pokerstars generally has good support, and if they had a connection problem with neteller, then its unfortunate.. They shouldn't have told you 5-10 minutes if it wasn't that, but you were lucky to get any compensation.. However, if you think Stars support is bad, good luck with some of the other sites.. Good chance FTP would have not even read your email in a day for example.. partypoker support has its issues as do most of the non-US sites do.. It sucks you didn't have an alternative method to deposit, you are lucky you are not in the US since it seems many US players have to juggle how they may deposit or withdraw since one day an option is working the next day that option may not..

For players in the UK, stars seems very friendly as they seem to have special freerolls alot for UK players and they also had a promo last year where basically everyone in UK that put in a little volume became a supernova..

I would suggest you cool down a little bit, before being I am not going to play there.. All the sites have problems, Stars has the least amount of connection/server problems and have not had a security scandal.. Obviously this decision is yours, just saying maybe give it a few days and see how you feel when the frustration level has settled down..

Sick brag about being able to deposit on stars at all. *sigh

 

Originally Posted by astonvillain

I have never had a spat with any poker site in my entire life until now. Typically British, I take an awful lot before I complain.lol

The problem started the other morning. I decided to shift my my session to 6am-Midday BST registration, playing mainly the the 30 freezes and down on stars and the 24 Freezes on tilt. 8/12 of the tournaments were top be played on stars. I dragged myself out of bed at 5.30am after 3 hours sleep and started to register my 12 tournaments. One problem, stars account empty so needed to refill from neteller where I have a decent amount of $. This is always instant so has never been a problem. I got a message that the transaction was going to take "5/10mins". This was ok, no problem. Unfortunately it took many hours to go through (after my session was to finish), I tried to deposit 8/9 times during this time and got the same message that things were to be sorted in "5-10 minutes".

Unfortunately I played 3 tournaments that morning in 8 hours and was not amused. I emailed support to complain, wasn't nasty, insulting or anything. Support said basically not our fault but heres 200 FPPs as a goodwill gesture to show you how important you are as a customer.

I explained that if the message had said that pokerstars are having problems with their connection to neteller and it may take a while I would have just gone back to bed and played my normal schedule. But it didn't at all.

I asked them to review this message and take some kind of responsibility. I also told them that their 200 points are an insult. They did not read my mails properly at all, despite me exchanging correspondance somehow with 3 managers and 4 or 5 support staff. When I replied to a message from a manager I got a reply from a totally new support person. Then they escalated it to a new manager, when I replied to their message it went back down to support. Over and over again.

My issue is with the "5-10minutes" message, this was wholly misleading and not the fact that my transfer did not go through with its usually immediacy. Somehow pokerstars did not want to take any responsibility at all and all managers and support staff thought my problem was with the time it took, despite me CLEARLY telling them that it was their message that screwed my morning up. I looked for a contact to complain to, is there one? I asked for contact details of a couple of managers at the company, they didn't refuse to give them to me, they basically ignored me.

I can't play at Stars now, customer service have ruined any good will I had for them. If anyone wants a transcript of the conversation I had with them I am happy to forward it. That team need training, basically listen to your customer then you might address the issue. There is clearly an arrogance here, US players have not really got the choice to walk away from the big 2 sites. I have got choice and I choose to vote with my feet.

Stars has the best support , everyone knows it, thats a pretty ridiculous title of a thread. Looks like u were sent an automated response to a temporary connectivity problem between stars and netteller. It sucks but these things happen. Maybe have your deposits made before u climb out of bed so early gl

didnt read thread but whatever your situation is you still chose a bad title. PS has the best support in the buisness, and I would be glad if FTP cared for their customers half as much as PS.

unfortunately i waisted an entire minute of my life reading this, and you're flat out overreacting. No where else would you even get 200 fpps and leaving stars is just retarded.

 

Originally Posted by dude904

unfortunately i waisted an entire minute of my life reading this, and you're flat out overreacting. No where else would you even get 200 fpps and leaving stars is just retarded.

 

Originally Posted by astonvillain

Why the hell is leaving Stars retarded? I can play on any number of sites, why should I play at a site who do not value their customers. I know we have an awfiul lot of fanboys for one site or another but there is no excuse for the appalling customer service. I knew when I posted this that the Stars lovers amongst us were to jump blindly to the defence of their beloved site. This time pokerstars know they're out of order and wouldn't defend themselves because they were very very wrong. Who needs to be told something 14 times before they get it?
I think people deserve better from both FT and Stars. We aren't gonna get better treatment while we have attitudes like this.

