My personal experience, having played at both Casino Action casinos, and Casino Rewards casinos, is that the former has some of the best support in the industry, and the latter some of the worst.
At Casino Action, my emails were answered after 15-20 minutes, and my live chats were answered instantly (or within 30 seconds). Support seemed relatively knowledgable, and would generally answer the question correctly and promptly.
At Casino Rewards, emails generally took 2-3 days to be answered, and when they were they came with a timestamp of 1st January 1970, so they disappered to the bottom of my email folder. Live chat was usually never answered. I once tried consistently for an entire hour to get hold of someone – mostly it just said ‘all agents busy’, but sometimes it would say “You are in the queue, you will be answered in 5 minutes” and would continue to say that for anything up to 15 minutes, then it would say “..4 minutes..” for another 15 minutes, etc. When I did speak to someone, I found them fairly illiterate, and usually just reading from a script. On a couple of occasions I sent emails asking two or three questions, and got back a copy+paste of part of the FAQ that maybe answered one of the questions, but ignored the rest. Sometimes it didn’t answer any of the questions.
All of my experiences were prior to the takeover, most recently being around April 2006. So the influx of new users after the merge was not the cause.
Combined with the reputation for some of the worst support in the industry, there is also your bizarre bonus policy: send a player a bonus, then lock his rewards account and call him a bonus abuser as soon as he claims it – though I gather that may have improved of late.
I can quite understand why some affiliates were rather annoyed at the revenue they lost when Aztec and Phoe moved to Casino Rewards. But, to be honest, it wasn’t surprising – Casino Action are one of the best groups in the industry and CR simply don’t compare. Perhaps the difference wasn’t obvious to some, particularly if you don’t regularly play at the casinos you promote (or doubly so if you didn’t promote CR at all prior to the handover), which perhaps has caused the frustration. To put it another way, if I had been promoting Aztec and Phoe prior to the handover, then saw who they were being sold to, my first reaction would be “uh oh, I’m going to lose all those customers”
That’s not to say of course that CR isn’t profitable for affiliates, and doesn’t provide a reasonable gaming experience for many of its players – I’m sure it does. But it simply can’t compare to Casino Action, and so the migrated player base must have been affected to some extent.
Having said all that, I just did a quick test – logging into my Blackjack Ballroom account for the first time in some months, and choosing Live Chat – and found that support responded instantly. I haven’t re-tested email support, but it’s good to see that you have made some improvements to live chat at least.
To Ryan: please understand that I mean no disrespect here, clearly none of the above is your responsibility and you have to work with what you’re given. I am speaking frankly, but honestly, and I hope these criticisms will be taken constructively, as I intend them.