David Fiske Affiliate Marketing & Web Development

Christmas is bad enough with plenty of "daily deals" to contend with, discount voucher codes as well as the many websites that seem to have recently had a redesign without proper deeplink URL redirection.

So why do networks feel they need to muscle in on this by not replying to emails?
 
There's a few things that get my giddy goat going.

Account Managers Replaced With "Customer Services"

Lately when I've gone to contact my usual account managers for several programs they have either left or have been replaced by the evil "customer services". Hiding behind "customer services" distances yourself further from affiliates, making them less likely to contact you and therefore less likely to work with you. Infact, it could turn us into network-unloyal affiliates.

Finding That Important Contact

I had a question about a technical issue and needed to speak to a merchant's technical team directly. It's taken one network a month and a half to reply to a support ticket with the reply:

Please can you send all questions that have been unanswered directly to ****. You will still need to raise a ticket on them.

I will try my best to answer otherwise i will need to send directly to ****.

Luckily I used my initiative and contacted the merchant directly who replied within a day or so. Had I have waited, I would have now forgotten why I contacted them in the first place.

Deeplinking Issues

A couple of sites have been relaunched and consequently require deep linking URL changes by affiliates. Besides this being a result of a lack of foresight by the merchant's web design team, it's also a right royal pain, especially to bloggers.

The worst one is when your deeplinks lead to a page that tells the user to delete cookies. Subsequently I have changed network on this particular problem as the original network hasn't done a thing yet. In all fairness I did receive a phone call which is when I told them I had switched networks. "Oh" is the best I received :(

Tickets/Applications That Take Years To Sort Out

I once had to wait a year and a half for an application decision - by which time the site had changed two or three times and was no longer suitable for the merchant in question.

Tickets seem slower during Q2-Q4 of 2008 across most networks I've contacted. Gone are the days of "guaranteed responses" as that seemed to fall flat on it's face.

Is There A Solution At If So, What Is It?

There is a solution. There's three actually.

1) Training

Train your staff to move somewhat quicker than they do. A month and a half for a reply (above) is outrageous. If I had bought something from a shop and it took a month and a half for a reply, I'd be livid.

2) Employ More Staff

If there are too many emails going to "customer services" to reply adequately to within 24 hours, you need more support staff - or you need a better technical team to rectify the problems as I suspect some emails cover the same topics.

3) Better Ticketing Systems

My personal favourite is Kayako SupportSuite. All I get to see is the front-end but that's simple enough to use and lets me see which tickets are open and closed. It also lets me keep an eye on outstanding tickets.

One great mod I've seen is the ability to display the average ticket response time and the queue length:


(These aren't stats for a networks - it's for a web host. 31 minutes for a response by a network is a dream if I'm not mistaken)

This offers a great deal of transparency to affiliates. I'd be less annoyed if the panel said the average response time was 3 days and I received a reply in 3 days. I'd be more annoyed if I expected (as I do) a reasonably fast response that ends up taking 3 days because I'm not aware of the queue length and response time.

All I ask is that networks help themselves by helping affiliates. If we had no problems, we wouldn't need to email. If we received timely responses, we wouldn't moan or need to post on the A4U forum (taking up more of your time). If we didn't email you, you could spend more time developing tools and applications for us, you could recruit more merchants - you could do whatever you wanted.

Happy affiliates = productive, reasonably loyal affiliates.