The death of Red Herring

The continuing saga of Red Herring.  After my post on the Red Herring/Zinio adventure, I got an email from the CEO of Zinio inviting me to give him a call while in the background the Zinio team was putting the word out to all the Zinio Red Herring subscribers.  They did a nice thing by offering everybody a free subscription to something 50 bucks or less.  It was late but, to their credit, once in gear, they tried hard to make up for it.  They have humans you can call, new person in charge of customer service, etc, etc.

All good. Rich Maggiotto, the Zinio CEO, was a good guy about taking the heat and making it right.

If you are keeping score, the good points:

• He never got defensive on the phone.
• Basically said, there are no excuses, we deserved the slap, here are the circumstances just so you know.
• He was very professional.

In the end, well handled.

Over in this corner, Red Herring has brought in the professional goofballs. 

Consider this email exchange:

• Send note asking about subscription, explaining that I'm a Zinio customer.
• Get response asking for full subscription information.
• I respond with email address the subscription is under and, again, explain, I'm a digital subscriber.
• Get response indicating that they can't help me without the full address information which I will find "on the label affixed to every issued mailed."

Nobody can be this dumb. This has to be a stall for the bankruptcy filing.

Dead Mag walking....

Comments

[Adrian]

Just to follow up and confirm that I also did get the $50 offer from Zino and used it.

I also had no follow-up from Red Herring.

I am happy with the follow up from Zinio and will continue to use them.

Adrian

[Syd]

I had the same cancellation experience with PC Magazine via Zinio. The PC Magazine rep continually asked me for the mailing lable - duh. In the end Zinio were great - they just kept on manually release more copies of PC Magazine until PC Magazine 'found' my subscription. A+ to Zinio for fixing probems. F for their magazine partners.