OceanMarketing vs PennyArcade & Customer

This entire affair seems to spreading like an ultrafast wildfire across the internet.

Read the cause of it here: http://penny-arcade.com/2011/12/27/just-wow1

That is probably the worst customer service I have ever heard of. Even worse when the guy is the President of the company.

Consequences have followed, and many more are likely to come:

- OceanMarketing changed their twitter account to OceanStratagy. They also deleted their Facebook page.

- The Amazon page for their flagship product has been getting tons of negative reviews.

- Gaming brands denounced OceanMarketing's claims: IGN - G4TV - Kotaku

- More and more sites carry the article: MyXbox360Center - Examiner - NatesNetwork- G4TV - Destructoid - Reddit - Kotaku

This entire thing is hilarious. I haven't seen such strong karma happen in a while.

This OP is courtesy of my fiancée, who hasn't stopped flooding my Skype with messages about the matter.

 

Oh dear god. This would be my nightmare as a businessman. There were so many opportunities for this guy to step back from the keyboard and defuse the bomb. But then he went and stacked dynamite under that very same bomb! Wow. Internet failure 101.

I woke up this morning thinking about my own customer service issue that I've been trying to solve for 3 weeks. As I said to that person earlier today, I'm much more interested in the big picture than any one deal. Those deals are important parts, but I always have to remember the whole. So I'm going to have to throw some money at a small problem in order to make more money down the road.

 

Fully agreed and have the same line of thought.

Just spent 25k € on replacing a used machine we imported from the UK for our customer. Broken piece of shit on which we spent a good $10k to get expert technicians to fix it here.

But so worth it in order to maintain our excellent reputation and enabling future repeat purchases.

Screw the UK. Should've listened to the Germans who told us not to buy from there.

 

I like how in one of the emails he gets a clue as to how much he's fucked up, but then can't help himself and starts pouring out more ill-advised douchey comments.
How did they get this far in the the business world in the first place? Did he inherit or something?

 

5 seconds of that link is enough to understand someone is full of epic fail.

 

I really have a hard time conceiving of how someone went so far down without anyone ever stepping in to recover. I mean, I'm sure he's frustrated by the delays on his product, but to just let rip like that is a pretty astonishing misstep.

I will say, though, that the customer was a pretty huge douche to just start cc'ing "media" on his e-mails. I guess it worked out for him insofar as getting a lot of attention, but if I were one of the Penny Arcade guys and I just randomly got cc'd on something like that, I'd probably delete it without even reading it. Guess he got lucky.

 

Maybe he's not so much of a "random guy". His correspondence with the Penny Arcade guy seems to have at least a bare amount of familiarity. But maybe that's my imagination.

 

Even if he has a relationship with Mike, Mike and PA aren't even vaguely involved in what is essentially a squabble between a customer and a company. Sure it's game related. Sure he mentions PAX East. That doesn't mean it's somehow appropriate to add people to a conversation in progress. If you're covering your ass and CC'ing your boss or something on an entire e-mail chain, that's one thing, but this guy clearly wanted to spam up some inboxes to have people take note of his little spat.

Not saying he doesn't have a valid complaint with them not delivering on the controller, but finish your e-mail chain first. Then send it to whatever news media you think might care to see if they pick up the story.

 

That is an amazing story. Puts me half way between blood boiling with rage, and shaking with fear.

Frosstbyte, I think I see your point ... the people directly involved in an issue should get on with it to seek to bring it to some kind of conclusion, at which point, if non-satisfactory, bring in third parties, but not before? I hope I've read you right.

I reckon it stopped being a customer/company squabble the moment the CEO hurled that torrent of abuse at the customer. I see the CEO's behaviour as a deal-breaker which changed the context of the communication from business conversation to cyber bullying, that the customer could no longer have confidence that some kind of businesslike 'due process' would be followed in future, and therefore needed some kind of recourse to third parties at that very point.

The reason I'm making this distinction is because, on occasions, I have been on the recieving end of that kind of thing, and have typically felt caught between the feeling that I ought to keep trying to deal with it by myself, and the sense that the game had changed beyond anything I had contracted to enter, or was capable of dealing with, and that therefore I should call in arbitration.

