Quote:
Originally Posted by pompousjohn
He's essentially talking about direct sales. It's very effective for getting raw joins but the potential for abuse is huge, since programs have no way to monitor what is being said to customers to convince them to join, and the vast majority of customers joining your site through chat have no interest in it, they were promised something else in exchange for joining.
However with chat sales, you don't have a customer, the chatter does. You have a join.
I have had chatters set up fake cancellation emails and send out fake refund receipts to customers to make them think they weren't spending money. I've had chatters call the customer service number pretending to be the customer and cancel.
It's a huge headache and if you don't know how to deal with it you should not get involved.
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Yes, the relationship between the chatter agent and the "customer" who does joins, guided by chatter, it is the main point. Honestly I had not many chargebacks from chat traffic, the issue it is more that they buy once only and the minimum.
About "programs have no way to monitor what is being said to customers to convince them to join", a program can still email a few customers asking this, and some will reply, but it is an unsolicited email you have to send, to question users.
To give an idea up to what degree the customers are doing joins just to make the chatter agents happy, rather than due to interest in the joined site(s), here's a cool story: my cam program's affiliate reports are showing not only an anonymous number of signups, but also the nicknames of each free or pay user that you as affiliate are converting. This is perfect for chat traffic agents, because they can check user by user by their nickname, and spot any missing signup. So they can bust either me (the program) for shaving, or the cardholder for not signing up as claimed.
The fun fact it is that when one signup was missing (this was simply because the cardholder googled tubecamgirl.com then clicked in results, rather than click on the affiliate link posted in skype/yahoo by the agent... a classic), the chat agent forwarded me the Epoch receipt email that the cardholder had forwarded to the chat agent as proof that he had signed up on my site. "See? This guy signed-up, here's the receipt that he got". This is quite some control.