Macing the dragon
Mar. 22nd, 2007 11:44 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
peterbirksFor the second time in three in the past six months, efforts to clear a bonus have not proved profitable. I knocked out 1,100 hands on Ultimate last night, for a net minus of $37, although when I get the additional 15 UB points needed, $50 of that will come back. So, overall, it looks like $100 bonus dollars will have been worked off, a $50 UB point redemption will kick in, and I'll be level for the week. Sigh.
But I tend to forget the positive bonus plays. Even after the Noble Poker Tuesday Night massacre, I'm up there more than the bonus I have earned and I've doubled my money in three months. The Pokerstars bonus was also profitable both in terms of bonus and in profit for the visit. But the Full Tilt experience was long-term and, virtually, level overall. A good example of not chasing the long-term work-offs.
Another plus was that I ended up in the black after a few hundred hands at $3-$6.
Full Tilt e-mailed me last week offering me $300 in bonus dollars. Unfortunately I had to activate it by March 23 and I only had two weeks to work it off.
I e-mailed them back, stating that I wouldn't be availing myself of their offer, because I would be in Las Vegas for the entire period that I had to work off the bonus and that, because of the recent events surrounding frozen accounts, I refused to play on Full Tilt except from my own desktop in my own home (see the situation where a guy's account was confiscated, and only later refunded, because he had played on the same IP address as used by a credit card fraudster -- that being a hotel in Las Vegas).
I suggested constructively that the bonus offers might have a less strict timescale.
Full Tilt's Customer Service Department lived up to its reputation by failing even to acknowledge receiving the e-mail.
It's so frustrating. The software is good and the freeroll challenges are good value, but they seem to have a customer service department trained by the Indian civil service.
++++++++++
I haven't checked the 2+2 boards to see the reaction to the Neteller announcement (I'm staying away from the interweb when I three-table, but I still notice my concentration wavering if something happens simultaneously at all three tables), but I can't say that it was particularly encouraging.
It's been eight weeks now, and Neteller have taken that long to come to an agreement with Navigant Consulting on the forensic accounting. Neteller then announces that within 75 days it should be in a position to announce a timetable for the redistribution of funds.
Meanwhile the CEO said that, although it might not appear on the surface that much is happening", much was going on behind the scenes. Personally, I don't reckon that eight weeks just to appoint someone to go through the accounts is "a lot going on". And the lack of communication to the depositors (who only learn what is going on via communications to shareholders) is little short of disgraceful.
Then again, I guess that if I was working for a company where half the staff had been made redundant and half the offices had been closed, I might not be that enthusiastic about coming into work.
_______________
But I tend to forget the positive bonus plays. Even after the Noble Poker Tuesday Night massacre, I'm up there more than the bonus I have earned and I've doubled my money in three months. The Pokerstars bonus was also profitable both in terms of bonus and in profit for the visit. But the Full Tilt experience was long-term and, virtually, level overall. A good example of not chasing the long-term work-offs.
Another plus was that I ended up in the black after a few hundred hands at $3-$6.
Full Tilt e-mailed me last week offering me $300 in bonus dollars. Unfortunately I had to activate it by March 23 and I only had two weeks to work it off.
I e-mailed them back, stating that I wouldn't be availing myself of their offer, because I would be in Las Vegas for the entire period that I had to work off the bonus and that, because of the recent events surrounding frozen accounts, I refused to play on Full Tilt except from my own desktop in my own home (see the situation where a guy's account was confiscated, and only later refunded, because he had played on the same IP address as used by a credit card fraudster -- that being a hotel in Las Vegas).
I suggested constructively that the bonus offers might have a less strict timescale.
Full Tilt's Customer Service Department lived up to its reputation by failing even to acknowledge receiving the e-mail.
It's so frustrating. The software is good and the freeroll challenges are good value, but they seem to have a customer service department trained by the Indian civil service.
++++++++++
I haven't checked the 2+2 boards to see the reaction to the Neteller announcement (I'm staying away from the interweb when I three-table, but I still notice my concentration wavering if something happens simultaneously at all three tables), but I can't say that it was particularly encouraging.
It's been eight weeks now, and Neteller have taken that long to come to an agreement with Navigant Consulting on the forensic accounting. Neteller then announces that within 75 days it should be in a position to announce a timetable for the redistribution of funds.
Meanwhile the CEO said that, although it might not appear on the surface that much is happening", much was going on behind the scenes. Personally, I don't reckon that eight weeks just to appoint someone to go through the accounts is "a lot going on". And the lack of communication to the depositors (who only learn what is going on via communications to shareholders) is little short of disgraceful.
Then again, I guess that if I was working for a company where half the staff had been made redundant and half the offices had been closed, I might not be that enthusiastic about coming into work.
