I don’t know if you happened to read it, but I viewed a recent letter emailed to Nielsen Audio clients from Ryanne Laredo, who holds the title of Senior Vice President of Customer Experience for Nielsen.
I’ll bet many readers didn’t know that Nielsen had such a position, but apparently, they do. That means you now have an additional person who can receive all your gripes about the service, other than your rep.
The subject of the letter was the recent unplanned outage of Nielsen’s online software services. Every Nielsen Audio online service (Tapscan, PD Advantage, etc.) was down for a couple of days in early September. Nielsen sent regular status updates until the services were restored. As you would expect, clients were unhappy. To be more precise, most were probably really pissed off.
The letter from Laredo (that sounds like the title of a country song, doesn’t it?) said the problem was a disk failure in the authorization program — the part of the system that lets subscribers get into the software and work with their data.
She said that Nielsen will devote more resources to their online services, but whether this means people, technology, or both wasn’t clear, at least to me. In the near term, the company is reducing “single points of failure.” Isn’t that nice? Did no one identify these points years ago? None of the software is new, so it appears that Nielsen went along with the system as it was. Why bother improving it if it works?
Long term, Nielsen says it will migrate its platforms to a “best-in-class cloud environment” with a target date of next June. If you’re a subscriber, you should be asking about Nielsen’s progress beginning early next year. Deadlines for IT projects have a habit of slipping, which is not unique to Nielsen but happens in many situations. If Nielsen comes back next June with a grand announcement about the completion of the upgrade, you should say, “Good work.”
But here’s what caught my eye. Now that we know that Nielsen even has an SVP of Customer Experience, why was nothing said about the recent reissues due to Nielsen mistakes? My column on August 12 noted the number of times Nielsen had to reissue reports because stations were left out of the report. When that column was published, the total stood at six markets, plus there was a delay in releasing PPM monthlies and CPRs.
Since that time, it’s happened three more times — in Stockton, Fargo-Moorhead, and Odessa-Midland. If you’re keeping score at home, that’s nine metros, plus the PPM delay, in the past few months. Considering the very small number of “oops, we made a mistake” reissues by Nielsen over previous years, this is a troubling trend.
Since Nielsen has an SVP of Customer Experience, I’ll take a wild guess that the customer experience in the affected markets (all 48 PPM markets, Monmouth-Ocean, Biloxi-Gulfport-Pascagoula, Gainesville-Ocala, New London, Grand Rapids, Omaha-Council Bluffs, and the three mentioned above) was less than the clients expected and less than Nielsen would like to see.
That’s 57 markets affected by Nielsen’s internal errors. Will there be another letter from Ms. Laredo explaining why this problem continues to happen and the steps that Nielsen is taking to ensure that this becomes a rarity rather than a case of “here we go again”? Will she say anything like, “Perhaps Nielsen has offshored a little too much of our operation, and it was better when people in Maryland were reviewing data before it went out the door”?
The Media Rating Council (MRC) closely reviews Nielsen Audio’s procedures as part of their annual audit, and I’m aware that MRC is looking into the reissue situation. However, MRC audits are shared only with MRC members. That makes sense because it keeps the nonprofit group in business, as MRC’s revenue comes from membership dues. However, not all Nielsen subscribers are MRC members.
Here’s my suggestion: when the MRC Radio Committee gets the opportunity to review the findings of what was behind the Nielsen Audio reissues, the committee members should vote to require Nielsen to release a public statement like the one sent voluntarily regarding the software issues. It needn’t be long but should cover what happened, how Nielsen found the problems (clients or internal review), how long it took to find the problems, and, most importantly, what the company plans to do to prevent further mistakes like this in the future. Nielsen Audio’s clients are owed at least that much.
Let’s meet again next week.
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