I don't know if this was ever a thing, but as someone who works in ITSM for almost 10 years, I think that regular customer-oriented surveys could help both players and CB to have better communication and understand where the company did well, and where they have misstepped. The idea came to my mind after reading the Interplanetario 2018 roundtable 'transcript' made by @Phlyk, specifically about the part where CB disagrees with 'vocal minority' about the reception of the Uprising and JSA splitting from YJ. While I can understand that negative feedback will probably always be more vocal and presented, I also think that a formal survey sent out regulariy once in a while would be a much more precise estimation of the customer satisfaction dynamics. Discuss?
How many participate in the ITS vs the whole of the customer base? Surveys that reach only a portion of your base and then get limited participation can skew all over the place (only the most happy or pissed people participate and a large portion ignore you)
thats what I was getting at.... I have a creeping suspicion a large portion of people 1. just buy the models cause they're pretty and/or 2. play extremely casually among a small group of friends This people probably cannot be reached through ITS email or the forums.
I guess, the ITS email is the best way to do this. Or, they could use their FB page, it's quite popular. Anyway, even if there is a large portion of casual players or collecters, why can't this parameter (player type) be represented in the report as well? That's what surveys are for, after all.
Cause there might not be an effective way to reach these people, furthermore they wouldn't really know if they were or weren't reaching them. I don't think a survey would necessarily be a bad idea – it just certainly wouldn't represent all their customers as a whole.
Well, of course there is some level of imprecision to be expected, CB obviously can't ask everyone what they think, so their best shot would be too assume the level of satisfaction from the feedback they receive on forums, events etc. But I think it's rather difficult to judge about customer satisfaction without having a lot of data about your customer base. Hence the surveys. Or AI-assisted data mining from social networks [emoji14]
really there best bet of getting an idea of the community is how much product they're pushing compared to how many ITS profiles there are. I don't doubt they have a pretty good idea of what the customers want, purely by what sells at release periods
If a company uses a third party tool where you have to sell your soul, then they can go to hell in my opinion.
Wouldn't like a survey built into army builder be enough? Everyone uses that, no matter if he is casual or tournament player. That would lead to some problems like people filling surveys twice but I'm sure smarter heads than me could figure it out.
Well, there are a lot of people who creates a profile to use the Army (saving lists between devices is great, after all... make the list at work, play it in the phone at the store), so... ITS logged players using the Army.
Yes I realize that, but I'm williig to bet that majority of players uses official builder, whether they are casual players or not. I also realize that many(majority???) people have ITS accounts, but they are also those that don't and that would be the way to reach them. I'm not claiming that surveys via armybuilder are perfect solution but it seems to me that it is the best one available. Also, chances are that armybuilder popualirty would increase even more had people know that it features way of communication with CB. Unless ofcourse surveying via all stores that sell miniatures is feasible option and I sincerely think it isn't.
GDPR complicates that. A lot less than people think, but companies are mostly erring on the side of caution. I think it would likely come down to an opt-in like a newsletter, which would still be helpful, but it's hard to say by how much. I'm pretty sure CB doesn't deal directly with every or even most of the stores that sell their products, so again it would help a bit, but it's still short of a solution.
"New survey! Fill in the survey for us and you will be in the drawing for one of 20 unique patches!" Done.
Add "everyone who responds gets a patch of their choice, randomly selected folks will also get one of 20 unique patches!"
$5 a respondent is cheap for getting the maximum number of replies to your surveys. Depending on CB's cash flows, this may take some time to get out, since I'm assuming somewhere on the order of 50k respondents (for $250,000!). Besides, you get to write it off on your accounting as 'marketing expense', which at least in the US means it's a reduction in your profits (profits being what you pay taxes on as a business, not gross income like an individual). Basically, as long as you don't spend more than your available cash flow in any month, your business will be fine.
CB knows that the amount of people who were upset over Uprising was more than insignificant, they're just trying to justify their business decisions post-hoc, just like they claimed that Army data said that players didn't use JSA units in vanilla YJ when that wasn't true. They're not interested in customer feedback per se, but they *are* interested in engineering customer opinion.