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Old September 25th, 2007, 07:25 PM
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Days of Wonder Rant

Hey everybody, Just a little letter to blow off some steam. As many of you know I went to Gencon this year and there were three companies I wanted to desperately hit. Hasbro was my big one, Fantasy Flight, and Days of Wonder. I had even signed up for a Days of Wonder event. Fantasy flight and Hasbro were both fun to hang out at and then there was DOW.
I went downstairs to ask about the tourney that I had signed up for to begin with. no one really knew to much about it at the booth so I decided to play Heroscape instead. It was a good thing I did because the Battlelore tourney was a complete bust from what I understand...you just kind of showed up and played a game against whomever...more like a demo. Well I was a bit dissapointed but hey, things happen sometimes. So then I decided I would buy all of the Battlelore expansion stuff and a copy of Colloseum that I did not have. My total bill, around 160$. I knew I could get it much cheaper on line so I asked about a possible discount, I was told I needed a larger order. A bit disgruntled I put the games back and decided to go without at Gencon. When I returned home I went online to buy my load of stuff online, I got it for around 60% of their price from one of their sellers. I could not believe it so I thought about it for a bit and decided to write them a nice letter but also expalin how I thought they could do better at Gencon and explained the problems.
Now before anyone here says I know nothing of retail I will let you know I ran a winery for five years and arranged most everything we did at festivals, our largest is 30,00 people. What do we do there? We show people a good time, offer a few reasonable rates and ensure our company is represented and remembered as a nice group of people who go out of their way for their customers. Mind you this does not mean bending over backwards, it just means showing people respect and offering specails to lure new folks in and acknowledge our biggest fans.
So I wrote DOW a polite letter explaining my concerns, ( by the way I had to do this through the Press contact since they have no way of reaching customer service with complaints that I saw). I explained how much I enjoyed their game and I did tell them about the lack of structure at their even as well as I was surprised that there was not even a small discount. After almost two weeks I wrote again asking if my letter was going to be answered...well it was and here it is. I will omit names but I think folks should see how DOW thinks of their customers.

Quote:
Originally Posted by days of wonder
Dear Skyknight,

Any customer who was spending over $100 at our Gen Con booth was offered a 10% discount. I know this because I was the person offering it. Now 10% is not much but it is the extent of the accommodation that we make. There are other resellers in the hall that carry our games. Many of them have discounted their
prices. We do not price compete with them. They are our customers also. At every show that we attend we sell our products at MSRP and offer the 10%
discount on large sales.

You are free to make your purchases as you see best. It is not our
responsibility to give you the best deal in town.

As I was not involved in the boardgame room scheduling I am leaving the rest of your message for **** ********to respond to. He will be out of the office until Oct. 8th.


Best Regards,

***********
Days of Wonder
Come out and play!
Well this irked me so I wrote them back as you could well guess :P


Quote:
Originally Posted by skyknight
Dear *******,

I find your tone towards constructive criticism a bit rude to be honest. I had over a hundred dollars worth of gear and I was told no on the discount. You may question my integrity all you like but in the end it is your company that loses out. As for this comment...

You wrote" You are free to make your purchases as you see best. It is not our responsibility to give you the best deal in town."

Well that is downright rude and I will be posting your comment at as many game sites as I am able. You are correct it is not your reponsibility to ensure me the best price or any sort of acknowledgement to your companies fans. What is your responsibility is ensuring that your booth is well organized and also learning to curb your tongue a bit when you are talking to customers. Trust me, I know. I own a winery and I would never dream of talking to a customer like that. I hope you are in charge or are in good with your manager because I am seriously disappointed in this response and you need to learn a bit of etiquette.
I believe you just lost a serious fan. And being in retail you should know...if a person has a good time or good service generally three people hear about it. If you have a bad time or bad service everyone hears about it. I believe the latter shall be the case. Now I will politely bow out as I originally politely wrote you, not only to talk about the lack of anything resembling professionalism( though I did not say this originally) but also to praise your company overall. Perhaps in the future you will take the term Customer Service a bit more literally. I am sorry it has come to this but your nasty reply was inexcusable.

Best Regards,

Skyknight

Well that is the end of my rant, does this mean you should not buy from DOW? That is your call though my mind is made up. I will not deal with a company that thinks so little of its fans. Long live Heroscape and its designers!!!! Thanks for the ears guys
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Old September 25th, 2007, 08:13 PM
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Wow... As someone who used to work in customer service... a response like that woulda gotten me fired! Or at least a stern talking to...

This line: You are free to make your purchases as you see best. It is not our
responsibility to give you the best deal in town.

actually made me laugh out loud cause I couldn't believe they said that. The person should have just left it at "we don't compete with our other customers pricing, as they are our customers as well" because that's a very valid point...

Wow. That sux man, but let me say something that I'm sure you don't want to hear right now, but you'll understand more when you calm down.

