A MEMBERSHIP PROGRAM AND A COMPLAIN WEBSITE: HOW SPORT CLUBS MANAGE EXPERIENCES OF THEIR MEMBERS

To win and keep fans, the football clubs maintain programs of advantages, also called Loyalty Programs. These programs have gained importance for the finances of the institutions existing in Brazil, in fact 73 associations that have already created their programs, raising 1,301,339 consumers. However, these programs do not always meet the expectations of the fans. The purpose of this study was to analyze the level of satisfaction and attendance of their complaints by the institutions involved in Loyalty Programs. Six programs were analyzed from the perspective of service marketing and customer satisfaction-supporter management. The study considered the proposals of the specifics programs and collected data on complaints and solutions given on the "ReclameAqui" (Complain Here) website. One of the results is that among the clubs studied, Atlético-MG, Corinthians and Palmeiras showed the best results in their efforts to solve problems.


Introduction
Providing services is to have, as the ultimate goal, customer satisfaction through the interaction of several layers of business relationship. Satisfaction with the product, if the service in focus is linked to some material good, satisfaction with the way the service is rendered, regardless of whether it involves a product or not, satisfaction with the price and advantages identified in the transaction. "The American Marketing Association defines services as being activities, advantages or even satisfactions that are offered for sale or provided in connection with the sale of goods (Las Casas, 2015). And to provide these services with the target audience, the passionate about football (soccer, in USA) is even more complex, as it aims to meet the demands of products or amenities To enhance their business relationship with their potential customers, clubs have created their benefit programs, which have been acquired and evaluated by fans thereafter. Online forums are already consolidated as democratic and effective tools for consumers to express their impressions about experiences in post-consumerism. The theme of this article is the management of customer satisfaction and we investigated the Advantages Programs of 6 major clubs of the Brazilian Championship Series -namely: Flamengo-RJ, Corinthians-SP, Palmeiras-SP, Atlético-MG, Cruzeiro-MG and Botafogo-RJ -and the degree of satisfaction registered by the consumer via the site "Reclame Aqui" 1 , a portal that receives 15 million accesses per month.
The use of the Reclame Aqui website for content analysis purposes is not unprecedented in scientific production (Almeida and Ramos, 2012; Andreoli, Veloso and Toledo, 2015; and others). Andreoli et al. (2015) conducted a content analysis on the 245 complaints registered by consumers in the city of Sorocaba-SP, Brazil, throughout 2011 in the Reclame Aqui portal, comparing claimant and non-claim consumers. In another article, in this case, a longitudinal design, Almeida and Ramos (2012) chose Reclame Aqui for "being considered the largest website in Latin America in consumer protection, being the only Brazilian tool that is among the top 10 ranked in refers to the publication of statements related to the experience of buying products and services" (p. 671), concluding that the complaints available on the website may "impact consumer perceptions of brand loyalty" (p 679). Therefore, the database of said website has been validated as a secondary source of relevant information for the analysis of consumer behavior.
The objective of this study is to verify if there is a correlation between management of unsuccessful experiences of members of the benefit programs of the clubs under analysis and the number of members in each of them, as well as the desire of the consumer to continue doing business with the clubs after experience. As unsatisfied supporters can cancel their participation, it is assumed that those who remain in the program are having their expectations met.
Initially, we will describe the concepts about services marketing, football and the financial volume generated by sports in Brazil. Then, we will collect the post-consumer complaint data from 6 advantages programs of Brazilian clubs, data obtained on the "Reclame Aqui" website. Finally, we will try to analyze which clubs are the best that relate to their members, which ones relate worse and if the good or bad business relationship impacts on the desire of its members to continue in the Program. The contribution of this article is to reveal which clubs are really concerned about the satisfaction of their fans and propose alternatives to improve this relationship. Although some studies have already analyzed the site Reclame Aqui, there is no one specifically directed to the satisfaction of the fans that belong to the Programs Sócio-Torcedor (Fan Member).