 

No, I understand the need for support, but it's not like he CC'd a lawyer or the better business bureau or something. His intent CLEARLY was to smear the company by getting the CEO to reply all a bunch of the bullshit to people in the gaming industry media. If you're looking for legal advice to protect yourself or your interests, absolutely get them involved as quickly as possible (though I think it's absolutely important to let the other party know you are doing so). This author wasn't in that position, he was just hoping that one of the media sites would pick up on the CEO's absurdities and run with the stories. I guess he's just lucky someone paid attention to it.

 

That President guy went far beyond the realms of business. His ultra-condescending and vulgar statements coupled with a very misplaced conceited attitude towards his customer deserve nothing less than a public shaming for him to learn his lesson that Ego has no place in business.

 

Ah. Point taken - there was another way. Actually, it's what I do when an eBay seller tries to move beyond the pale ... I let them know I reckon they have done so, and that I am prepared to open a formal case. They then have the choice to come back to straight and polite dealing, or to enter formal and well trodden route of third party arbitration.
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Oh dang .. at the same time, I see what remixer just posted, and, believe me, the boiling-blood part of me is still happy that he got strung up - I also think about countless past victims he'd Probably trod on in the past (inventing infinite previous offences is always good justification for lynching).
OK .. seriously, I am still feeling torn.

 

I'm apparently not making my point very well. My point is that it is very tacky in my opinion to include media in an e-mail exchange while the e-mail exchange is in process in order to bring public ridicule upon someone. I'm not defending the CEO, his words or his actions. He's clearly a douche of the highest order and how he got in his position I cannot even imagine. I'm simply saying that in my world, someone who would include new people on an in process customer service exchange without alerting the other party is also being rude. If I were in that guy's shoes, I would've let it play out to whatever ridiculous extreme it did, then I would've sent the entire exchange to media outlets. It's tacky to add people to e-mail conversations midstream, just as it'd be tacky to add another caller to a conference call without telling the other person what you're doing or who is being added.

 

Zen

The case that's become so well-known today wasn't the first piece of horrible customer service.

Another happened a year ago: http://www.natesnetwork.com/Poor-customer-service
--- merged: Dec 28, 2011 1:18 AM ---

I can agree with you on the part that the customer added media outlets in his Cc: prematurely.

But this:

sealed the deal for me. I would've brought this retard to the media's attention at that point as well.

For one, so that the whole public shaming starts rightaway. And second, for word to spread fast and reach people who are considering buying their product; so that they knew what would be in store for them.

Legal arbitration would've taken way too long. Also, we can unsafely assume that the customer meant his Cc:'ed response to be his last one.

 

Looks like Ocean Marketing has been fired as the manufacturer's PR and customer services company: http://i.imgur.com/axYAm.png

Also here an update from Penny Arcade: http://penny-arcade.com/resources/an-update1.html

 

Frosstbyte, I think that this is an effective tactic for the customer to get what he's been promised. The OceanMarketing guy did all he could to bring the hatred of the internet down upon his head, but the customer was simply trying to get resolution to his problem. Clearly OM wasn't doing an even adequate job of dealing with their customers, and this one took it in an unexpected direction. The goal was to get his controller or his money back. That's definitely going to happen now.

Also remember that the company is conducting some shady charging practices. They're charging folks 30+ days out for the controller and not shipping the item. According to the credit card companies, they're not supposed to do that since it invalidates the customer's ability to file a chargeback (get their money back) in case something goes wrong. If the container with the controllers fell of the ship, OM could just say "oh well, you're fucked" and walk away. The customers couldn't dispute the charges since those would be outside the 30 day window.

 

I found the whole thing rather funny, and I have no problem with the customer cc'ing the media when someone in the related field goes Charlie Sheen all over your inbox. It becomes a story worth looking at. I'm not shocked people paid attention. I mean, just read what the dude wrote. Talk about hanging yourself.

 

Courtesy of my fiancée: http://wwebsiteasontheinternet.com/

More updates on the Examiner.

 

This Ocean Marketing guy is incredible. Absolutely incredible.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/114994-Ocean-Marketing-Attempts-To-Extort-Former-Client

 

Wow, the stupid is strong with this one.
--- merged: Dec 30, 2011 4:23 PM ---
The Examiner is still updating. If you click @remixer's link above in #18, it's got the updates in chronological order (starting with #1 and going down from there). I'm now 100% convinced that Christoforo is 1) a moron and 2) an even bigger asshole than me.