Sadly the "Stepford Wife" mentality at ChaCha still exists in all its glory! This post on the ChaCha guide forums just about sums it up about their BS "points instead of real money" system! This was posted by a fellow ChaCha Guide on Jan 7th and I agree wholeheartedly with every word she said!
The Discussion topic was "Are you still going to continue with ChaCha if you are on the point system?"
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Please DO NOT post here if you were hired BEFORE December 1st!
For the month of December 2009, each point was worth $0.00716
I know I am curious as to what all the other new guides are thinking/going to do, and I would imagine all of the other new guides are wondering as well. If no new guides are willing to work for points, ChaCha would HAVE to change their system… For a while ChaCha might be able to get away with their current point system… but if they have a 0% retention rate of new guides from month to month, before long it will go under do to poor quality/inexperienced guides (even if they do keep the cash system for those who were hired before December 1st).
I myself will no longer work for points and I will give you a list of reasons why I will not:
1) We have NO GUARANTEE of making anything! Not even $.0001! We could put 40 hours in, and only come out with $10. I have never heard of people working for ‘mystery points’ before!
2) ChaCha is continuing to hire new guides, which makes me think that they are just going to be rotating the guides on the point system in and out. ChaCha is obviously expecting the new guides to quit after they realize how little their points are worth at the end of the month. If new guides don’t quit, an excessive amount of guides will also lower the amount of questions each guide receives- causing more down time in between questions.
3) ChaCha is continually devaluing the points! With each contest, “point raise,” “peak time bonus,” etc. the points become worth less and less- as these bonuses are only coming from the set pot.
4) I feel as though ChaCha doesn’t value their guides… not only by the pay… but also because they do not tell us anything! We were told little about the point system when we were hired, and provided only speculations when we received our points (and all of those speculations came from vet. guides who were wrong!)
5) In the email stating the amount of how much we earned this month, we were not even provided with data to back up what our pay actually was! Nothing saying how many questions were answered in the month, nothing about how many points there were total, and nothing about how many new guides/points only guides there were. For all we know, they adjusted the amount everyone received this month… maybe each point should really have been only worth $0.002... We don’t know…
6) Sadly, I do not think next month will be any better… We have no idea how many new guides are being hired. Plus, already looking at the top point earners this month (1 week into January), they are already getting close to the total of the top earners from last month! Meaning, that there may very well be more than 4 times the amount of points in the system this month as compared to last… making the points worth like $0.0002 or less! I realize that the cash guides won’t try working for points anymore, and that a lot of us hired in December will quit. But, we do not know how many new guides have been hired, how many more unaware guides will continue to be hired throughout this month, or how much our points were truly worth last month. And, again, the fact that the point totals from the top earners are already (1 week into January) pushing close to the totals from the entire month of December isn’t a good sign either…
7) I can pretty much guarantee that all the guides will be switched over to the point system within the next few months… which means that the pool will be saturated with people,
8) The first month of the new program certainly isn’t setting a very good precedent. If this is supposed to motivate the cash guides to join, or the new guides to stick it out for that matter, I have no idea what they will pay next month!
9) When I first joined ChaCha, and learned a little more about their point system, I put some figures together to check their system out. I posted it on January 1st, but sadly, ChaCha was apparently unhappy with my findings and closed my thread. I will post my math on here again, so you can all see how much ChaCha would in fact need to put in the pot to make each point worth even a penny ($0.01).
This figure is an example of how much would have to be in the pot if ALL guides were paid using the point system (though, the random bonus points are not accounted for, which would mean that the pot would need to be higher than the given total on this post). This figure also represents the number of questions asked in the months of December/January, the number of questions will undoubtedly increase over the next few months, which would mean the pot would still need to be growing.
My resources:
~ ChaCha sent out an email December 31st saying that they were just about hitting 1,000,000 questions a day = roughly 31,000,000 questions a month
~ There is no data saying how many questions are answered by thumbsavers or lulu, but for the sake of this calculation, we will say half of all questions are answered by a computer (though, I honestly doubt that it is even close to half). This leaves a total of 15,500,000 questions handled by expeditors each month.
~ Expeditors are “paid” 2 points per question, which means that their would be 31,000,000 points from Expeditors each month.
~ Again, speculation will have to be used when figuring out how many questions go to the Generalists/Specialists as I can find no hard proof data. In order for a guide to be compliant, they must make a Quick Answers benchmark of 55%. So, for sake of this calculation, we will say that just 1/3 of all questions are sent onto a Generalists/Specialists. This leaves a total of 5,166,667 questions handled by Generalists/Specialists each month.
~ Generalists/Specialists are “paid” 8 points per question, which means that their would be 41,333,333 points from Generalists/Specialists each month.
~ 31,000,000 monthly points from Expeditors and 41,333,333 monthly points from Generalists/Specialists = 72,333,333 total points in a month
For each of those 72,333,333 points to even equal a penny, ChaCha would need to have $723,333.33 in the pot- that’s three-quarters of a Million dollars! And, again, this doesn’t include the bonus points/power hour points/etc doled out by ChaCha. The current pot isn’t even at one-hundred thousand…
Sadly, I am betting that this thread will be closed… ChaCha doesn’t like it when people are unhappy with the point system…Please new guides, post your thoughts and what you are going to do!"
SMH @ChaCha
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