The Age notified newsagents yesterday that they are changing the subscription model, or how they deal with newsagents at least. They are moving from fixed-term subscriptions to open-ended subscriptions. Beyond giving newsagents only seven days notice to make considerable data and system process changes, there are questions customers will have when the previous fixed-term subscription continues. While The Age ‘manages’ the customer relationship, newspaper home delivery customers often like to talk about these things face-to-face. Of course, in this day of subscription based home delivery the newsagent no longer owns the customer.
As a retail newsagent, I would prefer The Age invest in over-the-counter customers. They are as loyal yet cost significantly less than home delivery customers … except that the margin for The Age on retail sales is not as good as their home-delivery model where newsagents share the cost of subscription campaigns.
Mark, is there a dialogue happening between Tower and the AGE to come up with an automated IT solution to remove all the stop dates from existing subscriptions? Manual removal is somewhat of a pain and ongoing as many subs will not come up for a stop for 12 months.
Craig,
Has we (Tower Systems) had any notice of this then we could have created something to make this cut automated. However we where only infromed by The Age late on monday night. We have a meeting with them today to discuss the palns in more detail so we will know more then.
The frustrrating part is that the POS providers should have been consulted months ago so we could made the required changes.