computer or humans, but I get much the same message and link each time. The link takes me back to the same non-working control centre each time. As I mentioned to CS, it is like Groundhog Day.
I have been a magazine subscriber to FWW forever, and also had an online subscription which, at a grandfather rate, does not cost as much as it I had to start over. I did not want to lose this. But now, after the last email to Customer Service, I appear to have been unsubscribed from this as well!
My last email went like this:
Case id: 45122837
Original Message Follows: ————————
The reply from Customer Service was this:
Thank you for contacting Fine Woodworking.
Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience caused, and thank you for the opportunity to be of service.
As requested, your order has been cancelled.
If we can be of further assistance, please let us know. To ensure your future concerns are handled in a timely fashion, please include all previous e-mail correspondence.
Thank you,
Janrich
Fine Woodworking Customer Service
Cancelled? Why would they cancel when I requested a subscription?
Getting ready to quit FWW …
Management, please do something.
Derek Cohen
Perth, Australia
Replies
I have had troubles too. I signed up for the monthly subscription but nothing really changed from my view point. I am logged in and the orange Subscribe button is still at the top of the page. Articles still have a padlock and I haven't received any confirmation or printed materials. After questioning whether I even filled in the form correctly I found the credit card charge on a statement. I emailed to inquire about the status and they could not find the subscription. They requested that I submit my statement with the charge on it. After I complied they they sent a reply that I haven't been signed up long enough to get a magazine yet. I usually get a popup add asking for me to subscribe daily. Not very impressed so far but I will give it more time. It is like the staff is mostly bots and disconnected.
fyi I'm logged in and still see the orange Subscribe button and padlocks and pop-up/email pleas to "Subscribe Now!". I learn a lot from my subscription so for me the annoyance is a small price to pay. If you click on the padlocked articles, you can still view them. It did take a couple months for the print magazine to kick in, but that was a year ago. More recently, it's been USPS that's the bottleneck. Just a couple days ago I received my Jan/Feb issue, and I noticed they just released the Mar/Apr issue.
Derek,
Sorry you're having this issue. I know it's annoying but account information has never been available on the website. I don't have a good answer as to why, but it just isn't. It's possible someone just plain made a mistake and hit the wrong button and cancelled your account. As you're well aware, mistakes happen but what is important is how you fix that gappy dovetail, I mean customer service issue.
You have had my email for awhile now, as does just about anyone on the forums by this point... ([email protected] if you don't). You know I would have gotten this resolved right away as I have in the past.
Now for the other issues:
Sclause, have you tried to go to a locked article and hit the paywall? I too have the orange subscribe button and I'm able to access everything. I also get a pop up, but only once a day unless something is broken. I understand how annoying they are.
If anyone has issues, please reach out to me. I can't actually do anything about them, but I can get them in front of someone who can.
Ben Strano
FWW Digital Brand Manager
Ben, We have had some of this discussion offline. It seems the web site more or less does not know if a visitor is a logged in paying user or not (popups, subscribe buttons, lock icons on content), even if it does not block you when you try and open "locked" content. Paying subscribers deserve better. The web site needs an update. I am sure you put these issue in front of people that could do something about them. But it seems they do not do anything. As your email has been out there for a while, and we all have access to it, so have many of these issues. And the site does not seem to improve . . . even after a long time waiting.
In what sense, one wonders, is ....
Ben Strano
FWW Digital Brand Manager
a meaningful title? It seems like just a label on the lapel, with no actual power or ability to manage anything. This is a common syndrome in many commercial organisations these days, as the actual "digital brand management" has been outsourced to one of the now-normal greatest-profit-for-least-service outfits, run by a money-grubber and disaffected staff on less than minimum wage via a zero-hours "contract".
Any organisation that fails to manage itself end-to-end can end up with these kind of issues. There is no "core FWW" that is just some woodworkers writing interesting articles. The whole publishing service is "core" and should be run by people interested in making it a good service, not some underpaid techies with no interest in woodworking, publishing quality or anything much.
But so many places have stopped making high quality things in favour of making lots & lots of money.
Lataxe
I never bother looking at job titles. They don't tell me anything I need to know.
I don't expect woodworkers, editors, or writers to know anything about coding web pages. I'd rather they do the jobs they ought to be doing. And I don't really care if a coder can chop a mortise. But all of those folks ought to be able to work together to produce a good product.
I think FWW does a very good job. I think there are some things they can certainly do better on the web end. But they have absolutely not "stopped making high quality things in favour of making lots & lots of money." If that were truly their goal,then I would have to say they are doing poorly.
> There is no "core FWW" that is just some woodworkers writing interesting articles.
If that’s the case (I suspect it’s not), then there should be.
Ben and the ‘core’ folks at FWW know about WW. Other aspects of “the business” have to be farmed out. If they had to bring in-house all the talent required to build a top notch app and web experience, they would have to charge a lot more. Then the complaint would be that it costs too much.