I feel the reality is that this isn't a widespread thing with Stars (would have been worse if you were dealing with another site I feel), and what happened was eventually recognized by them which is rare in the industry.. I just don't see which sites are you going to move to that have as good service, as good servers, as good software, etc. etc.. In my opinion, all the big pokersites have bigger issues.. Its not that we are stars fanboys its really just experience has taught us they are good when compared to the rest of the industry.. I have been playing myself on some of the smaller sites, so if you find one that you think is better than stars, please let me know as I might give it a shot if they haven't had a scandal..

 

Originally Posted by astonvillain

Why the hell is leaving Stars retarded? I can play on any number of sites, why should I play at a site who do not value their customers. I know we have an awfiul lot of fanboys for one site or another but there is no excuse for the appalling customer service. I knew when I posted this that the Stars lovers amongst us were to jump blindly to the defence of their beloved site. This time pokerstars know they're out of order and wouldn't defend themselves because they were very very wrong. Who needs to be told something 14 times before they get it?
I think people deserve better from both FT and Stars. We aren't gonna get better treatment while we have attitudes like this.

I've never had a problem with stars. They are by far the best. I actually tried transferring a large sum of money last night which they flagged, and within 5 minutes of my reply email it went through. You got a raw deal here but I used to have the same problems with netteller back when it was legal for Americans. I'm sure stars did everything in their power to fix the situation, and you got free FPPs out of it.

I appreciate your views re- pokerstars customer service. I wish I could post the 28 messages that went to and fro but that may possibly mean that p5s need a new server. To be able to offer good customer service the main things you need to do is
1 Listen to your customer.
2 Empathise
3 Take responsibilty
When I have to explain to 5 different people that the problem wasn't that I can't deposit, it is that the automated message was wholly misleading and resulted in a wasted day for me. And after every clear explanation they ALL told me that its not their fault etc that I can't deposit it gets very very tiresome. I have 5 and 6 year old daughters, they would have understood the iussue very clearly. With regard to the 3 above criteria for good customer service, pokerstars managed to screw up all 3. No organisation in a competitive marketplace could afford to get away with such unprofessional practice.
They don't care that I won't be playing there tomorrow, it's hardly going to kill their bottom line. My prediction is that when US players are given the choice to play anywhere they want again, Pokerstars will have to train their staff to a much higher level/ be a much more customer driven organisation/wll rightly lose a huge amount of market share. I am not saying this with spite/anger or with any ulterior motive, if I was a divisional head managing this team heads would roll today. Totally appalling customer service, being in the Isle of Mann maybe they've caught the British disease.
If this was just 1 employee that was bad at their job that would be different. It was 5 of them, 2 of which are managers. Simply didn't listen, didn't care took no responsibilty. It wasn't just a bad day, the emails were flying for 3 days.
Again I repeat, I know things go wrong sometimes. I am not moving away from them because processes went wrong. I'm voting with my feet because they didn't listen over and over again. And by not listening they compounded their problem and wasted many more hours of my precious time. I will not contribute to the wages of staff who are incompitant who work for a company who obviously don't train their staff properly. For heaven's sake there is no obvious place to even complain about such treatment and they only react when a post comes on P5s about it. There is a principle here.

I read the first post but not the rest and I sympathize with pokerstars because after reading the OP I am still a little confused.

Let me see if this is right, you tried to deposit, their system was down you got an automated message that said it would take 5-10 minutes because system was down. You tried a few times and their system never went back up. You were upset because you could have been sleeping if they had someone who told you they weren't sure how long it would take instead of having an automated message that said their system was down. Their apology and gift wasn't enough for you, so you bitched some more. They said they were working on your deposit and you are upset because they didn't understand you.

So how close was I? Seems to me like it is more of a problem with you being not so clear because it took me like 10 minutes to figure out your few paragraphs and 5 support members couldn't figure it out at all.

so they had a problem taking deposits and you did not like the message that poped up get over it move on. it's not worth 28 e-mails or what ever you sent to them.

@OP What are you new? Stars has far and away the best support. FTP is a distant distant 2nd and UB is just completely horribad.

In my opinion your first mistake was not having your bankroll ready well in advance (like days before) of starting your session. Your buyin transaction got queued up and some silly coder somewhere threw a message in there, guessing 5-10 minutes would probably be the average time to wait, and you probably found a corner case.

Your email to pokerstars should have just said "Why does the message say 5-10 minutes if it can end up taking hours or days? Please forward this along to the dev team or whoever is responsible so that players aren't waiting unnecessarily."

You should treat this as what it is, a minor annoyance that you should only have to deal with once. Not a major fumble by Pokerstars CS and not really post-worthy on the forums. Let us know how you like the response time or the downright ignorant responses from the other sites support orgs though after you get a chance to experience them.

