CYBERSPACE —While most webmasters attend seminars, brainstorm over cocktails, swap links, post to message boards, and invest a fair amount of their copious free time energy fretting about how to attract and retain traffic and subscribers to their pay sites, Grooby Productions has encountered an almost unimaginable problem in the other direction. Is there such a thing as too much website loyalty?
That was the question that Grooby Production customer service representatives ultimately found themselves grappling with while trying to figure out why a customer wasn’t able to log onto the ShemaleYum.com website.
According to a company press release, representatives assumed the issue was a routine one, easily resolved. What they discovered was that their billing solution wasn’t up to the challenge of a truly hardcore tranny lover.
The customer in question had certainly been through the login process before. In fact, he’s been through it 99 times. CCBill technical support concluded that this much loyalty was actually the problem, because the system simply wasn’t set up for a 100th re-bill.
“We thought it was strange that CCBill would have a limit in,” company owner Steven gallon observes in the PR, “but on contacting Doug at CCIBill, we were told that we were the first website to have reached the limit! We went back into the management interface and found over 20 more people reaching the limit this month – and at least that much the following month on both our longest-running sites, Shemale Yum and Ladyboy-Ladyboy.com.”
Not one to let the sun go down on the opportunity to renew a membership, CCBill representatives quickly updated the software, which is likely a relief not only to subscribers but to the affiliates who’ve been cashing referral fee checks for the past eight years.
Gallon, whose Grooby Productions has worked with CCBill since 1999, isn’t particularly surprised that his sites are popular because, as he explains it, “When a customer is given a website that caters to what they need, they have no interest in looking elsewhere. We supply good quality, original and unique content, as well as have a virtual community which that customer would have trouble finding in the ‘real’ world. They have an invested interest in the website and its growth and remain members.”
And remain members is what an impressive number of people have done; with some transferring into the CCBilly system in 1999 after having joined Shemale Yum two years before.
“It just goes to show,” Gallon opines, “that niche and websites in very specific categories might not get the numbers of some of the bigger players, but we certainly get an awesome customer loyalty.”
As for the awesomely loyal customer whose billing cycle hit 100, he now has a free year site membership, new DVDs, and branded merchandise. Sometimes loyalty pays both ways.