IMO, FWW spends its resources in the right places: WW. Great articles by experienced woodworkers, beautifully photographed and presented.
As a side note, the mrs has a subscription for America’s Test Kitchen, and it’s the same story—great content, technology not so great.
I don't agree that the core of FWW is just woodworking. That's obviously part of it but their core is publishing information about woodworking, including the on-line stuff. That's what we pay for these days, not just a paper magazine. In fact, we outside the US don't even get the paper magazine, just the electronic reader version (which isn't downloadable either).
To be clear, I don't blame Ben Strano, despite his "digital brand management" badge. He obviously doesn't have the remit or power to directly govern the digital content and it's delivery. That seems to have been outsourced.
Outsourcing only works if those who then do have the remit and power to provide the service also have the ability and will to do so. Imagine if the "outsourcing" of woodworking articles by the various FWW article writers resulted in stuff about making badly designed planters from chipboard or white-painted MDF cupboards held together with cheap screws. (For details, see most British WW magazines). We'd complain bitterly about the quality; and rightly...... We might vote with our wallets! (I certainly do with those British WW mags).
A distributed-functions business model still needs to be a model that works to provide a high quality service or product. It's no good shrugging to say that "....it's all some mysterious person's fault and there's nothing much we can do.....".
As customers, we may well "do something" ourselves that the business won't prefer.
****
On the other hand, FWW does remain a provider of some extremely good and useful content. But it's slowly turning into a Curate's Egg. ("Good in parts, m'lord"). Such eggs soon become inedible.
Who manages FWW and/or it's parent organisation? It's the top dog in that organisation who needs to be given earache, rather than poor ole Ben Strano, a handy scapegoat and whipping boy (or so indicates his badge).
Lataxe
Lat_axe,
Groan.
Ben Strano
Digital Brand Manager
I’ve been a subscriber for a while, but constantly get emails to sign up. And, to two different email addresses.
Bens a good guy and it’s not his area of responsibility, but in this day and age, there’s just no excuse for a magazine not to know how to manage a database.
This is a multi-level, multi million $ company. Hire a software tech to fix it, that’s all!
Who’s running the show?
Wow, I thought it was just me!! The website needs some serious attention. In order to find what I am looking for, sometimes I have to log in and out to get it to work properly. The website certainly isn't intuitive and needs to be updated. Also, I have not received the last magazine and will check in to see if can get that straightened out.
My membership was set to automatic renewal and awhile back one of the print issues never arrived. I contacted customer service who responded by saying that I missed an issue because my subscription wasn’t renewed in time... Facepalm. I had to write back to point out the purpose of an automatic renewal should be to avoid interruptions in the subscription.
Only after my somewhat snarky reply did customer service offer to send me the missed issue.
Thanks Ben. I have emailed you the details.
Regards from Perth
Derek
I agree with weymouth2 that “ IMO, FWW spends its resources in the right places: WW. Great articles by experienced woodworkers, beautifully photographed and presented.”
I think overall FWW is delivering excellent content across the magazine, website, podcast, webinars etc and I’ve noticed that Ben Strano has brought excellence with him to the organization. Ben has been directly helpful to me on a few occasions and makes himself very available - and that is not common. Ben’s mixture of WW skill and interest, combined with being fairly tech savvy has opened new doors and improved everything FWW does.
And to be clear, for many of us, we simply wouldn’t be the woodworkers we are today without Fine Woodworking magazine.
Like I said I will give it more time. I will make a suggestion though. I know that getting the website to look different to subscribers may have a big cost barrier and I get that. It may help to send some sort of "Welcome to FWW" email to provide some sort of confirmation that something happened. Usually those are generated within minutes of processing payment. I will try clicking on the padlocks. I guess I assumed if they are still there then I am still locked out.
Send me an email if it doesn't work.
Pardon me, but isn't this a "groundhog day" from a couple years ago? I used to get occasional updates on this exact issue, and I THOUGHT it was the same OP (Derek Cohen). Back and forth with Ben Strano, and same conversation. Or are my dreams become more lucid and more prescient?
Meryl, it seemed that way. I went round and round with Customer Service. Incoherently. Ben stepped in, as I expected, immediately understood, and gave me the correct person to discuss this with. I solved the issue by taking out a fresh, new contract.
Now this does not answer the issue - why Groundhog Day exists. The issue is that there was no contact to state that my “automatic” renewal did not renew, or that my banking details were incorrect .. and no way for me to determine this anyway.
Regards from Perth
Derek
I canceled my subscription the other day. I never use it. I have to scroll side-to-side to read each and every line, viewing pictures is hell, and there are way too many magazines out there that optimize for a phone's screen as I enter the site. (iPhone X here) Good luck on this. FWW has a fantastic group of woodworkers. Alas, their technical side is so lacking that I would rather use forums like Sawmill and LumberJ (where I see your name quite a bit). And other online magazines. I have given up on FWW completely.
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