Good service is not ‘rake dependent’.

How do you keep players loyal?

Once you have a significant player base, the next dilemma for the affiliate is how to keep players actually playing.

With the industry being so competitive now, any affiliate that is serious about his job cannot afford to just sign up a player and assume he’ll just keep playing and generating commission for him.

You would hope that the player has chosen you at first because he felt that your deal and service were the best option for him at the time.

However, if your attitude, as the affiliate, is that your job is now done, then you are not going to be successful.

Just because you provided the best option 3 months ago does not mean that the player is not constantly looking around, just to make sure he can’t do better.

The duty of the affiliate is to make sure that he continues to offer the best deals and service for every single player.

You have to make sure that there is not another option out there that is clearly better than what you offer and, if there is, do whatever you can to ensure you provide a reasonable alternative for your players, just in case they start considering a change.

This is a full time job in itself.

It is very easy to spend time on a player that rakes $15k a month, bend over backwards for him, answer his emails before others and generally ‘go the extra mile’.

But the mark of the good affiliate is to do this for every single player.

The guy that played a few $1 MTT’s last month who is asking you about the VIP system on iPoker is just as important. He is asking you because he does not know and he sees you as the person to answer his questions.

As the affiliate, you must never lose site of what you are supposed to be doing.

You are offering a service to the players. This is not ‘rake dependent’ or ‘volume related’.

You cannot be successful if you don’t appreciate something as fundamental as ’best service for all customers’.

The guy that made you $0.03 in commission last month may just know somebody who grinds on PokerStars and rakes $10k a month.

If you spent hour after hour on MSN explaining how a VIP system worked or even just chatting to the guy that just moved house and was unable to play lately but was hoping to start again soon, who will they recommend when their $10k raker friend tells then they are thinking of moving from Stars because they can’t play any longer without some sort of rake back?

The nature of the industry is such that large scale advertising is not really cost effective for mid-sized affiliates like ourselves.

More new business is going to come from referrals and ‘word of mouth’ and, for that very reason, every single one of your players is equally important as the rest, regardless of whether they rake $10k a month or $0.

If you are doing your job well then you should notice a pattern….

Players who have not even played under you for maybe a year will still contact you to see if you can hook their friend up with a deal. Players that rake high amounts will contact you BEFORE they consider some other deal that apparently returns higher amounts.

It is like a show of loyalty for the good service. They are thinking of moving to a different deal but wanted to give you the chance to at least match it and keep their business.

If your service was not up to scratch then these players would move without saying a word.

The fact that they take the time to contact you first means that they appreciate the job you do for them and want to reward you.

The bottom line is that in order to keep players happy, you have to make sure you don’t get left behind.

A good example of this would be the recent move of Betfair to the Ongame Network.

This is going to lead to increased interest in Ongame sites and deals so we had to make sure that when players asked about Ongame, we have a deal that is likely to compare well with what is being offered by other affiliates.

The fact is that we did already have a perfect deal for that situation, but if that Betfair move had happened 2 months earlier, then we would not.

We would have had to make sure that we contacted as many Ongame sites as possible to negotiate the best possible deal available, ready for any enquiries we get.

And all of the time still contacting players, keeping them updated about developments that may interest them and generally making sure we have a list of happy customers.

I sincerely hope we achieve this but we also welcome any criticism that players may have.

We cannot hope to improve deals if we are not aware of the things that are wrong.

I am very proud to say that any negative feedback we get is almost exclusively related to problems that are down to the poker site, as opposed to our own service, but we still want to get involved and try to resolve any issues for the player as soon as possible.

It’s just another thing that an affiliate should want to do as part of providing the very best service possible.

I am sure that we would hear if we are doing it wrong………………..

Nik
(Tetleyboy)