Monthly Archives: May 2014

Customer Feedback

We love getting feedback. Our favourites are the unsolicited emails we get telling us about your parties, but sometimes we send out our feedback form. In March we did just that and sent out 1200 feedback requests to our most recent purchasers of our games.

Actually, when I say we’ve got them back, we only received 11 responses. We think a lot of this is due to the emails being caught in spam filters, but perhaps we need to redesign our emails to make them more appealing.

Players enjoying Lord and Lady Westing's Will

Lord and Lady Westing’s Will

Anyway, thank you to everyone who responded. We’ve read all of them and here are some of the key points.

Just the numbers

Most of the feedback was returned within 48 hours, and it mostly came from the United States (no surprise as that’s where most of our customers are), but also from the UK, Canada, and Australia.
Most people had found us via the internet or a search engine, although 3 (27%) found us through word of mouth. We’d like to improve our search engine presence, but word of mouth is valuable too.

We ask our customers to rate how likely they are to recommend us. From this we’ve calculated that our “Net Promoter Score” for March 2014 was 64%. (Note – Net Promoter Score is a registered trademark of Fred Reichheld, Bain & Company, and Satmetrix.)

Party size ranged from 9 to 16 players, but that’s not surprising as the feedback came from just four games: Curse of the Pharaoh, Davy Jones’ Locker, Spellbound and A Will to Murder. None of those are our larger games.

Comments

Our feedback form has some space for customers to write their own comments – here are the key themes:

  • There were several comments about the host role being too complicated for a first-time host. I’ve got a bit of sympathy for this. While we design our games so that anyone can host them, some of them are more complicated than others – particularly those that involve combat. We’ll consider highlighting the games that we think are most suitable for first-time hosts – perhaps a section on our site with games for beginners.
  • Several people commented that a second host would have helped. We often recommend that in our instructions, but it’s not always possible to arrange.
  • One person suggested sending rules out in advance to the players so that they could become familiar with them – that’s something we could look at making easier to do.
  • Two people liked the smaller games (8-12 people) and one person specifically appreciated the fact that we have gender neutral roles that make it easy to cast.
  • Quite a few people gave lovely comments such as, “EVERYBODY LOVED IT”, “Everybody was talking to everyone else, despite them not having met previously” “All attendees said they had a good time”.

Our actions

There’s no point asking for customer feedback if we’re not going to do anything about it! So here are the actions we’re taking from this feedback:

  • We are going to see if we can redesign the request for feedback emails to improve response.
  • We’re going to look at a section on our site covering games for beginners.
  • We’re going to see if we can make it easy to share game rules in advance.

Steve Hatherley

From the author: Murder on the Dancefloor’s Terence Smith

To coincide with the launch of Murder on the Dancefloor, we asked the game’s author, Terence Smith, for a few words describing where the game came from:

“My involvement with Freeform Games began with my 15th birthday in 2010. I was a drama student at school and, along with my friends, played Lei’d to Rest. This was followed by many more over the following years including Under the Big Top, Who Shot the Sheriff?, Casino Fatale, The Night Before Christmas and a playtest of A Will To Murder.

Terence Smith (right)

Terence Smith, our newest author, in Under the Big Top

Terence playing Under the Big Top

“The first playtest of Murder on the Dancefloor in 2012 was also the first time I had hosted a Freeform Games murder mystery (until then I’d always played a character while someone else hosted). That was quite an experience! I made some changes to the game, and it was again playtested in early 2014 in England. I was on holiday in the UK with my parents at the time, and I had the pleasure of meeting Mo and helping to host the game for another very successful playtest. I had a real sense of accomplishment from seeing the characters and storylines (revolving around Ricky’s murder and the dance-off at the diner) take place in front of my eyes.”

Murder on the Dancefloor is now available here – we hope you like it!