Thank You For Your Service

I think it’s probably fair to say (and although there isn’t a question about it in this the 2022 Great Wargaming Survey - live throughout August - maybe there could be next year) that customer service within our hobby is slowly improving. 

This could be due to a whole range of factors: it’s easy to think this might just be the inexorable influence of our US friends, whose cheerful customer service has historically put Europe’s barely-restrained disdain for any customer to shame, but we ought also to consider other things: higher quality casting… less brittle materials… improvements in packaging methods and materials… Whichever way, things seem to be getting better. 

You may have been lucky enough to receive a surprise freebie thrown in with an order: an extra metal model maybe, or some spare components. Maybe a tempting sample from a new range, or even an entire sprue! I was delighted to get a small pack of sweeties in with one of my recent orders, although to my frustration and my wife’s subtle delight, I’ve forgotten which company. 

I know, for example, from personal experience that Warlord Games have an absolutely world-beating Customer Service department - both in the UK and in the US - who’ll do whatever they can to remedy miscasts, breakages or other frustrations, but this week I’d like to focus on a private individual from a recent eBay purchase, here in the UK. 

I ordered some resin 3D-printed 28mm French motorcycles with AT rifles from Garden Shed Printing last month, at a very competitive price, and I was very pleased by the speed with which they arrived. Sadly, one of the AT rifle barrels had snapped off at the base in transit, and was not easily repairable whilst maintaining any structural rigidity:

No problem, though: a simple message to Garden Shed Printing, and not only did I have a brand new replacement bike sent out at no cost, they even offered to tweak the .stl file to make the barrel fractionally thicker to be on the safe side. Amazing. 

What's even better - and you'll see this in the picture I took for them - is that prior to posting, they took the initiative to actually greenstuff some minor structural glitches on the print! How very thoughtful.

And this is what our hobby - and the industry - needs to keep working on: as a rather niche subset of consumers, we’re notoriously quite persnickety, very demanding, touchpaper-quick to react, and - we’ve all seen it - some of us have rather fragile egos. 

So well done and thank you, Garden Shed, and to everyone else offering great customer service in the industry: please keep it up!