The most popular teams in Brazil
According to survey conducted by the IBOPE Research Institute, it is possible to measure the number of Brazilian affiliations to their clubs. In the ranking of the fans, Flamengo, Corinthians, Sao Paulo, Palmeiras, Vasco, Atlético-MG, Cruzeiro, Grêmio, Internacional and Santos appear as the ten associations with the biggest fans of Brazil (2017), as shown in table 1. This institute organizes the digital ranking of the clubs, taking into consideration the relevance of the digital accounts of the associations and how many followers in the social media online universe, as we see in figure 1. Note some inversions of placement in the digital ranking in relation to the ranking of the number of fans, including the placement of Chapecoense among the ten most relevant clubs digitally even that the club from Santa Catarina does not appear among the 15 biggest fans group. The commotion generated by the tragedy that occurred in December 2016, when the plane that took Chapecó-SC's team to Colombia for the South American Cup final crashed, produced a genuine empathy for the Brazilians to the Arena Condá team.

The football business in Brazil
Despite an elitist beginning of football in Brazil, restricted to the highest castes of society in the early 20th century, football became extremely popular among Brazilians, becoming the most practiced sport by Brazilian men (IBGE 4 , 2017) and motive of enormous passions. A five-time FIFA World Cup Champion, the Brazilian national team is recognized as one of the world powers. Sports marketing sponsored around R $ 665 million in 2013 (Souza, 2014), "confirming football as the mode that receives the most money in the country, concentrating 68% of the funds invested by the sponsors in the year" (p. 10).

'Socio' Membership Program
The great Brazilian football clubs have created their relationship programs with their fans, offering them solutions and facilities in the purchase and guarantee of ticket purchases, as well as financial advantages and amenities in the consumption of products and services of commercial partners of the clubs. The website "Movement for a Better Football" (Movimento por um Futebol Melhor, in Portuguese) brings together the member-fan programs of 73 Brazilian clubs, adding, according to the portal itself, 1,301,339 registered members. Each club administers the program itself. The ranking updated in June 2018 is presented in table 2.

Table 2. The top 15 clubs in membership numbers
As maintained by Martins and Las Casas (2017), the club loyalty program promotes the consumption incentive for the rewards offered to affiliated supporters and provides insight into the fan profile of their fan and allows for enhanced financial planning with other sources of revenues from the club's business relationships between partners and partners. "It is reasonable to consider that the loyal supporter follows the club more through the media, attends more regularly at the stadium, is more exposed to sponsor brand communications and club product offerings, and provides data needed for use in other clubs marketing actions "(pp. 48-49).

Service Marketing and Reclame Aqui website
Basic rule of any Service Marketing manual is the conviction that it is up to the company to meet the needs of customers through their products or services. And monitoring the degree of customer satisfaction or dissatisfaction, learning why your customers abandon their services or consuming their products can enable new strategies and increase delivery. Jato, Lucas, Farina, Tentrin and Garcia (2008) show that consumers, once dissatisfied, can act in different ways.
"(1) Complain with the store or the manufacturer; (2) stop buying the brand or store; (3) promote negative word of mouth communication; (4) complain to private or governmental bodies; and (5) initiate legal proceedings "(p.65) At the time of the aforementioned study, the Internet revolution was taking its first steps and the word of mouth complaint, listed as item number 3, had not been typified in the form of online complaints. The option of complaining in the store or with the manufacturer was a tendency to appeal at first, before leaving to buy the product. Discussion forums, complaints and compliments are in the online environment, and are available democratically and accessible from a few clicks. And if there is the consumer registering their experiences with the companies, there should also be service providers and suppliers, set to the online universe or not. Customer relationship capabilities in this new arena can be instrumental to the success of these operators in this new phase of Relationship Marketing. The portals designated for the interactions between consumer complaints and the company's response opportunity gave a strong voice to the people.
The Reclame Aqui site does not qualify as a complaint site. It is presented as a search site. And he believes that 92% of Internet users who access www.reclameaqui.com.br do so to evaluate the company before making the purchase. The data of access to the site are registered in Table 3 and give the dimension of the importance of such spaces have for the current relations between consumers and companies. The site presents its way of evaluating and punctuating the companies through a criterion with factor as defined in Table 4: Thus, up to 10 points per company are distributed, being rated as "optimal" the company that reaches between 8 and 10, 'good (between 7 and 7.9),' regular '(between 6 and 6.9),' bad '(between 5 and 5.9), and' not recommended 'for all those who score below 5. "This formula is only applied if the company goes through 2 previous evaluations: it has a response rate higher than 50%. If you have a response rate of less than 50%, it is automatically categorized as "not recommended", says the site.

