http://www.unitedmania.com/united-begins-offseason-housecleaning-inside-and-out-10677 I give my $.02 on the events of the past 48 hours...
Getting rid of the marketing staff maybe legit for the owners but to the fans it seems like amputating a leg to cure a brain tumor (DK). James
No salesman on this planet could have sold tickets to this pile of dung. Fire those who were unable to sell tickets to this is short sighted.
My ticket rep got axed the day BEFORE the final game. He had the courtesy to call me and let me know. I was scheduled to meet with him and his boss (re: the Youth Club I work with) in the Champions Club before the Houston game and he said that meeting would go ahead as planned so I dutifully turned up an hour before kick-off and waited for 30 mins. No-one turned up so I manged to collar my previous rep who called "the boss" who simply said "get his card and I'll call him on Monday". I've STILL not heard from this guy nor do I know who my new ticket sales rep is. Seems to me they are firing the wrong bloody people in the FO (my rep called me frequently throughout the season jsyt to see how things were going and to see if I needed help in our club ... he might have not been able to sell as many tickets as his boss would have liked, but you can be damn sure that was NOT for want of trying ... something his boss seems incapable of at the moment). Maybe someone from the FO is looking at this thread and might want to give"Roy" a kick to call me
You may want to call the temp agency thats in charge of staffing the DC FO. Maybe they know where the boss is. As of right now all inquiries should go to DKs office. He is in charge.
I don't have a sales rep anymore, I have a "customer retention specialist", whatever that means. I mostly just get bulk emails from them announcing events or trying to get me to renew my season tickets. No personal emails or phonecalls like I used to get. In the past, even when the team was stinking it up on the field I at least felt good about my interactions with people who worked for United. Now, with no sales rep and with the continued deciomation of the behind the scenes people who have been with United for years I don't even have that feeling. It's probably a minor issue for some (maybe even most) people, but for me I want to at least have something to feel good about. United had an almost family feel about it, now it is just sterile and business-like. I used to think the team was going to bottom out in terms of fan support; that is even when they put up a bad product on the field there would be a certain core level of fans that would stay no matter what. Now, I worry that they are doing the one thing that could likely reduce that core fanbase and that is alienate the long-time season ticket holders with just bad customer service.
I had 2 or 3 (ironically-named) retention specialists before the season started this year. The one we ended up with had a simple problem to solve when we had ticket scanning problems, and could not seem to do it until we got nasty with him via email and sic'ed a higher-ranking United FO person on them. Did he even come by the seats once to check in? nope. Easiest Customer Service ever and he managed to mess it up. I noticed yesterday he's no longer on the FO page on the website.
and this sums up the problem Apparently if DCU loses a season ticket holder it wasn't because the team played badly year after year or there seems to be no reasonable plan to improve the team or get a stadium (until recently). It was because the customer rentention specialist didn't do what it took for you to renew.