Is Games Workshop a book case study on horrible customer care?

I do not consider myself to have any prejudice or bad feeling about GW, after all I have been their customer for 15+ years now. Their staff over the years has always been friendly, if not a little too insistent - like one time I went for a couple of paints and the guy was trying to sell me the Dark Vengeance box. Easy boy...

But more often than not we come across from actions that pisses me off as a customer, even when I have not been involved, and puts me on thw wrong foot as someone who makes his living out of (hopefully good) marketing. The story comes from Faeit 212, and in short goes like this:

• A long time Tau player is rightfully excited by the new codex and pre-orders $300 worth of greater good plastic.
• The day of the release he goes to the GW store, only to be told by the store manager that his order had not arrive. At this point, is worth mentioning the products were on the shelves and the manager just told him "those" are not yours.
• He goes back home, calls GW customer service who pretty much tell him to wait.
• Some days later he calls the store, they tell him they have a riptide so he asks them to save it (let's remember he has already forked out $300) and inmediatly drives to the store, only to find the riptide has been sold.
• At the moment he is awaiting a call from customer service to notify him his order has arrived.

Now you just need some common sense to realize all the terrible mistakes GW is doing; I hope this is just this manager/store but it could well be a country or general GW, which would be absolutely devastating.

1. First of all, someone who pre-orders $300 is a customer you are desperate to retain. You as a company want him happy with the hobby for many more years. The temptation of selling boxes to people who just walk in the store is absolutely dumb: if they were curious people who saw the models in the storefront, sell them something else or tell them to come in a few days. If they are Tau players who know their stuff, rest assured they will get it from this store, GW direct or someone else. It doesn't matter, at all.
2. This is pretenciously assuming you have an overwhelming degree of power over your customers, as no matter what you do to them, they will buy anyway. Let's not mistake engaged players for fools. No one likes to be treated like an idiot, and when they are, they will respond accordingly. This could result in a) not buying anymore from you but more likely b) getting the stuff alternatively. This includes second hand, ebay, proxies or even darker options like clones or chinese copies. Unfortunately, these exist.
3. Last but not least, you are telling a customer that you don't have his order when the shelves are full of products. Apart of disgracing yourself and your company with a lot of bullshit, this is an illegal practice, at least where I live. A customer purchases under the promise of having access to his order on a certain date, and the products are threre. The store can't retain that stock.

We could go on for a while but I think the concept is clear now. So what should GW be doing instead?

1. Apologise to all customers who are receiving their stuff late and do all you can to honor your promise. This means shifting stock/production, prioritizing pre-orders to store sales, etc.
2. Start running some bog-standard CRM practices. It is extremely easy for GW to give away a model or two to customers who make these purchases, to give them the digital codex for free when they purchase the book, or to print a few tchotchkes for them (i.e. t-shirts, keychains, pens... stuff that costs you $0.30-$1.5). It's all about making the customers feel you care for them (which you should actually be doing).
3. Clarify to their store owners what are they there for. Not to make money, not to treat people like idiots, no to spend their afternoon in a toy store, but to acquire new customers, teach them how to play, how great this hobby can be; to run competitions and events with long standing customers, to hear what they say and pass the word up to the HQs. To be ambassadors of the hobby, in a nut-shell.  Sales will naturally flow, and make these stores a shitload more profitable than they are today. Without any doubt.

Please feel free to write your thoughts / comments below. Thanks!

Dark Heart Review & saving money at the Black Library

Dark Heart is a short story by Anthony Reynolds set in the Word Bearers attack to Calth and makes a nice read for those who have enjoyed Know No Fear by Dan Abnett. Don't be fooled by the cover, this story is all about the Word Bearers and covers a scene towards the end of Know No Fear from their point of view. In Abnett's original novel, we pretty much see the Ultramarines side on this particular action and we don't get much insight onto what is going on Kor Phaeron and his boys end.

Now the good thing is that Reynolds doesn't just tell the same story from the other side of the mirror, but rather uses that context to give us some insight onto what the Word Bearers legion has become at this point. Even in the small calm before the storm, things stir where the Word Bearers tread!

All in all an enjoyable read, if only a bit short. But that's what you get for that price. Oh wait.


Price shaenigans, or how this costs 70% more in Europe than in the UK!

Now onto the rant... why does this ebook cost 70% more in euros than in pounds? and 26% more in USD than in pounds?

It is a well-known fact that international companies often have different prices across regions, beyond what the exchange rate fluctuations would justify. This is of course a profitability measure, as the price elasticity, competitive landscape and rest of variables affecting demand and supply can have significant differences. It is also use to protect margins against exchange rate fluctuations but let's not get too technical ;) GW's prices in Australia comes to mind as a good example.

And how to get around it

The good news for us customers is that unlike physical goods that can be restricted to a certain extent, online products like ebooks are far more difficult to bound to a geographical area. If you tried to order from the UK site of GW to say Europe, GW would stopped you from doing it with the UK prices as soon as you entered the destination address. However an ebook is purchased and downloaded, regardless of the adress the user has entered.

Simply register as a new customer with a UK address and order in pounds. Creating a new account takes a couple of minutes and you can order straight away and download the ebook. Unfortunately this only works with ebooks and not traditional paper books.

