The Agloco Official's reply to the referral system issues

While reading through the 205 comments to the latest post (Early March Update in the Agloco Official Blog I came across a reply made by the Agloco Official to the recent members' comments on issues with the referral system that I thought was worth sharing.

here it is ......

AGLOCO Official said,

March 3, 2007 @ 1:31 am

I would like to take a moment to address the recent comments on issues with the referral system. While most Members have been very satisfied with the referral system, there have been some isolated cases in which Members have contended that a referral has been ‘lost’. In every case we have investigated thus far, we have found the integrity of the referral system to be in perfect working order. In almost every case, the issue turned out to be one of three things (having said that, we still want to hear about problems as we are always looking for possible problems in the system that we could fix – so please keep sending them in to help@agloco.com).

Either:
1) The referral had not yet verified their email address (credit for the referral is not tallied until the referral verifies their email address and signs in for the first time – many times new Members wait a day or two or end up deleting the verification email by mistake as it gets put in the email folder – please note we tell them on the website to look there, but sometimes they do not).

2) Someone thought a referral signed up under them, when they mistakenly (or purposely) did not.

or 3) If a direct referral’s network is growing faster than a Member’s own, it is because the network growth is coming from that referral’s fifth level and thus they would be the sixth level for the original Member, out of the five-level system by which referrals are counted (since the referral system is designed that a network grows exponentially each level down, this is actually quite common). This includes people who have their spouses signup as under them and then put all new recruits under the spouse, which pushes referrals out even quicker.

While these problems are NOT computer ‘glitches’, they are user errors that will sometimes happen, but may be preventable in some cases. The third problem we can’t do anything about, but we are taking steps to help Members address the first two.

For #1, we realize that some of our verification emails get put into the junk/spam folders. In many cases, the solution is simply to check your email system’s bulk/spam folder, and the verification email will be there. Other times the verification email may take an hour or two to get into the inbox after we send it (it is always sent immediately after the person enters their data).

In order to make this as smooth as possible, in the last few weeks we have provided more detailed instructions for Members signing up now regarding the email verification step, and we now show Members the email address they entered when signing up in case there was a typo.

For #2, we have been looking into the possibility of posting the referring Member’s ID# on the automatic signup page. Keep in mind that if we do this (so a Member can get visual verification of who he/she is signing up under), we will also need to add an user option to clear and change that Member ID (in case the referral sees the Member ID and realizes it is not the correct one). If automatic referrals can eliminate the ID, some may do this simply because they do not fully understand the AGLOCO referral system and thus new referrals may be ‘lost’. As you can see, this is not a win-only solution.

I cannot promise whether we will go one way or another on this issue of posting the referring Member’s ID, but we will be continuing to discuss it and possible other improvements.

Again, we are taking your concerns about the referral system quite seriously and we are investigating each complaint individually to verify that it is continuing to work properly.

Brian