 

Originally Posted by TC_Clueless

@OP What are you new? Stars has far and away the best support. FTP is a distant distant 2nd and UB is just completely horribad.

In my opinion your first mistake was not having your bankroll ready well in advance (like days before) of starting your session. Your buyin transaction got queued up and some silly coder somewhere threw a message in there, guessing 5-10 minutes would probably be the average time to wait, and you probably found a corner case.

Your email to pokerstars should have just said "Why does the message say 5-10 minutes if it can end up taking hours or days? Please forward this along to the dev team or whoever is responsible so that players aren't waiting unnecessarily."

You should treat this as what it is, a minor annoyance that you should only have to deal with once. Not a major fumble by Pokerstars CS and not really post-worthy on the forums. Let us know how you like the response time or the downright ignorant responses from the other sites support orgs though after you get a chance to experience them.

I told them clearly that the message was the problem, 14 times. On the 14th mail finally they got it. Seems this customer service is the best we can expect, are you kidding me. I would agree that cake have better CS as do ipoker. I know that PS employ lots of people and I expected a certain amount of defence., but how can you defend the indefencable. I already had low expectations, I am certainly not new to poker.

UK players don't have deposit problems, every site always goes straight through within 1 minute with neteller, and I mean always. There is always a first and I accept that no problem. What I don't accept is being told that something will take 10 minutes max when it takes hours. I also don't accept having to tell 5 people 14 times before they get it.

 

Originally Posted by fly44

They were wrong. I dont think there was any malice when they said your deposit would go through quickly, they just had technical problems. I understand being so upset if this happens often, but one mistake hardly seems like a major inconvenience.

I want to be on your side because I am also a Villa fan but if you were on Full Tilt you wouldn't have gotten a response for a day. But you do have the luxury of playing the Euro sites, so do that if you like.

I'm not saying that pokerstars wanted to annoy me so this is what they did. I am saying that they bahaved unprofessionally and clearly need training/new staff. They could have easily avoided my action, all it would have took is the reply I got in the 14th reply to be the first.
I managed a cs team many years ago for a large Japanese IT manufacturer. If my guys performed their role this badly they would have been out of a job, they didn't because thay were pretty well trained and listened to their customers. To get the scale of the incompitance you would have to read the email chain. Awful.

And well done for supporting my beloved Aston Villa!

 

Originally Posted by TC_Clueless

Alright, well, I think it was a corner case and it wasn't listed on their little flipchart. if you clearly said "please forward this along to someone in your development team that has the authority to change the message so that people aren't waiting needlessly" and you got back the same canned "not our fault" response over 14 exchanges then I guess you do have some room to be annoyed.

Still seems pretty minor and I think you should judge the site based on the opportunities it presents -- I think you'd be doing yourself a disservice to self-ban from Pokerstars. Play on your other sites for a couple weeks and come back once the bad taste in your mouth has faded.

Would you eat in a busy restaurant that served great food but treated you like an idiot and cared not a jot about your opinion. Personally I wouldn't. I would rather eat in the smaller restaurant down the road who value me and bothers to listen if theres a problem. The smaller restaurant will be superior if their standards are higher.
I think everything that I'm saying about stars is also true of full tilt. Roll on the time that the market opens up and competition will mean that things like this will not happen. Players will truly have power rather than these arrogant sites that we play on.
TBH my ROI would be more like 75% rather than the 40% it is if I were to self ban from tilt and stars. Maybe this situation will be a benefit and that their incompitance has done me a favour.

 

Originally Posted by bonflizubi

wow. poker players will put up with a lot.

OP is dead on.

So are the responses that Stars is generally better than other sites and that FTP might have taken days.

That said, support in this business, regardless of site, generally sucks. We wouldn't stand for it IRL at the local store or from our credit card company. Just because we have few options for switching (especially the US players amongst us) is no excuse for accepting anything less than quality service.

service that is by any scale relatively better than others does still not make it good service.

@OP Unfortunately you have business experience and high expectations. (I suffer the same problem) You're not going to get any support from the vast majority here that are <24 yo... :(

In the business world these companies would get murdered, particularly the big 2. It's almost like people are greatful that they can pay their rake to these guys, amazing how easily people absorb marketing.
It's like saying X is a good person because he's not as bad as Y. X has only been convicted of manslaughter where Y is a convicted mass murderer.
Expectations have to be lifted, these guys are getting rich and offering so very little in return. I knew when I posted this that I would face a certain amount of defence for pokerstars. Sorry guys, Pokerstars is run less professionally than my local pub and with an awful lot less integrity.

There have been times where I forgot to unreg for the Sunday million $215 and a $109 turbo and got refunded both times and I hardly ever play on stars so I think there support is great, sorry it didn;t work out for you