My Venting Session

So I am going to start with the sugar before I say the spice.

Sugar #1
US U23's not only beat Canada 3-0 in the semi-final to advance to the final - they qualified for the Olympics in Beijing and they won in good fashion. GOOD JOB BOYS and GOOD LUCK THIS SUMMER! So the irony is they qualify for the Olympics without having to win the qualifying final. But they will play regardless. And Honduras is in the final as well. Looks like Mexico goes home - YEAH!!!

Sugar #2
We got another customer! And we got our developer moving forward with our database. Exciting stuff. So by the end of April - we should be ready to really rock and roll with our web site.

Spice #1

Tryouts happened last weekend. In some ways I love tryouts. It's an ego thing with me. I get a high knowing I can in 3 hours identify a player's mental, technical, tactical, and physical ability. And knowing I can do this evaluating a variety of players. And then knowing further, that over the course of the year - I am going to prove myself right. Yes, that's right.........I am a right fighter. I love to be right. I love to win. I love to prove someone wrong. Is it a flattery asset of mine - no, I know it is a behavioral flaw of mine. But I don't care. :)

So moving on to the good stuff. So we promoted 2 players - always a good thing! We dropped one player and we picked up 5 good players - including a keeper that WANTS to play for us. Oh I can't tell you how happy we are about that.

The bad stuff. SO one of the players we kept - failed to contact us within 24 hours of posting the results. Actually it was past 72 hours before the parent contacted us informing us that the player would like to play for us again.

Here is the problem. We stated to contact us within 24 hours to reserve a spot. We then followed up with the family 48 hours after - because we have to start notifying alternates. You know where this is going correct?

So 72 hours later - we contacted our first alternate to offer her a spot. About 8 hours later - we get an email from the other parent. So now I ask you....what do you think we should do? And before you answer that, keep in mind the following aspects:

Our team/club is not cheap. If you want to play on our team - which is less than if you are on the A team - you pay a minimum of $2000 a year.......to the club. This does not count the money spent on uniforms, travel costs, tournament fees, indoor fees, etc. So realistically it's about $3000.

So think about how one person's lack of organization, could impact YOUR child's playing time? How do you feel about that knowing how much you pay for your child to participate.

So do we eat crow and accept the girl - we like her - but the mom has been like this the past year. Apparently she has a lack of organizational skills. The excuse - they were moving and didn't have Internet connection. The problem with that is we also had one of our players send the player a text message. And the girl is 14 - she isn't 11. So we also feel that this should not be the sole responsibility of the parent. After all - the girl is not only old enough to to contact us, she had means to do so even if her home Internet was not available. And we had agreed that after last year's tryouts, we would never let parents hold us hostage again. it's just not fair to us, the team or to the alternates that otherwise would take a spot on our team. So with all that said....how do you feel about it?

Spice #2
Customers are obnoxious - this would be my day job. I find it amazing that i work in an industry where people think you should fix their errors and shortcomings, for free. That their ignorance is unimportant, and your customer service should make their problem right. Because it isn't their fault they screwed up. And because they don't want to have to explain how their lack of attention to detail caused a fracas. Ahh mortgage brokers. I hate them.

The other day, we had a $732 charge we assessed to a customer's credit card for rescore charges he incurred. A rescore is when a broker takes data from the individual and their creditors and passes it on to the three credit bureaus in an attempt to clean up their credit file - so they can get a better FICO score so they can fund a loan or get a better loan term for the borrower. the consumer can do this for free to the repositories directly - but it takes about 60 days to go through this process. The broker can do it within a week - but for a hefty price tag.

So the guy signs off on the order form - one inch below where it discussed the pricing. We got billed, therefore he gets billed. Well of course he called. he was pissed. His problem? He didn't understand how much the total bill was going to be. But he has been doing loans for 10 years. his rescores have been partially comped at other CRA's because he had bundled service packages. So the bottom line was, he said he was only going to pay $200 and that he was going to charge it back. Go ahead buckaroo - you won't win the charge back cause your signature signed off on the pricing. So he failed to read the pricing and if he had a question on it, he didn't ask anyone for a total amount either - even though he was the one who checked what services to perform on what bureaus, etc. His gripe - no one told him the total before the services were performed.

And how is that our fault when you were responsible for doing the math - we gave you the prices. Ah but the CS person spoke with him twice about the services - why didn't she tell me? First off - it wasn't our CS, it was our credit agency's CS person. He didn't care. And he tried to tell me that good customer service to retain him as a customer would be to basically eat it on his behalf. Cause....he knows lots of originators and he can tell people not to use us...........oh no, a little bad press - alert the media!

I told him - that' ok, our CEO is friends with your CEO. And then I told him - it would take us over a year or 2 before we began to see any profit from his account if we ate the fee - only in the hopes that he didn't get upset at anything else and remained our customer.

We have people scream at us all the time because we won't fix the name information on the credit report they pulled - when they were the retards that typoed it in the first place and we even gave them a review screen. The reason we don't.....we just can't pull the report back in our system is all if we do fix it. But it pisses them off that we won't fix their mistake.

Do you see my woes?