Complaint Review: Area Circulation I - Virgina Beach Virginia

Call them and make a lawyer threat and they have to cancel your service. At that point I would request a full refund. Don't let them tell you anything else about doing a service inquiry or anything that they may offer. You want a full refund by credit card.

Troy, We have several processes in place to prevent what you describe, such as a verification at the end of the sale where everything is repeated back to you, and we ask you to repeat it back to us so we know you have been following along. I'd like to help you out, so if you contact me at [email protected], I'll look everything up and take care of any problems found. Bottom line is I want to make you a happy customer. I can't stress enough that we don't make money on original sales, but on renewals from happy customers. If we break even on the initial sale, we are happy. When customers refuse to pay, we lose a huge amount of money. We invest the money for your magazines up front. We lose all of it when customers don't keep their end of the bargain. The confusing part here is how it could have slipped by that we ask our customers to pay us back our investment within the first year, rather than waiting 5 years. It's how we get such a good deal for you, by paying it all up front. Then after you are happy, we renew your subscriptions, and that's when we make money. So we lose money on unhappy customers, and only make money on very happy customers who renew. It's a strange business, the magazine business, to be sure. But it is how we get the best deal for you, and allows us to make money ONLY after we've made you happy. An unhappy customer is double lose, a happy customer is big win. More information below: Hello, I'm Burt Bellows, and I'm the Director of IT from Area Circulation. My story is very simple in that while researching information to increase our web presence, I discovered some complaints that surprised me. Our customer service department runs from a strict script like most telemarketing companies, because we have to make sure the govt. regulations aren't broken. How these complaints can occur is now an ongoing investigation in our company. Some of the complaints I've read seemed very legitimate, but when reviewing the person's file, I have found things like, 'no contact with customer, they just stopped paying', or 'we cut payments by 75%', and things that didn't jive with the complaint. I'd like to find out the whole story and just fix it. It seems most of these things can be fixed simply by communicating, so that's what we would like to offer. I'm sorry this is a generic note, but after replying to 6 personally, I realized my IT network managing isn't getting the focus it deserves and requires, so I am making a generic request for contact via a special e-mail account I've set up. [email protected] is the place to write to, and I will give you my personal attention. So far I've been able to fix everything in one day, but we are making huge changes in our infrastructure that require my attention, and are trying to expand our web presence. So please understand my time is limited, but I WILL get to everyone eventually. If you don't mind, to help me keep track of e-mails, please put 'complaint' in the subject line so I can do searches and make sure I've gotten to everyone. We handle hundreds of thousands of customers, and our goal is 100% satisfaction. But there is human error, or misunderstandings in that kind of volume, and apparently not everyone is getting the time and attention they should have. So please let me fill in that gap and see what I can do to help you. One young man wrote to me yesterday, and I fixed him up in 5 minutes. We simply didn't have his cancellation form on record, and he was in the wrong queue. I can only assume it was our mistake, so I fixed it and canceled his account. He is quite happy and after hearing the deal we make in the e-mail, said he would consider doing this once he could afford it. For those who were confused or did not understand how we work let me explain. Our main 'deal' is awesome, but only if you can afford it! We don't want you to buy something you can't afford. We offer 5 magazines per week, for 5 years, at a rate equal to $3.64 a week. At less than a dollar per mag for weekly mags (some are monthly, etc.), many people find this unbeatable. People Magazine, for instance, is $2 a week even for a direct subscription. If you do the math, our deal is $900, compared to 5 magazines at $2, which would come to $2600. That's nearly triple our price. Because we pay the magazine companies and our affiliates up front, we lose a lot of money when a customer 'buys' and then refuses to pay. We literally don't make money on the initial sales. We try desperately to just break even. The place we make money is where in renewing a HAPPY Customer, that wants to get in on things like the free tickets to London, Paris, etc., and wants to get an even better deal on magazines. So for us to create complaining unhappy customers, makes no sense at all. We couldn't possibly make money. We would never have lasted 20 years. But let me finish the math and describe where the greatest complaint seems to come in. First, it takes 8-12 weeks to get the magazine's first delivery. We dislike that timeframe, but can't do anything about it. Many customers don't like paying a bill and seeing no results. They become worried they were scammed, cancel, and we lose money. Secondly, we spend a great deal of effort explaining the math, but it doesn't always get past the simple $3.64 a week price. That is the cost if you divide it up by week, but we can't get this super deal from the magazines and our affiliates without paying up front. So we invest a huge amount of money, trusting our customers to likewise fulfill their part of the bargain, paying off what we invested, within one year. Since most people don't have $900 they want to put out initially for 5 years, we tell everyone that the cost is $74 per month for one year, and when we hear them agree to the deal, we transfer them to a verification department that tries to make this as clear as possible, by asking the person to repeat back to us the cost per month and other details such as the 8-12 week waiting period. We record this, and I was very surprised to find that some customers called back saying they never agreed to it. We go at incredible lengths to make sure to repeat and even have our customers repeat it, that by far most people simply accept the deal and the only time we hear from them is when they want to change from one magazine to another (which is a FANTASTIC plus in working with us, you can change any time you like to any other magazine). One other point to consider is that the credit card companies would not have kept us as customers if we didn't meet STRINGENT policies. True rip off companies lose their credit business within a year, usually less. Feel free to write, I'm here and listening. I am honored to work at Area Circulation, and I come from a background that does not stand for dishonesty or corruption. Mistakes are made when you deal in hundreds of thousands of people. To those people that slipped through the cracks, we are sorry, and we are seeking to make things right. We want you to be happy so you recommend us to your friends. I am working on this, and will eventually answer, fix, and resolve every case. Reply back to me and you will get helped. We risk a lot for our customers to get them a fantastic deal on magazines. Please understand we have no motivation whatsoever to rip you off. We simply don't make money until you are happy! And we lose horribly when you are unhappy... so if you do the math you see why I am trying to fix all complaints, even though my main job here is IT in nature. Burt Bellows Area Circulation Director of IT