Ordinary Nothing

I’m subscribed to Nature
magazine for years now. The sciences are a hobby of mine, and Nature is
one of the best, and oldest, interdisciplinary journals out there.

My current subscription was nearing the expiration period, and I logged
in to the site to renew. I don’t usually use the site much, since I
read everything on the paper, but when it comes to registration it
beats filling a paper form and sending an envelope, hands-down.

Before starting the renewal, I took a quick look at my account details,
and noticed a problem. I was listed as working in the pharmaceutical
industry. I certainly never provided that information, so it must be a
mistake. This is one of the information fields that doesn’t have any effect on me,
and only interests them, since it gives them better data about their
subscribers.

I decided I can spare a minute to be nice and go and change this. I
entered the account details page, changed to a more appropriate
category, and tried to update the data.

No such luck. They have required fields which were not
filled.
Mind you, these are required field that didn’t contain any info
previously, so how can they really be required? But specifically, they
require that I also fill in my Secondary Speciality, my Main Activity,
and my Professional Qualification. Even ignoring the fact that I’m not
entirely sure what the heck they’re talking about, why would I be
required to provide that info? I don’t want to, and don’t need to.

I’m a paying customer, have a subscription for years, and nobody forced
me to go change my details. I’m doing them a favour of updating some
details, and they won’t let me do that without divulging even more personal
information? Yes, that’s exactly what they’re doing.

I could either tell them more than I wanted to, or let them keep the
wrong info that I was willing to correct. So I said goodbye, and left
them with the garbage info. This makes no sense, why demand to receive
more information, when the info isn’t really required? Do they really
prefer to get no information about people, than partial info? Why?

And, oh, as a side-note, while the new subscription page works
great, the
renew subscription page is a total bust. The help system has a page
saying something about the entire on-line subscription being
inoperational, but the page is entirely undated, so it’s impossible to
know how close it is to apply. And the support rep, by email, said that
she doesn’t know why the renew pages don’t work, and offered me to send
her the credit card details by phone, fax, or email. Yes, clear-text
unencrypted email. Sloppy all around.

April 17th, 2005 at 15:43 EET | Categories: Marketing | Track comments. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.