I had one of the worst customer experiences of my life over the last 6 weeks. The ‘6 weeks’ should give you a clue about how bad it was. For those of you who don’t know, I am incredibly lazy about shopping – so I will preferentially order goodies online rather than deal with finding a store and then driving to it.
This time around I was trying to get an expansion of ‘Munchkin: Cthulhu’ (the third one). Since 80% of you probably have no idea – Munchkin is a card game that parodies of the entire role playing games genre. It is a lot of fun when you have 4 or 5 like minded people to play with.
So I’d ordered the core game off of Games Paradise, got it no trouble. Played a few times and a few weeks later ordered the three expansions – on sale to boot, bonus... Two of them arrived and then the third was on back order (Munchkin: Cthulhu 3).
No notification of when it would arrive, no mention it was on backorder. So I called and they explained “it wasn’t shipped from their wholesaler. Should be in, in a couple of weeks.” Disappointed they didn’t tell me but okay.
Two weeks later Games Paradise sent me a store credit to apologise for the delay and let know me that my order should arrive next week. In my good books still...
After the expected delivery time came and no delivery, I called and they tell me it still hasn’t being shipped to them. Well done. Then a couple of days later they just issue a refund (well they send me an email to that effect but the credit doesn’t show up on my card for 3 days.)
All this drama for an item that I bought for $15? At this point if I was in their shoes I would buy a copy from a competitor and have it shipped to me. Regardless of the loss.
I am about to order some $200 worth of games. Had they done a better job resolving it I would have ordered from them. I won’t be ordering it from them now. I found another online retailer (Joe Dodgey Games) ordered Munchkin Cthulhu 3 and another $185 worth of games... Big mistake Games Paradise
Compare that to how we handled a mistake...
We didn’t put in the correct finishing instructions in the production system for a client’s business cards. They wanted rounded corners and we gave them square ones.
This error wasn’t picked up on until the client received them. When the client called – we found a friendly supplier is nearby who could fix the problem for us QUICKLY. We arranged to have the cards couriered to the supplier, they made the corners round and couriered it back to the client. We ended up with a small loss on the order (Couriers are expensive like that).
Most customers are tolerant of mistakes if you bend over backwards to fix them. We’ve maximised our chances of a future order (who knows, that next order might be for 10X as much), there is every chance they will refer – after all it’s a great customer experience given the circumstances. Who else bends over backwards like that to fix a mistake these days?