About Dark Vengeance LE, Wayland, customer commitments and greedy people

A long title for a rather simple issue. The inability of many fans to get their copies of the Dark Vengeance LE.

This begins with GW not producing enough Limited Editions to cover for the demand, which says a lot about how bad they are at product launches. They should know their player base well enough to know that they would buy the new box as soon as it was out, and should have a pretty accurate idea of the player base size. After all, they know how many hobby stores they have, how many units they have sold in the past, how many different customers buying online... you need to be really bad to get this forecast wrong.

Advice #1 for GW: hire someone who can do a decent forecast.

Failing at correctly estimating the demand is bad for GW mainly because those (like me, you guessed it) who couldn't get their copy will buy the normal box, therefore spending less. It doesn't mean they won't get the LE chaplain with time, but that's a different story.

Advice #2 for GW: you usually want to lift the average order value and average customer value. Limited Editions help here, as long as you produce enough.

Advice #3 for GW: for 7th edition, be rather aggressive than conservative with the prevision because you will sell all the copies anyway.

Then let's talk about Wayland. I'm a regular buyer and a satisfied one, even with the issues that regularly pop (like terrible long times to get my orders, confusion about stock availability...). Their wonderful, efficient customer support more than makes up for it.

Problem is, you can't sell something you won't be able to fulfill. If they knew they had say 100 units for the first week and probably 100 more for the next one, the right thing to do is to tell customer #101 that they cannot guarantee their orders. This is something they did in the end but not when I purchased.

Worst than that, they told me 2 days ago that they had stock for me, so have the boxes suddently vanished?

That said, I really like how they have handled this, giving customers different options to choose from.

Last but not least, I'm going to talk about some of the people in the community. I lost count on how many times I read "I'm going to buy 2 boxes of the LE", or even more. That's your freedom of course but considering it is a limited edition and the fan base is rather big, well I would have certainly never bought more than 1, even if I wanted the minis to build a new DA or Chaos army. That any extra box that I was getting means that someone would not get it. It does not hurt to think about other people from time to time. Now I know some of you will not agree with this view but please give it a thought. Feel free to comment away, but let's keep it civil!

Forge World Rant

19 frigging days to process an order comprised of a pack of rhino doors and 3 space marine torsos, from a recently launched kit.

Charge 20.5GBP for that.

Add 15% on top for shipping and handling

According to their website, expect 10-14 days of transit.

And then pray you don't get too much bubbles.

Nicely done, Forge World. Another happy customer.*

*Dear reader, if you happen to be a Forge World supervisor, please note the sarcasm intended in this last sentence.

What's behind the new GW paints

At this point we all know about the new lines of paints GW has released. Not only they have expanded the line with more colors and other additions  (i.e. textured paints, glazes, etc) but the whole look and feel of the line has also been refreshed. All of this while keeping the prices. Emperor bless GW for caring so much about their customers!

Well yeah... that's not exactly true. GW has not changed their paints line to improve the quality, to expand the line, or simply to give it a fresher look. Gosh it doesn't even know from the feedback of their customers (side note: GW is notoriously known for not giving a s*** about what their customers say, and GW's customers are notoriously known for complaining about everything). I digress...

The reason behind the new lines is simply saving costs. Sure yeah, thanks for the article. Well it really is. Large companies usually outsource secondary / complementary lines of their business, for reasons that we don't need to discuss now. It's  fairly simple - GW focuses on their core business which is selling miniatures, and the games in which these minis are based. They can of course also sell you paints, brushes, cases and even orange juices if need be. The simplest way to go about this is to go meet the larger suppliers of these products and send them an RFP (request for proposal). This is basically a document in which they disclose what their looking for (i.e. what type of quality, prices, volumes and guarantees) and they just screw with it the main suppliers, those big enough to support the large volumes GW is going to be asking of them, big enough to be reliable and to respond to unexpected issues, which I can tell you happen often.

So some guy with an expensive suit and a rock hard face sources different suppliers, and closes the deal with the cheapest one. Not the best quality-for-price. Not the one with the most innovative or better product. The cheapest price gets the contract. That's how it goes. Think about it - how many GW customers have actually tried paints other than those that GW sells? and why should them, if GW paints are accessible and easily related to what they want to paint? if someone is actually looking for something different, well they will go to any other brand that focuses on what you're looking for, be it Vallejo for quality, Army Painter to get a couple of platoons ready in Sunday morning... you get the point.

This is the sad, ugly face of business. The new paints are here just because they are cheaper, and once the contract is over (typically 2~4 years) they will look for even a cheaper price. Don't get me wrong, the fact that the whole point is about lowering costs doesn't mean that we users don't get anything out of it. Getting lower costs (and thus improving the margins as the retail prices are kept) means GW could go to market with lower margins in other lines as the paints compensate for it. For example, say the production costs of brushes (of course also outsourced) suddently go up. The higher margin of the paints could help GW to keep the price on the brushes.

Another benefit is that changing the supplier actually helps to redefine the lines, and you fix more easily recurrent problems with the old lines, like the sealing of the pots or certain type of colors that the old supplier could not be getting right. And internally puts the focus in the paint lines and helsp create the appetite to solve other gaps, like that book/video from the 'Eavy Metal team, or the detailed painting guides.

Bottom line is that, even all this is just about money, the users can still get a few good things out of it. Even if GW never considered them.