"So much for Customer Service" Topic

I'm not a complainer by nature. Hell I'm British, and we never complain! But I've had enough now and I have to vent my spleen.

Last year I bought the Flames of War Game and one of my first purchases was the M10 3" GMC Tank Destroyer Platoon. It was a few months before I got a chance to work on this set but when I did I found I had a missing part (the turret counterweight from one of the tanks). "No problem" thought I, having heard good thing about the Parts Replacement service offered by Battlefront. So I went on their website in early November 09, registered my missing part and waited for a reply….

…and I waited…. eventually in early December I wrote back and asked what was happening. I had a prompt reply from the UK distributor for the parts service and he promised to dispatch the missing item next post…. and I waited… a week before Christmas I emailed again, and again I received a prompt reply, apologising for the delay and promising to dispatch a part by registered mail the next day… and I waited….

I think you can work out what happened next (or what didn't happen). I'm not sure where the problem lays – with Battlefront or their UK distributor – but I'm not impressed. I'm about so fire off another email but I don't have high hopes of success. In fact I'm already trying to work out how to make the replacement part myself.

Ok I feel a little better for getting that off my chest. Calm down Lee, breath slowly….

BigLee
Blog link

The last two replacement parts requests I'd submitted were received, passed to Battlefront USA, and then stalled due to internal problems (similar to your experience). Both got sorted out in the end after some delay, but both took getting managers involved. It might be worth picking up the phone and calling the UK number to escalate the issue:

link

I submitted another request last Thursday, and have not received the automated response that assigns a case number; that should have happened overnight. I've just resent it.

Not enough empirical data to prove it, but my gut feeling is that the Battlefront CS system is overwhelmed, due to increased problems with the Malaysian production facility.

Allen

I had a part replaced promptly. Call and speak to someone.

I've had slow replacement service from them, too. I've always gotten the parts, but almost feel I should be paid for the time I waste chasing them.

I find my replacement parts needs from BF are about 1 item in 3. So I've simply stopped buying anything of theirs except infantry. Simple!

I've heard a lot of good things about BF's response, but one thing that really makes me blink is the frequency with which this missing part problem seems to occur.

I've made thousands and thousands of plastic models – all of which have many, many more parts and probably many more different sprues than BF's products from what I see – since the 60s and I can honestly only ever remember one time when I had to mail away for a missing part. I had one incident with a lost aircraft canopy from a Russian manufacturer, Smer, in the late 90s, and I think that was because I was careless with the opened kit after I opened it and inspected the parts. Other than that, since 1989, when I got back into military modeling for wargaming full time, I've never had the misfortune of buying a kit with missing sprue/parts.

I realize many of the companies in our wargaming hobby are part-time garage operations by one or two folks, but BF is, AFAIK, a full time enterprise with some staff, so this business of missing parts (from the anecdotes I see on TMP) is really not a good reflection.
--
Tim

Well, Tim, whenever anyone mentions product faults on the FoW forum, it usually generates a horde of folks saying that they've never had any problems in the thousands of dollars' worth of product they've bought. They tend to drown out the folks with legitimate problems.

So on the one hand, it's all anecdotal. Battlefront isn't saying what their fault rate is, that's for sure. And as plenty of others have rationalized, if it were cutting into their bottom line too much to courier an entire pack replacement for a single missing bit--they'd probably do something to reduce the fault rate.

On the other hand, if you look at what gets put together, painted up, and shown off in public fora, sometimes you have to wonder if *some* of those folks who have spent thousands of dollars on BF product actually knew whether they were getting complete product or not. When you have seen enough miscast bits used and painted, you have to wonder how many defects are *not* being identified and reported back.

And then there are the folks who don't care: they shrug it off and buy a new item (even they do tend to get irritated
when they find the fault repeated), or fabricate a replacement, or do without.

So trying to assess the extent of the problem from the consumer side is like trying to gaze into a crystal ball that has a cloth draped over it. From another room. In the dark.

All I can go on is personal experience. There was a period, three to four years ago, when I was experiencing over a 40% failure rate in purchases of packs and boxed sets. A good number of those faults were due to packs that had separated, and bits fallen out. BF has (mostly) corrected that problem. And all the missing and broken and miscats bits were eventually replaced. But when you've been through that experience--4 in 10 defective items--or even EC's 1 in 3--you have to have a suspicion that something just ain't right.

Allen

…Malaysian production facility…

Our group quit using Battlefront miniatures to play the game and went to 5/6mm scale. One of the reasons we made the collective decision was the difficulty we were having as a group getting everything we had purchased.

One purchase sticks out in my mind in particular. We ordered slightly under $1,000 USD in Russian equipment. Seven in ten of the packages were missing items and the supplier was giving us grief about wanting "free" stuff since the missing parts basically amounted to additional vehicles. Of the 30 T-34's purchased 20 were missing random parts up to and including tread assemblies, turrets, etc. very nearly equaling complete vehicles.

We worked on the equipment for almost a year in preparation for a convention finally receiving the last of the replacement parts in July shortly before GenCon when we were scheduled to do the tournament. By then many members of our group were so fed up with dealing with Battlefront we decided to sell everything at the convention and move on to something else.

We now play the game using GHQ equipment on BF stands without changing anything else. Works great, and looks even better.

In fairness I must point out our group tends to gravitate toward 5/6mm for much of our WW2 – Modern periods anyway so the difficulty with BF's quality control and customer service was just the final nail in the standard BF scale's coffin, not the whole reason.

Will

OK, so now the automated responses are working: I have two different case numbers for the same issue. Since I prefaced my second request with "I am sending this again because I have not received a response" (or words to that effect), I hope they will ignore one and address the other.

As an aside in the request, I mentioned the six packs of Churchill tanks that had come with the wrong (later) track sections. I didn't ask for replacements (I'll do the hatch conversions myself), but provided the information for feedback, even though these were old items from the New Zealand factory. I do wonder how much feedback helps to improve processes in the long run.

The missus--whose first job in college was assembly-line quality control in a Sylvania plant, and who was a Lean and Six Sigma person for the defense depot here for years (as well as a key person for the previous depot contractor's ISO team)--just shakes her head in wonderment.

Allen

And now I just received a third automated response with a third case number. This will be interesting.

Allen

I emailed them to request a replacment part back in December, still no response, not even an automated one. I'll try emailing them again.

Looking back, I used the "sales" address instead of the "customer service" address when I emailed in December. Last night I emaled the customer service address, and I got a response promising replacements in the mail this morning.

So far, out of about 10 packs, I've only hade one with missing parts.

Yep, today Marc in Delaware confirmed the receipt of my original replacement request from the 28th, and said he would be sending out replacements. I e-mailed him back to advise him of the apparent duplication; he thanked me, and said there had been a glitch in the system last week that propbably caused the lack of a response, and then the duplication.

Edit: oh, and I see that the UPS Quantum View shipping notification landed in my Inbox. So the replacements are on their way.

When they're on it, they're on it. But when something breaks down, I guess you just have to follow up.

Allen