BASEBALL HQ FORECASTER CUSTOMER SERV

[chest .rockwell]

Am I the only person who thinks their customer service is absolutely horrific?

I ordered a forecaster about 6-7 weeks ago. Call around Christmas and they say yeah we are just sending them out now. I got the impression they had to print more.

Now nothing and no returned phone calls or emails. Not a way to run a business. Can anyone on here help?

[mdecav]

Yes they are HORRIBLE. It took them two months for them to send me a book after numerous attempts on my part to reach out to them after they charged me.

The best way to reach them is tweet Ron Shandler. That should get the ball rolling.

[Edwards Kings]

I haven't had a problem with delivery of product, but I am subscriber to the site (of course). Don't know if that is relevant.

[KJ Duke]

Absolutely the worst. They send out one product a year; you'd think after 15 years or whatever they could manage it without pissing people off.

[chest .rockwell]

I am well aware that Ron does not run in it anymore. I always chuckle at a conversation I was a 3rd party to.

Ron is discussing the baseball hq business with a former nfbc player and in my mind is being a bit condescending or bothered by the conversation. Why is this business lightweight conversing with me type look. The other party was ceo of a publicly traded company most of us have heard of. I wanted to be like this guy could buy or sell you ten times over Shandler get off of your high horse.

Attitude towards customers start with leadership. If leadership is elitist and takes customers for granted trust me employees will too.

[chest .rockwell]

I haven't had a problem with delivery of product, but I am subscriber to the site (of course). Don't know if that is relevant.

Hurricane Wayne not sure you are a good example though. The issue is how much they care and how they respond when they are not able to execute...

Hope to see you in Vegas. I am going to pop in for about 24 hours.

[KJ Duke]

I am well aware that Ron does not run in it anymore. I always chuckle at a conversation I was a 3rd party to.

Ron is discussing the baseball hq business with a former nfbc player and in my mind is being a bit condescending or bothered by the conversation. Why is this business lightweight conversing with me type look. The other party was ceo of a publicly traded company most of us have heard of. I wanted to be like this guy could buy or sell you ten times over Shandler get off of your high horse.

Attitude towards customers start with leadership. If leadership is elitist and takes customers for granted trust me employees will too.

That has always been my impression of him too. He reminds me of many of the Notre Dame students I used to run into when I lived in Michigan. They think they're special ... but they're living in freakin' Indiana. Oblivious. And no doubt the attitude trickles down.

[Edwards Kings]

I haven't had a problem with delivery of product, but I am subscriber to the site (of course). Don't know if that is relevant.

Hurricane Wayne not sure you are a good example though. The issue is how much they care and how they respond when they are not able to execute...

Hope to see you in Vegas. I am going to pop in for about 24 hours.

It would be a great pleasure to see you again, my friend, even if only for a few....

[Lunatic]

Quicker and cheaper to just order through Amazon; need to spend $35 for free shipping, easy to do if you also like Baseball Prospectus.

[Roy's Outlaws]

The Forecaster doesn't have any mention of A-Rod for this coming season. I guess he didn't make the cut for this coming season ? Chet , you going to be making a visit to NYC this draft season ?

[meanguy]

I ordered mine weeks ago with 2 day priority shipping. It never came, I called 3 times leaving messages as no one answers and e-mailed 3 times as well. No response at all to any inquiries.

[rmurph3]

Ray Murphy from BHQ here....

Anyone who has a customer service issue with HQ should always feel free to inbox me here. Couple of points about the book shipping process:

- as much as we try to improve our process or throw more resources at the problem, December is always a fire drill for us, for a number of reasons.
- the way our order fulfillment works is that we start taking pre-orders for the book in September. Once it's ready to ship, all of the pre-orders get shipped out first, and that takes some time. So if you order in early/mid December (right after the book starts shipping), there is inevitably going to be a lag before your book ships, as we finish fulfilling the pre-orders before getting to the new orders. For this reason, we only guarantee holiday delivery to those who pre-order.
- holiday shipping delays, etc., don't help our cause. Not to pile on the USPS because they do great work in general, but something tells me that if we were shipping our book out in May, the % of books that get lost would be a lot lower.
- that's not to point fingers elsewhere, though: we can do better and we work on improving our operation every year. To that end, we changed book distributors this year, which led to some inevitable short-term growing pains in the past few weeks, but will be beneficial long-term.
- regarding A-Rod's exclusion from the book, we did a lengthy treatment of him on our site in December (it's a free read): http://www.baseballhq.com/content/confo ... -rodriguez

Finally, I know the history between the NFBC community and Ron, and I'm well aware that beating up Ron on this board is something of a tradition. But I also think it's safe to say that I know him better than anyone here, and the characterizations of him on these boards frequently make me scratch my head. If anyone wants to REALLY know what Ron is like, I encourage you to introduce yourself to him at any industry event - Tout Wars, First Pitch, FSTA, etc. and you can judge for yourself rather than draw conclusions from a 3rd-party observation.

