A grain of sand or a landslide?

I am potentially worth est. £2,000 to a major publisher but a small slip they made with my subscription renewal is fast becoming a terminal fall. Can the British Film Institute catch me, dust me off and put a plaster on my scratches?

A few days ago Royal Mail informed me that it was holding a letter because the ‘the sender didn’t pay enough postage’. Unable to judge the value of this mystery item, I decided to pay the £1.32 online.

Royal Mail’s confirmation page gives no indication as to when the redelivery would be made; or whether I had to take a subsequent step to arrange that. Unsure, I went back into the site and worked out how to arrange redelivery. Bit of a pain. I mentioned this to Royal Mail—I wonder if it will amend it’s process?

The letter was safely redelivered a couple of days later, and turned out to be a subscription renewal notice from the British Film Institute (I’ve taken Sight and Sound magazine for at least a decade). There was no postage on that envelope—the cause on the initial non-delivery.

I contacted Sight and Sound via its webpages to ask for a refund of the postage. Still received no reply. I prompted @BFI on Twitter a couple of times (I could find no Sight and Sound account at the time) and got a response 18 hours later. “Not bad”, you might say. Perhaps. Other organisations have responded quicker.

To date my lifetime value to the BFI is at least £380, so I probably represent a subscription manager’s dream. I hope I get a result or it might turn into a nightmare for both of us.

Big organisations need to get the fundamentals right in order to hold onto business:

• Respond to customers who contact you via your site
• Monitor and respond to tweets.

I wonder if @sightsoundmag can avoid an Imax-sized, Hi-Def, wide-screen #FAIL?

Cinemascope image courtesy of androsko.com