Ranting

I'm going to rant for a bit about the way the First Land program termination is being handled. If that's not your thing, I suggest you skip this one.

What kind of morons do they have working at LL?!! Hello! Bait-n-switch and false advertising are considered pisspoor business tactics and just happen to be illegal in most of the USA. Do they not even bother to THINK before doing something? What kind of dumb are they putting in the drinking fountain over there? Did it even occur to anyone over there to grandfather the program out?

Promising something and then removing it without compensation is a GREAT way to make your customers look forward to doing more business with you. Especially if you want them to invest in your goals and tell their business partners about how great you are. Integrity attracts partners. Within two years, quite likely less, you're going to have next generation product offerings trying to tempt away your customers - start thinking about why they'll stay with you.

Either you DO want individuals to buy memberships, or you DON'T. Pick a business focus and stick with it. Don't struggle over conflicted ideals or vague dreams - know what you want and make it happen.

If you do want individual accounts, try treating people with small accounts as worthy of your time. Effective customer service, arrange things so that people have some time to adjust to changes that will affect them, support efforts to train your user base so you can spend less on customer service. Keep improving mainland and island controls so people make fewer support calls.

If you don't want to keep handling them, stop selling them. Let attrition work for six months or a year, then sell all your existing small accounts to a third party. Hell, we might get better customer service out of that deal. The L-Word's orientation area seems to generate much better-educated newbies than the main areas. When it takes 5 DAYS to get a crappy email back from some support guy who didn't appear to read the initial request I'm not impressed. Hate dealing with all that Mainland support? Bundle the Mainland and a sim rollback button with the account management.