Selection and Presentation of Observed Programs
Six professional men's football clubs from 3 different states were selected. All of them with huge crowd. Flamengo and Corinthians are named by IBOPE 1 (2017) as the most popular clubs in Brazil. We saw, in figure 1, the digital ranking of Brazilian clubs prepared by IBOPE 2 (2018). "The survey is published monthly by IBOPE Repucom and aims to follow the development of the digital bases of 40 clubs with the largest number of followers in the country." Flamengo, Corinthians, Palmeiras, Cruzeiro, Atlético and Botafogo appear, in this order, among the 13 first placed in the ranking. In their respective Fan Programs, the six teams have different IBOPE 1 (2017) and IBOPE 2 (2018) rankings. In Minas Gerais, Atletico has more affiliates than Cruzeiro. Both have more successful Socio-supporter programs than Flamengo, the most popular club in Brazil. Flamengo maintains the lead of its regional rival, Botafogo. Among the clubs analyzed here, Botafogo is the only one that maintains the same performance in the three rankings: the worst. The data of the clubs' relationship programs with their supporters will be observed below in the order of their ranking in IBOPE 1 (2017).

Figure 2. Complaints of the Nação Rubro Negra
The main complaints of the program are: Undue Charge (7), No Answer (6), Waiting Queue (6), Delay in Service (6), Return of Amount Paid (13), Can not Operate by Phone (8), Poor service of the service provider (8), Difficulty in acquiring tickets (7), Cancellation (6). It is worth mentioning that these are complaints linked to the relation of consumption of football products, such as tickets.

Figure 5. Complaints of the Galo na Veia
The main complaints of the program were: Off-air site -Slow (10), Problems in completing the purchase (21), Misleading advertising (13), Delay in execution (9), I can not cancel (17), Login Password (13), Poor service of the service provider (7), Reimbursement of the amount paid (13), Quality of service rendered (9), Duplicate collection (5). Higher prevalence of problems in interaction with technology and perception of the value of service delivery.    The main complaints of the program were: Wrong product (2), Poor service provider service (5), Quality of service provided (6), Abusive value (5), Improper billing (3), Noncompliance with marked places (1), Reversal of amount paid (4), Low quality (3), Difficulty in acquiring tickets (3). It is worth registering that the search in the Reclame Aqui was with the term "Cruzeiro Esporte Clube", because "Sócio do Futebol" does not generate any result  The main complaints of the program were: Delay in service (1), Quality of service provided (2), Misleading advertisement (2), Poor service provider service (2), Improper billing (1), Reversal of amount paid (5), Freight amount (1), Cancellation (3), Does not attend (1), Delay in execution (2). It is worth registering that the search in the Reclame Here was with the term "Botafogo Futebol e Regatas", because "Sou Botafogo" does not produce any results.

Sou Botafogo -Botafogo-RJ
Overall is possible observe that most problems identified by the supporters are connected with technological aspects and return of amount paid. Another recurrent claim is about service qualities. Even that those datas are important it is required to analyze the alternatives solutions taken by the clubs.  The Minitab 2018 program was used for data analysis and treatment. Table 5, shows the data still "in natura", where we can observe the absence of the "Hours for the response" data of Flamengo-RJ. This "Missing Value" will be treated as recommended by Las Casas and Guevara (2010), initially placing the average of the indicator in the programs and then promoting statistical regression. Then, data before doing the regression data were normalized and positivized (from "Hours for response" to "Speed in response"), as could be seen in Table 6.

Figure 8. Dendrograma of the groups of indicators
It is noticeable in all programs that attending customer discontent is not a priority. Therefore, the indicators observed here have a very low correlation with the waiting time of the customer dissatisfied in obtaining their return. This situation will be considered in the conclusions of this article. In the same way, the percentage of fans of the Membership Program of its club (Market Share) also presents low correlation to the other items, as well as "solution index". Table 8 shows statistically the strong correlations between the indicators analyzed.
To analyze the correlation between the selected indicators, the "Pearson Correlation" will be used. The results are interpreted as follows: • 0.9 for more or less indicates a very strong correlation. As could be seen correlation between " Complaints Answered " and "Number of Affiliates" is lowest a not very precise (p=0.080).

