| Mike Nolan 2005-03-21, 5:52 pm |
| "Angelo De Pa1ma" <adpspammersgotohell@tellurian.net> writes:
quote:
>If you cannot provide reasonable customer service because you don't have the
>personnel or your workers "don't have the time" then you are not charging
>enough. My suggestion for a $1 charge is not meant to be punative but to
>cover the cost of ANSWERING GODDAMNED PHONE AND EMAIL MESSAGES, WHICH USCF
>DOESN"T XXXXING DO AND HASN'T DONE FOR THE PAST SIX OR SEVEN YEARS!!!!!!
>SHIT don't you guys get it????
quote:
>So please don't tell me it's not necessary to charge more.
The cost of answering the phone and responding to e-mail messages isn't
directly related to the ratings process, though ratings issues do account
for some percentage of those costs. However, many of the calls are about
memberships, national events, TLA's or other non-ratings issues.
The current rating fees were set in August of 2003 based upon my analysis
of the costs in 2001 and 2002 and were intended to bring the ratings
department to a roughly breakeven basis instead of losing perhaps
$50,000/year based on the cost structure that was in place over 2 years ago.
The USCF has changed dramatically since then, with most of the changes
probably leading to lower direct costs and overhead.
There's no question in my mind that it costs us less to rate games
submitted online and paid for by credit card than to upload, check and
rate events received in the mail on diskette, but we still have the
administrative costs of running the ratings system to pay for.
If Grant's concern that the 20 cents/game rate wasn't covering costs is
accurate, then 18 cents/game for events submitted online may not be
covering them either, though I think we are saving more than 2
cents/game in terms of reduced staff involvement in rating events
submitted online.
This is something that needs to be studied, changing rating fees again
is not something we should do casually. It would be best to wait a
few months to let everyone get up to speed in the new office and on
the new software before trying to measure those costs.
quote:
>In this day and age nobody should have to sit at a terminal entering 86 x 5
>results, not to mention player IDs and membership information. I doubt that
>anyone can do that for any extended period of time, at the rate you
>mentioned, without going crazy.
That's why the ratings and membership tasks in TN have been combined,
so that nobody has to spend all day on just one task.
So far this month, we have rated around 40,000 games from events received
in the mail and 24,000 from events submitted online. The former number
is skewed a bit because there was a large backlog of events received in
NY in early March that has pretty much been disposed of. (Not all those
events are rated yet, but we're close to the point where they've all been
entered into the system for validation.)
I have said all along that by December of this year I expect that 3/4 of
the games we rate will be submitted online.
--
Mike Nolan
|