First BusinessWeek, then Medco

The Internet giveth and the Internet taketh away.  I had two noteworthy online experiences this past week that made me scratch my head in wonder.

First up, the subscription geniuses at BusinessWeek.  It's one of the few remaining magazines I subscribe to, er, subscribed to.  My account was up for renewal next month and they offered me the one-year rate of $60.  As a completely new subscriber I could get that same service for $40.  A quick back-and-forth e-mail thread with their customer service team got me a better deal than $60 but still not as low as $40.  It looks like they offer the full magazine content for free online so I'm letting this one lapse.  When will the magazine industry ever figure out that they can't keep overcharging their most loyal customers?!

Next up, Medco.  Like millions of others, I take a statin every day to keep my cholesterol in check.  Medco's online prescription service has always been extremely reliable...up to now.  When I ran out of refills in the past Medco would check with my doctor to renew the prescription.  It always worked so well.  This time though, Medco contacted my doctor and said they got no response.  I contacted my doctor and they confirmed they faxed the prescription once and did so a second time late last week.  Medco confirmed they got the fax but still said they couldn't refill it (for some unknown reason!).  So now I'm forced to do this the old-fashioned way: take the prescription to my local drugstore and get it filled there.  Sometimes the online world just isn't as smooth and efficient as I'd like it to be.

Comments

[Alain Pierrot]

"their most loyal customers"

Ah! You should take a primer in "scoring" techniques in the management of subscription based economic models...

Usually, you use these techniques to sort the profiles of your customers and prospects in order to get three populations:

1. Prospects likely to subscribe => discount and gifts, then full fare at renewal.
(Sophisticated scoring techniques may even allow to match the amount of discount/gift to the expected number of renewals according to prospects profiles.)

2. Customers likely to leave but who can be convinced to renew subscription => gift, special offer.

3. Prospects unlikely to subscribe (for a decent time), loyal customers and customers likely to be definitely leaving => do nothing, ask for full fare…

From the loyal customer, to display a loyalty profile is a bad strategy…

[Jim Minatel]

You're lucky your Doc will even fax your script to Medco. My Doc we've been going to for 15 years quit faxing them scripts 18 months ago because it's too much extra overhead to fill out their forms. This even though my Doc prints my script from his wireless TabletPC that he takes notes on during office visits. It's not like he's a technophobe.

[Joe Wikert]

Hi Alain. I have no doubt the model you described has worked well over the years, particularly in the pre-Internet days when information wasn't as readily at your fingertips. But as we continue moving towards a more transparent world, where it takes about 3 mouse clicks to figure this sort of thing out, how much longer can these rules survive? Of course, plenty of people are happy to renew without doing much homework, but the tightwad in me insists on avoiding a ripoff, regardless of how small the transaction is!

[Alain Pierrot]

Well, on this 1st of april, I really should be lighter and whimsical, but these techniques indeed emerged from the Internet years, and the "3 mouse clicks to sort these things out" are jeopardized by the 'scope" difference between companies and individuals: the time and efforts we, as individuals, can spend, do not match what the tools available to sellers/advisers (in the companies own scope) can do against the traces individuals leave/provide. For an individual, the time/effort to access the relevant information which would allow us to reach a fair deal with a provider must be protected…
Not that obvious these days?