That's just one person's opinion. Don't take that persons tone and negativity and stamp it as "this is how DOW feels" It's the same thing as calling Hasbro and getting someone in Customer Service that doesn't know much about Heroscape. Just because they aren't experts, or don't care about the game doesn't mean thats the way the rest of the company feels...


Groucho over there was probably having a bad day.
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Old September 25th, 2007, 08:19 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by theGuru
Wow... As someone who used to work in customer service... a response like that woulda gotten me fired! Or at least a stern talking to...

This line: You are free to make your purchases as you see best. It is not our
responsibility to give you the best deal in town.

actually made me laugh out loud cause I couldn't believe they said that. The person should have just left it at "we don't compete with our other customers pricing, as they are our customers as well" because that's a very valid point...

Wow. That sux man, but let me say something that I'm sure you don't want to hear right now, but you'll understand more when you calm down.

That's just one person's opinion. Don't take that persons tone and negativity and stamp it as "this is how DOW feels" It's the same thing as calling Hasbro and getting someone in Customer Service that doesn't know much about Heroscape. Just because they aren't experts, or don't care about the game doesn't mean thats the way the rest of the company feels...


Groucho over there was probably having a bad day.
I hope you are right, but I have a feeling this gal is of some import since she seemed to be running the booth. We will see what kind of response my second email generates if any...if not I am posting this on Boardgamegeek as well. You are 100% correct about how she should have replied, but she took my original note that was much better than bad very personally and then also my question if they were going to answer my email she took bad as well. Not a real bright move on her part...remember kiddies, once you hit enter there is no turning back. Will I be alone in my experience??? Maybe, if not when I post on Boardgame geek and if two other folks had like experiences...well that is when it starts hurting a bit.
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Old September 25th, 2007, 09:06 PM
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DOW makes more than a few great games, so I hope this was an isolated incident and nothing more. However, without reading your initial note to them and without knowing the person who read it, I'm going to make the assumption that your criticism was taken personally or in the wrong light, and responded with more terseness than was warranted.

I hope they respond... and I hope you respond back and keep us updated... I'm going to put myself down for $10 that within three days we'll see the "I'm rubber, you're glue" from one of you two.
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Old September 25th, 2007, 10:42 PM
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I own several DOW games, and the expansions for most of those games. I never buy directly from their web site for the very reasons given in the letter they sent to you; I simply do not want to pay MSRP for something when I can get it 40% less elsewhere.

However, I have had nothing but excellent customer service from them so far. When I first bought MM44 many of the infantry were bent (that was before I knew about the boiling water trick). I wrote asking if it were possible to buy additional soldiers as some of mine were bent. They immediately sent me a bunch of spares at no cost. When my copy of the pacific theater expansion was missing one infantry piece, they sent me a few extra. Then there is the Battlelore dice replacement program, the on-line gaming opportunities on their website, and the forums and other resources.

To be honest, the only line in the letter you provided that should have been dropped was the "best deal in town" line. I just didn't think there was anything "nasty" about the letter to warrant the strength of your response. And we didn't have the opportunity to read the actual text of your original letter, which, in fairness, may (maybe not, but may) have been responsible for whatever "attitude" was in the DOW letter.

You certainly have every right to share your complaint. I guess I just dont see the big deal here, but that's just my opinion.
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Old September 25th, 2007, 10:48 PM
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I was also surprised that DoW wasn't offering a small discount or bundle prices for their product. I wanted to pick up the latest releases for Battlelore (Pikemen and Goblin Maruaders) but decided to wait to get them later once it was clear they were selling them for MSRP only.

I've seen a lot of companies not offer any or very little in the way of specials during GenCon for the exact reason he/she mentioned about how other companies were selling the product and they did not want to undercut them. WotC didn't have any specials and sold their product at MSRP. I do agree that the reply letter to you was a bit over the top even if you had written a letter that provoked a response like that (I don't think you did...just saying).



Newb.
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Old September 25th, 2007, 11:36 PM
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I'm really glad you brought this up SkyKnight as I felt the same way at Gencon. I was really only wanting to check out two booths, WotC (for HS, etc) and DoW. I was also impressed with the way HS personnel were topnotch, ready to help and talk and then sorely disappointed with DoW. I'll break it down, very simply. The woman running the booth was a B-iatch. Plain and simple. I tried to ask questions about there product and she ignored me- even when I was the only one there, when I did get through to her, her responses were gruff and demeaning. I asked about the possibility of releasing the Hill Giant from Battlelore and she gave me a lecture on how pre-releases work. Suffice to say that my visit was extremely disheartening. I have enjoyed many of their products and was excited to try some others but they were so disorganized and rude that I gave up. The kicker was that before I tried to talk to the hag, I was helping teach some people how to play Battlelore with the demo they had set up, all the while she was sitting around rearranging stock. Its really too bad that they seemed to not care about any kind of criticism to help make there company "face" better. Interesting that they are great with customer service when directly related to their product (see the replacement dice for battlelore and the other fixes with card backs in the expansions) but totally fail in face to face interaction.

