There has been a lot of speculation and investment around Generative AI and how it will transform our society, but in the rush to capitalize on this new technology many companies are just going to end up alienating their customers just to save a dollar or two. One of those companies is Hearst Magazines, the publishers of Cosmopolitan.
Back in 2022 my mother died, and with her passing I began to worry about my father. She took care of him for nearly 60 years and I was certain that living on his own would not be good for him. To make a long story short, we uprooted ourselves and I moved back to the town in which I was raised (and fled when I was 16 years old). The house we bought had a nice daylight basement apartment and last November we moved my father in to live with us.
Along with the move came his mail, which we forwarded from his old address. We started to get a lot more mail than we were used to since we long ago moved to “paperless” for most things, but my father, being older, has not (in a somewhat ironic twist we ended up selling his house to our postal carrier).
We still, on occasion, get letters addressed to my Mom. This tends to upset my father, so where possible I’ve been trying to remove her name from those mailing lists. My mother never used a computer on her own and never had an e-mail address, so she still liked to subscribe to print magazines.
When Better Homes and Gardens and AllRecipes magazines started showing up, I scanned in the mailing labels and sent an e-mail to Meredith, the publishers, and I received the following reply:
Dear Subscriber:
Thank you for contacting Meredith Customer Service.
We received your email request and we have cancelled the subscriptions for Mary Balog to Allrecipes and Better Homes and Gardens.
The accounting department is preparing a refund to compensate for the remaining service. Please allow two to four weeks for receipt. This refund will be mailed to the subscriber’s estate at the address where the magazine had been delivered. Please contact the post office for forwarding to another address.
Please accept our sympathy for your loss. If we can be of further assistance, please do not hesitate to contact us.
Easy peasy. So human: we got your note, we cancelled the subscription and we expressed sympathy.
When Cosmopolitan showed up I did the same thing. Now Cosmo is published by Hearst Magazines, and they took a different tact:
From: Hailey (Cosmopolitan Magazine)
To: Tarus BALOG
Subject: Hello. My mother passed away in 2022 and back in November my father moved in with us. It seems that my mother had a subscription to Cos…
Hi there,
Thank you for contacting us. I can confirm that you have an active subscription, with account number xxxxxxxxxxx. Please log out and back in using your email and account number here (https://service.cosmopolitan.com/) to access your subscription benefits, and update your account details.
Thank you for contacting us. If we can be of further assistance, please let us know. To ensure your future concerns are handled in a timely fashion, please include all previous email correspondence.
Thank you,
Cosmopolitan Magazine COScustserv@cdsfulfillment.com
So you’ll notice a few things different with this interaction. The subject line was just the first few sentences of the e-mail I sent to them, so obviously auto-generated. They didn’t address my issues, they replied as if I was the subscriber and that I actually had an e-mail address on file with them, and most importantly, that I was still alive.
I figured, heh, perhaps they did associate my e-mail address with the account so now I could just cancel it through the web portal. No such luck.
Unlike other magazines, I could find no way of setting up an account on the website using information from the mailing label, such as account number and expiration date. Since I knew I was dealing with GenAI I wrote back and got directly to the point: cancel the subscription associated with account number xxxxxxxxxxxx. The reply:
Hi Mary,
As requested, we have canceled your future renewals for Cosmopolitan. We have updated your account as requested. You will no longer be enrolled in our automatic renewal service. If you receive any further invoices, please feel free to disregard them.
We are sorry for your loss. If we can be of further assistance, please let us know. To ensure your future concerns are handled in a timely fashion, please include all previous email correspondence.
Thank you,
Cosmopolitan Magazine
Now I didn’t ask to cancel “future renewals”, I asked to cancel the existing subscription. Her subscription is set to expire in 2027, so that defeats the whole purpose of trying to stop the magazines from showing up. This e-mail did, at least, state “We are sorry for your loss” but since it was addressed to the deceased that kind of negates the sentiment.
At this point in time I just gave up and called the 1-800 number. After navigating the automated voice response maze I was connected with Sherwin, who was able to get the subscription canceled in about a minute.
If Hearst Magazines cared about customers, they would ditch the AI and hire more Sherwins.
I just want to point out that I am not a Luddite when it comes to GenAI. I recently saw I demo by Rod Johnson on his Embabel project and that got me thinking about building a personal digital assistant where I could run it locally and my data would not leave my house.
But just rushing to implement GenAI without fully testing and understanding how that implementation will negatively affect your customers is unwise. Hearst Magazines has joined a rather short list, but growing, of companies I will go out of my way in order to avoid doing business with them.