I’ve been a Consumer Reports reader and subscriber since the 1960s. And things have always been good between us, until this past few months, after changing my delivery address from my home in California to my apartment near Boston.
So, a few minutes ago, I went on the ConsumerReports.org website, to check out my account info and see what’s up. Turns out the address change in September failed, and somehow got turned into an old-old Santa Barbara address. So I changed it to the Massachusetts address, and went on to try to get some back issues. Then the system told me there was a problem with my address and looped me back into the Account Setup form, where I discovered that the street address took, but the city did not, so I had a new street address and an old city address. There was no way to tell this unless I went back and looked. So, the system was a bit busted. Fortunately, they do provide a number for calling in. And, even though it’s a holiday, a human being answered the phone immediately after I punched a number on a promting menu — and just the first of those, instead of one after a long series. The human, a native speaker of English, found that indeed the system had a problem, and corrected it all, even getting me all the available back issues, and reporting the problem to the magazine’s technical folks.
Consumer reports also provides a way to report problems by email inside their site, including plenty of room to explain things. I did that too.
All this is good, and worthy of kudos. Others should take notice.
Here’s hoping they’ll be up for welcoming VRM to match their CRM. Sure hope so.
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