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Maybe Richard would care to post Shrapnel's guidelines for customer relations?
Hope you don't mind hearing from the President of Shrapnel Games
We believe the customer comes first. As the publisher, we have two customers really. The end user, that's you guys, and the developers, that's Aaron and all the rest. Without the developers we wouldn't have end Users and without the end Users we wouldn't have the developers. From a publishing point of view, that's a tough one - balancing the needs of the developers with the needs of the end Users. (BTW, I think we are unique in thinking of the developer as a customer, the big boy publishers think of the developer as an expendable resource - they use them up and then throw them away).
The key is listening. Taking to heart the concerns of not only the end Users, but the developers as well. We are committed to custoemr service (both developer and end user) and every decision we makes takes on the focus of how it will effect our customers. It's the first question we ask ourselves.
Being a small fish in a big pond, the only advantage we really have is making our cusotmers as happy as possible. This means listening to the end Users and trying to make our products better - giving them what they want. By doing so we insure faithful, happy customers.
For the developers it means trying to increase sales and then return as much of the profits to the developers as possible (this is opposed by the big boy publishers mentality of trying to return as little as possible to the developers). By doing so, we allow the developers to continue their work (which hopefully means more games for us to publish), and hopefully be able to turn their dreams into realities (I think most would like to be doing games full time).
Now as part of our customer relations, we put a strong emphasis on customer service. We know how frustrating it is to spend your hard earned moeny on something and then have problems - whether they be shipping (it's been a week and I still haven't seen my games!) or product problems (the music plays, but the screen is blank!). We spend alot of maney that we could othewise put in the bank, to try to make every cusotmer's experience with Shrapnel Games a happy and fulfilling experience. (On a side note, don't write mean letters to the customer service folks, they didn't do it! Whatever the problem, it was probably more my fault than theirs...)
I hope I haven't rambled on too long and maybe I enlightened this discussion a little.
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Tim Brooks
Shrapnel Games