Please direct any responses to "executive_ committee @ cch.com" so that Pete
Massie, Oakleigh Thorne and myself, the three members of the CCH Executive
Committee can receive them, thank you.
The Executive Committee, and the other 5,700 employees of CCH, share in your
frustration and apologize for the problems you have recently encountered with
our services. The fact of the matter is that our company, and many other legal
publishers, are burdened by inflexible 30-year-old order processing and
customer management systems that make it extremely difficult to handle simple
requests like yours, a request as simple as -- can I get this missing report?
To compound the problem, these antiquated systems have been troubled by
intermittent problems over the last few months resulting in certain subscribers
being dropped from our mail master. Part of the problem resulted from our
attempt to make some short term improvements to customer service by moving
customer data to a more powerful computing platform. This resulted in missing
reports for a number of our subscribers. Due to the large number of missing
report requests, and the unanticipated production peak, requests were not
fulfilled in as timely a manner as they should have been. Some customers then
requested the same missing reports a second or third time due to slow
fulfillment on our part.
We have doubled and tripled our staff in certain customer service areas in
order to work around the limitations and problems created by our antiquated
systems.
However, due to the intermittent nature of problems relating to subscribers
being dropped, theyve been difficult to pinpoint and resolve. We thought they
were completely eradicated a couple of months ago, but theyve recently cropped
up again.
As some of you pointed out, the postal service is responsible for some of the
problems, but we don't think we can blame them for the majority of the missing
reports. However, in February we consolidated current report production in St.
Petersburg, Florida, and even though the post office assured us they could
handle the additional volume, results have shown that not to be the case. The
good news here is that recent samplings have shown marked improvement in weekly
report mailings. We will continue to monitor the post office's performance.
We now have a full time task force dedicated to resolving the underlying
systems problems that result in subscribers being dropped and we are
specifically addressing our missing report request process to insure that any
missing report requests are being filled in a timely manner.
Unfortunately this is a good example of why CCH will be spending more than
$120 million over the next four years on reengineering CCH ... $10 million
will be spent this year reengineering our order processing, billing, accounts
receivable and fulfillment systems which will provide significant customer
benefits. We are committed to improving our customer service and were willing
to put a lot of money where our mouths are to do it. All of the antiquated
systems will be replaced.
Again, our apologies for the problems some of you have encountered, we do
appreciate your business, and we assure you we are addressing these issues and
will fix them. Then, you can look forward to a much higher level of customer
service from CCH as we roll-out our new order processing, billing, accounts
receivable and fulfillment systems later this year.
Please contact us at executive_committee @ cch.com if you have additional
questions.
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