I'm not saying that I will ban DoW products but they have definitely lost my respect and I will never be as devoted a completist as I am with HS. It just shows me how great the guys at HS and a lot of the other booths can be.

I only saw one other booth behave rudely and that was Slugfest games. It really surprised me because they were so energetic and fun, but then I saw the young kid (who was also the loudest) running some games pull up shop as some elderly lady came into to try to play. It was really wierd, one minute he's yelling for people to demo, the next he pulls up shop and says they're on a break. He waits for the lady to wander off and immediately pulls out demos to play. Really unfortunate, not sure which booth incident irked me more but maybe if enough people write about the failure to communicate at the booths, the companies may listen and build their teams after the companies that are doing a great job. I'm glad I wasn't the only one noticing DoW's crappy appearance, though.
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Old September 26th, 2007, 01:55 AM
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Skyknight, I agree. That was some bad customer service.

However, I also have to agree with their choice to not give much of a discount at gencon. A lot of companies don't. Take hasbro's online store for example. Everything is MSRP. Can hasbro beat wal-mart's prices? Easily. Is it a good idea for them to start undercuting the stores that carry their product. Nope.

Could be worse. Wizkids actually sells their stuff over MSRP at gencon.


There is no excuse for advertising a tournament and just running demos instead though.

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Old September 26th, 2007, 04:00 AM
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Quote:
" You are free to make your purchases as you see best. It is not our responsibility to give you the best deal in town."
Skyknight I dont see anything wrong with this comment because its true.you only had $160 in stuff and you didnt even buy it.

Ive purchased over $200 in video games a few times and if asked Microsoft to give me a discount because of how much I purchased Id expect the same answer,it sounds like your picking IMHO.

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Old September 26th, 2007, 05:38 AM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by spacemonkeymafia
I'm really glad you brought this up SkyKnight as I felt the same way at Gencon. I was really only wanting to check out two booths, WotC (for HS, etc) and DoW. I was also impressed with the way HS personnel were topnotch, ready to help and talk and then sorely disappointed with DoW. I'll break it down, very simply. The woman running the booth was a B-iatch. Plain and simple. I tried to ask questions about there product and she ignored me- even when I was the only one there, when I did get through to her, her responses were gruff and demeaning. I asked about the possibility of releasing the Hill Giant from Battlelore and she gave me a lecture on how pre-releases work. Suffice to say that my visit was extremely disheartening. I have enjoyed many of their products and was excited to try some others but they were so disorganized and rude that I gave up. The kicker was that before I tried to talk to the hag, I was helping teach some people how to play Battlelore with the demo they had set up, all the while she was sitting around rearranging stock. Its really too bad that they seemed to not care about any kind of criticism to help make there company "face" better. Interesting that they are great with customer service when directly related to their product (see the replacement dice for battlelore and the other fixes with card backs in the expansions) but totally fail in face to face interaction.

The woman who answered this letter was the same one you are speaking of, and yes she was a biatch at genCon...you are 100% correct.

And Django, I have seen how you respond to alot of folks, so I cannot honestly say I am surprised you did not see that as rude. You could work customer service for them as well I think. Of course i did not buy it...at that price...I was not looking for huge savings mind you....just something, a small discoutn, a promo, some sort of handout saying....hey we appreciate you guys. They could have stayed home and sold off the internet for the amount of customer appreciation they showed at the Con.

As for the original letter I wish I had it to still post, it was pleasant for nearly two paragraphs and then went into a few problems I had seen at the Con. Give me some credit here guys, I have worked long enough in retail to know how to write a decent letter and not make it offensive. Now I help sell multi million dollar products and deal with the US goverment every other day, I know how not to be rude, and trust me the original letter was far from rude.

And JBB, while I want to believe this is just one person at DOW I think she is of some import. She was running the booth by herself for a bit at gencon and then she is answering Customer Service mail so she is somebody at DOW. As was said prior, I understand they have great automatic customer service programs I do....but it seems I am not the only one who found this gal a bit offensive to say the least....she was an awful lot like this at the Con as was mentioned before, when she told me no on the discount. Which brings up the fact that she is outright lying about the 100$ discount thing in her mail.....in no way did she offer a discount and flat out told me no. I plan on forwarding her letter to someone in marketing if I can find them and then we will see how snarky she gets or if the letter was not rude. I bet they will have a different thought about her response.
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Old September 26th, 2007, 08:40 AM
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I'm convinced. Except for the Ticket to Ride expansion, the DoW games I don't have will go down several notches on my priority list.

And for that kid pulling that stunt on the lady at GenCon... that's just beyond rude.
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Old September 26th, 2007, 08:57 AM
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SK! I totally agree with you. I spent 5 minutes at the DOW booth this year and it was enough to see that they were a disappointment. Gencon is usually the only opportunity folks get to actually meet the game company and create or strengthen the consumer relationship. DOW was a miserable failure in this department. The shock at how horribly they handled the tourney when they had people actually volunteering to run it for them was something that pissed a lot of us off. Battlelore itself could have brought in a good bit of players for a real tourney. What a disgrace.

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