Analyzes, Conclusions and Limitations
As shown in Figure 9, Atlético, Corinthians and Palmeiras (in this order) present a better relationship in the correlation between the rating received on the site "Reclame Aqui" " Complaints Answered ". And this observation leads us to look at Figure 10, which records the same strong correlation between " Complaints Answered " and "Would You Do Business Again" with your club. For Keller and Kotler (2006), the number of clients who experience a negative experience and who can do business again with the company, provided that their complaints are answered, is between 54 and 70%. "The percentage rises to astonishing 95% if customers feel that the complaint was answered quickly" (p. 153). When they published the book, they argued that clients talked to five people on average about the good treatment they received from the company that solved the problem. Today, experiences are shared for as many people as the customer has in their network of virtual relationships. It is important to point out that Cruzeiro, Flamengo and Botafogo can not exonerate themselves from responsibilities or from ignorance of the best uses of Internet communication channels. The three clubs with the worst performance in terms of unsatisfied customer interaction are protagonists in social media. Their accounts have, adding Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Youtube, millions of followers, as seen in figure 1. Who has the online prominence that these clubs have, not giving satisfactory return to their complaining consumers can be seen as a commercial negligence. Figure 11 correlates the number of affiliates of a program to the perception of the internet users who has had their complaint answered by the club in the site Reclame Aqui. The relation cause X effect does not allow such direct association. But here is the note: the clubs that knew best how to deal with complaints from their members are the ones with the best performance in terms of membership. Neglect has its price.

Figure 11. Number of Affiliates X Would You Do Business Again
The loyalty of the fans and the commercial experiences lived between them and their club seem to have different dimensions. The customer may complain about the post-consumer experience and wish to cancel the purchase. However, the supporter will hardly leave his heart club for a disappointment, even more if it comes from an unsuccessful purchase. Espartel, Müller Neto and Pompiani (2009) analyzed through qualitative (exploratory) and quantitative research, and found that, "although the fan is satisfied with the site, the stores and the sponsor, are the factors 'from within of the field' (players and team performance) that trigger this sequence of relationships. In other words, the management and the structure developed by the clubs are important, but the victories and the titles won are that bring the supporters closer to the club (...). The constitution or representation of loyalty in this way is confirmed, for example, by the motivations to be a partner: the formal approach (being a partner) between the supporter and the club is mainly because of love or passion for the club and to help it grow" (p. 76).
This study shows that neglecting of returning of unhappy supporters is already starting to cause a breach of confidence in the club's advantages program. Although it is not possible to measure the correlation between the little case in the return to the dissatisfaction and bad experiences of its fans and the growth or fall of the number of affiliates -and this is one of the limitations of this article and suggestion for other researches -, it is possible to observe that the love of the shirt does not prevent that consumers feel betrayed in their confidence in the consumption, they complain publicly and they wish to cancel their commercial links with the club, as could be seen on the desires of cancellation, or else with the program of the club in the site Reclame Aqui .
If it is not possible to affirm that the low performance of clubs like Flamengo and Botafogo as to the number of affiliates in their advantage programs is due to the negligence found in this study, it is possible to affirm that the clubs with the best performance among those observed here are the ones that have the most effective channels of communication with clients whose experience has been unsuccessful, and this is a managerial contribution of the study: expectations of the customers of the partner-fan programs can be frustrated in the numerous interaction alternatives, be it in the purchase of tickets, access to the site, in the delayed delivery of a product purchased or in the contact via SUPPORT to request some service. It is part of the service, as intangible, as perishable and heterogeneous. But the club that really cares about the return to the client will be able to get even closer to it, generating not only emotional fidelity (not the subject of our study) but, rather, commercial loyalty.
Being in the network, attentive to the demands and interacting with the consumer, is not only a trend, being intrinsically linked to the current social force. For Guedes and Silva (2016), "this environment leads organizations to review their communication policies and relationships with their stakeholders" (...). Living online is a reality that organizations cannot avoid "(page 63).
Despite the website Reclame Aqui being endorsed by the academy as a consistent source of data, the fact that only one portal of post-consumer analysis is one of the limitations of the study and suggest to follow the study. Field surveys with consumers who are members of benefit programs could be produced at stadiums, at the time of purchased facilities, such as tickets to matches. And a field survey on the value perception of the club loyalty program could be done before and after the game may help to assess how much the match score interferes with the value given by the consumer to the program.