I am a WSJ (Wall Street Journal) reader. I find the articles insightful and interesting, which makes it an enjoyable experience, especially with my morning coffee. However, I can’t say the same thing for their customer service experience. So, Mr. Murdoch, I hope you are reading this post and will take this customer’s recommendations to heart as you are developing your strategic plans.

I almost posted about my WSJ customer experience couple of months ago. You see, their Online Journal and Print Edition are two very different organizations, and they don’t share any subscription information at all. So, early this year, when I re-subscribed through WSJ Online which also gave me a print subscription, their Print Edition group had no idea. This wouldn’t normally be a problem, except I kept getting letters for subscription offers, which didn’t make any sense to me. Unfortunately, they also sent a letter accusing me of taking advantage of their good will for continuing my print subscription and urging me to re-subscribe for something that I already paid for! This issue was finally resolved when I got in touch with their print subscription service representative that admitted she doesn’t receive any notice from the Online WSJ group regarding the print subscriptions offered through their promotions.

Today, I ran into a different issue with WSJ services group. Guess what, for every new WSJ account, you need to create yet another user account to manage it. I actually called up their 800 number as I thought they could update my user information with the new account number, but no go… It is bad enough that I have a spreadsheet to manage my accounts/passwords, but now I have 3 different user accounts for one site and one is no longer valid???

When I asked how I can provide customer feedback and suggestions for their Website Services group, I was told that they would be happy to pass my feedback along. However, they don’t have any mechanism to submit it directly to them. Lack of customer connection is in my top 10 list of how NOT to innovate!

This is quite different than my UPS delivery experiences. I always enjoyed using UPS and their online tracking services. Yesterday, however, I was introduced to a new service from them, which has apparently been around for the past 6 months. It is an automated voice message that they send out when the package they are delivering requires a signature. The service today cannot give a specific delivery time (sometime between 8am-7pm). However, with the latest technology advances, I wouldn’t be surprised if we see an updated service integrated with their SMS messaging to give a 1-3 hour delivery window within the next 6 months.

Thank you for listening. For more on the importance of quality of your customer service and dangers of siloed organizations, please read my previous posts. If you happen to have one of these siloed customer service organizations, please take action today and put a strategic plan in place with specific milestones to fix it. How well you service your customers can be your strategic differentiation or a sign of your deteriorating brand.

• Innovate with quality
• Strategy 101: Revisiting Low-Cost Leadership with Dell
• Good, Bad and Ugly: Organizational Silos

Technorati Tags: WSJ, Wall Street Journal, customer service, Murdoch, UPS

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