How could the New York Times possibly have such bad customer service?

That’s crazy. My little newspaper here in Albuquerque does a much better job. The few times a delivery was missed, they brought a paper over within an hour.. Since print media may be seeing its demise now, you’d think excellent customer service would be one way to ensure a following.

The NY Times is flailing economically, and when companies do that customer service is usually one of the first things to go.

Yes, one would think, for the very reasons stated. It boggles the mind. Probably can be traced to shortsighted “money saving” cuts made by a corporate ninny.

I think it’s a case of bad intermediary. I have had the NYT Sunday edition delivered to me on time for two years now with zero incident. But yes, I think they should be efficient and honest enough to know that the distribution people they hire over there is hurting their business and customers.

@mazingerz88: I think depending on the area, some places have better delivery than others. Regardless, I think if he misses 4 out of 4 there’s no excuse, and if they can’t do it, they should just say we have trouble delivering to that area. It’s not like I live on a mountain in Alaska or something. I live in a rural area but there are lots of houses around. I really want to let the problem resolution person know my issue and if it’s not resolved by next weekend, I’m cancelling and writing a letter to someone high up (I’ve found from experience that writing letters to “customer service departments” may just get a form letter in response, whereas writing to a president or someone high up gets a better response and possible solution).

It will be interesting to hear what the customer service rep says. I had problems getting my NYT subscription started, similar problems, and even worse getting it moved across town. But once it got going I rarely had a miss.

I called Customer Service around 9:30 this morning and it’s around 9:30 at night, Sunday night right now and no phone call all day. 12 hours have gone by. This is not good.

@jca It is a Sunda, though. I don’t think they man the Customer Service desk on the weekends.

@zenvelo: No, the customer service rep said the guy should call me back sometime today. I would expect a paper that has 7 day delivery to have customer service reps working 7 days. It would be especially bad if they said “Someone will call you back tomorrow to resolve your problem” and in the meantime, you’re cancelling your subscription (like I should have done).

Ditto on on-line access. This aspect of their operations is completely incompetent. Don’t do it,no matter how addicted you are. Find another paper. They’re going down and it’s not pretty.