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"