_______________
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2007-03-22 12:10 pm (UTC)North Shore Mike worked for Full Tilt 3 months ago, he probably still does now, why not ask him?
http://northshoremike.livejournal.com/
no subject
Date: 2007-03-22 12:40 pm (UTC)But all that I was doing was providing feedback, to the feedback@fulltilt.com address, explaining why a marketing ploy of theirs did not work for me.
Now, most people just ignore failed marketing attempts. People who respond to them and tell you why they aren't working are gold dust. So the first thing you do when you get constructive suggestions in an e-mail is to acknowledge receipt of the e-mail.
That's about as simple, as ABC, as it gets. And yet Full Tilt don't seem able to manage even that.
PJ
Marketing Feedback
Date: 2007-03-22 01:23 pm (UTC)Re: Marketing Feedback
Date: 2007-03-23 10:16 pm (UTC)Time to replace "marketing professionals" with hyper-intelligent pigeons, I believe.
It has long been a truism (which probably means that it's fallacious): 90% of dissatisfied customers don't even bother to communicate their dissatisfaction. They just walk. (Although there's a horrible little sound-bite being repeated on the highly peculiar and very business-biased BBC World to the effect that 25% of hotel customers absolutely hate their experience, but are repeat business anyway. I prefer not to think about the implications of this.)
It really has been a truism for that long. I was once a Marketing Manager. I know these things. I read the bumf. Why it doesn't conform to the standard 80/20 rule -- which is in itself probably a crude approximation of a power series -- I do not know. But it is taken as common knowledge.
Which is interesting, because I have never come across a marketing department that pays the slightest attention to it.
I am currently in the process of dumping the idiots who translate my invoiced gross (some tens of thousands of SKr) into a net of 20%. I have been yelling to them for months that this does not make sense on any level. Some of it is, no doubt, down to my own ineptitude; some of it is to do with the Swedish tax laws; some of it is because they are Swiss; some of it is to do with the fact that they outsource the back-office to India and give the poor sods rotten instructions.
Most of it is to do with the fact that they are fucking incompetents with a "business process" that wouldn't last six seconds on a battlefield. Even one with bows and arrows.
Now, I have made this plain to them in my own inimitable way. I have made it plain to the head of the (rather large) recruitment company in my own inimitable way. I am not happy. I am fairly sure that he is not happy.
The end result is that I am either going to change bean counters, or I am not going to take a three month extension on my contract.
Immediate result: one lost customer.
Potential long-term result: loss of significant proportions of business, if not of a major source of custom altogether. However, the marketing and customer support staff in question will presumably move to another part of Switzerland, after polishing their CVs to demonstrate success.
It's this sort of behaviour that makes me wonder why right-wing loonies complain about "Command Economies"... no, strike that, right-wing loonies are generally too ignorant to understand the reference. (Although I much enjoyed the pure spurt of unalloyed hatred that I felt for Cameron when he compared Brown to Stalin. Even better than dreaming of assassinating the bitch Thatcher with an Uzi.)
What, exactly, makes private enterprise such a bastion of common sense and good practice?
no subject
Date: 2007-03-23 09:16 am (UTC)Not for the first time I have a differing view!! I have seen enough mud thrown on fora and blogs to realise that something must not be right, but I have never attached the same level of importance to the quality of email responses from poker sites. Yes, it would be great if I got the desired reply in 5 minutes flat all the time, but, frankly, it doesn't cause much of a problem to me when I get a bad (or no) response.
I guess my way of looking at it (and I haven't activated my FTP bonus offer yet either) would be:
* It is not a rip-off new sign up deal
* It is an unsolicited offer to existing players
* It doesn't happen to suit your circumstance, but that's not to say that they won't actually achieve what they want to achieve with this strategy overall - whatever that happens to be! maybe they expect low traffic over easter and are trying to increase it in that 2 week period? Who knows.
* You are no worse off as a result of this
In my world, I would simply lay back and think "shame I won't be around to take advantage of this one this time around - hey-ho." I certainly wouldn't be sending follow up emails as if I had somehow been wronged somewhere along the line :)
no subject
Date: 2007-03-23 09:19 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-03-25 05:25 am (UTC)I accept your third point, that it's possible that the offer was so restrictively designed for the reason you stated.
But that doesn't mean that an e-mail from me was worthless. It tells FTP that, had their offer been less restrictive (and, remember, the FTP bonuses are really just extra-generous rakeback; FTP still makes money from you) then I would have 'returned' to FTP.
And my main gripe was that they failed to acknowledge my e-mail.
Hell, as you say, FTP have the right to offer bonuses as, when and how they see fit. And I have the right to tell them why I won't be taking advantage of it (just in case their strategy was not specifically designed to generate increased traffic leading up to Easter). What I do think that any organization should do is take the trouble to acknowledge a receipt of a person sending something other than splenetic abuse to the feedback section. I didn't feel "wronged". I was actually trying to help them improve their marketing. So the "wronged" feeling came from the subsequent silence.
PJ