Email list hosting service & mailing list manager


Summary: Ebsco Harriston, Victoria 01 Oct 2004 17:50 UTC

Colleagues,
My thanks to everyone who responded. I would also like to send special
thanks to the Ebsco Subscription Agent representative who contacted me
immediately and who is now working with us to resolve our issues.  Below
(sans names/affiliations) is a summary of responses I received directly.
Perhaps, as a result of this discussion, Ebsco will consider hosting
regional focus and/or user groups for their subscriptions customers. Or,
conduct a customer satisfaction survey to address the issue of customer
service, and additionally further improve the functionality of EbscoHost
for subscriptions management.

Victoria

Victoria Harriston, MLS
Library Manager
The National Academies
George E. Brown, Jr. Library
500 5th Street NW
Washington, DC 20001
vharriston@nas.edu

Summary:

"We also have Ebsco as one of our vendors, and have for a few years now.
We do have a lot of frustrations with most everything about them.  The
renewal list is difficult to use because of it's format, our customer
service rep does not really closely read the e-mails sent to her,
resulting in extra staff time on our part to explain again what was
already in the previous e-mail sent to her, and EbscoNet is not a very
useful tool at all and not very reliable with info. that is on it.
Overall, we feel sometimes like we spend a LOT of time trying to get info.
from them that should not really be all so difficult to get..."

"You are not alone in your frustrations.  We are doing our best to work
with EBSCO in the best way we know how but right now I am struggling with
a list of []titles we should have online access to but most of them
require user names and passwords.  So, although we pay EBSCO for the
privileges we actually have to track down the publishers ourselves and
figure out why we are being denied access.  As for looking up prices, I
have found the big clumsy book and tiny type they send out on a yearly
basis with all the journal information is a more useful tool for looking
up prices than EBSCOnet.  It is sometimes a challenge to know what EBSCO
is really giving you and what you have to do yourself in relationship to
them"

"We find Ebsco's entire attitude toward customer service appalling. They
refuse to run reports, their software does not allow it and they have no
intention of changing that apparently. When they do run one for us it is
almost useless. The information on their web pages is not very up to date
or completely accurate. They want us to go to their online web page to
check our claims and yet refuse to have it up at a certain date of each
month. We have insisted that they send us back our paper claims annotated.
They either email a response or fax one to us. So far they are doing this
and this is fine. Every other vendor in the world SENDS US a claim
response report, we do not have to go to them. The people who answer our
questions, customer service reps have been quite rude in their responses,
[our Sales rep] [] got that changed. But they don't recognize the
importance of the ISSN, the only vendor in the world that we work with who
does not include the ISSN on any of their claim responses.
They seem to want us to do their work for them, they want us to find out
information about titles and tell them. Me and my clerk just keep asking
our customer service rep via email and have them find out the
information since their web interface is so clunky and not very helpful.
They give lots of excuses and change their service very little. Of all
the vendors I have worked with for the past 15 years they are the worst.
Unfortunately they seem to be the only stable vendor at this time for
American journals."

"We too were done in by the Faxon fiasco and moved about half of our
titles to Ebsco for FY04.  I was so frustrated by their lack of
service..."

"We are a small, private liberal arts college [].  We, too, were caught in
the Faxon bankruptcy as we ordered all our subscriptions through them.
We subsequently switched our subscriptions over to EBSCO.  Thus far I have
been very pleased with my customer service rep.  And for me, that is a
make or break for a business. I use EBSCONet fairly frequently and have
not had the frustrations that you talk about below.  I can generally find
the information for which I am searching.  I do realize that sometimes,
however, it is difficult to pinpoint which subscription is the correct one
to order.  In those cases, I will send an email off to my rep and she is
very quick at providing me with the information I need. I will say, that
when I first started using EBSCONet, I found it to be more cumbersome than
divine's online service.  It seemed like it took many more clicks to bring
up the information I wanted and the overall look of EBSCO's product was
not as friendly to my eye.  Now that I have used it over a year, I can't
really remember what divine's product looked like and I don't really
notice the extra steps I have to take to find information.  So overall, I
would say I am fairly pleased with the product.  Being able to access our
institution's information online is very valuable to me and I very much
appreciate the immediacy of the product."

Victoria Harriston, MLS
Library Manager
The National Academies
George E. Brown, Jr. Library
500 5th Street NW
Washington, DC 20001
Office: (202) 334-2327
Fax: (202) 334-1651
vharriston@nas.edu
National Academies: http://www.nas.edu
George E. Brown, Jr. Library:
http://www7.nationalacademies.org/nrclibrary/index.html
"Meeting the research, advisory, and educational  needs of the advisors
to the nation on science, engineering and medicine"