Anyway, Ron is still heavily involved in BHQ, but Brent Hershey and I are the co-General Managers now. I'm an original NFBC player and unabashed fan of this event. As such, I have a vested interest in making sure this community is happy with their BHQ experience.

So, please, if you're having an issue, feel free to hit my inbox here. As someone mentioned above, hitting us on Twitter is also a good way to bypass Customer Service and get something in front of my eyes directly. Please tweet your issues to @BaseballHQ. Tweeting Ron (@RonShandler) about a customer service issue is like complaining to Brian Cashman that you don’t like your seats. He just forwards them to me anyway.

Ray

[Gekko]

I've spoken with Ron a few times, and I've always found him to be knowledgable, entertaining and humorous. I enjoy (and look forward) to chatting with him

[thepats]

I didn't realize so many folks had issues with HQ. I've been a subscriber for six years,have always gotten my Forecaster when promised and really enjoy the site and the advice I get from those who run it both past and present.

[chest .rockwell]

Ray,

With all due respect is 2015.... I ordered a product from your company on December 1st a time sensitive product at that.... On January 7th I still don't have the product and cannot get a single person from your company to even acknowledge a communication. You could list a 1,000 reasons why and my response would still be really?

My very unsolicited advice for Ron and you would be screw the Cashman analogy. I am fortunate enough to lead a pretty large organization and often times do exactly what you say he does when a complaint hits my desk. I try at least once a week though to take one and follow through with it myself. I often times find black holes in our system and get to experience the customer's angst first hand. It is invaluable. It also shows my staff I give a darn.

BTW I have never been a Ron basher and I can understand why my posts here look like I am.

Roy- no NYC for me buddy. I really enjoyed my time there. I have not seen friends like Andy, Dan, Neal, and Wayne and many others in a long time and want to say hello. I am pretty much dead money in the nfbc now and also need to be fair and spread the love around a bit. I still remember you pimping Brian Dozier to me as we are walking back to our hotels after the MTM dinner. You were right my friend.

[rmurph3]

Chest, PM me your order number or the email address you put on your order, and I'll get that sorted out. Obviously something's gone wrong there; I'll see what I can find out about it.

[mdecav]

Ray:

Here has been my lone - and likely my last - experience with Baseball HQ.

On October 14th I ordered Art McGee's book - NOT the Forecaster. My credit card was charged and after about a week I didn't receive it in the mail. So I went to the website and over the next few weeks sent multiple e-mails and left multiple voice messages. Multiple. Likely around ten altogether. Nobody got back to me. IF YOU ARE GOING TO HAVE A LIVE WEBSITE OR E-MAIL SIGNATURES WITH CONTACT INFORMATION, THERE SHOULD BE SOMEBODY ON THE OTHER END RESPONDING WITHIN A REASONABLE AMOUNT OF TIME.

So on November 13 as a last resort, I tweeted Ron. Lo-and-behold I get an e-mail that same day. I was told by the representative then (who will remain nameless) about the distributor changing and a book will be sent that day. Needless to say, I received no book.

So I tweeted Ron again on December 3rd. By December 12 I still had not received the book, so I sent numerous e-mails to HQ support to get some/any kind of response. Nothing.

I tweeted Ron again on December 16.

The representative finally got back to me and said that two books had already been mailed to me. Um... no they weren't - I'm pretty sure the person was either flat out lying, clearly mistaken, or really not sure if they were shipped. So I finally received the book around December 22.

[rmurph3]

Michael,

Yeah, I was very familiar with your case. There's no question that we screwed up there.

I did mention the distributor change above, and the "How to Value" books got caught up in that transition. In retrospect, we should have stopped selling those for a couple of months while we went through the transition. What happened was that our old distributor had to ship the entire stock of those books to us, so we could take over the distribution. When you ordered, we didn't have access to the books to send them out to you. And as always happens in these cases, the whole transition took far longer than we anticipated.

It's a lesson learned, for sure. And your point about the communication/lack of response, which was also mentioned by chest, is a fair one. I could sit here and explain some of the problems we face there, but it's not really important: the point is that they're our problems, not yours, and we need to fix them. We are working toward that, I assure you.

Ray

[Walla Walla]

I'm shocked that anyone could say a bad word about Ron Shandler or Baseball HQ ! Shame on you all!

[Cobb]

I downloaded it for the Kindle. The formatting on that is not the greatest but I'm sure there will be some growing pains with that medium.

However, I'm sure you are probably aware Ray, but there are several pages missing on the Kindle version. Some players are repeated and some are missing, etc. Hopefully you are being proactive and working to fix those bugs.

[rmurph3]

Thanks Cobb. I actually just got the Kindle version about an hour ago. Will take a look at it this weekend and see if I can find out where I turn to get the errors cleaned up.

[Cobb]

Thanks Cobb. I actually just got the Kindle version about an hour ago. Will take a look at it this weekend and see if I can find out where I turn to get the errors cleaned up.

Thanks Ray. You can start by looking for Gio Gonzalez. At location 4284, last name is Jeanmar Gomez, next location is 4290 and starts with Nick Greenwood. That location has Zack Greinke twice too. If you try to search specific locations, like 4285/4286, it still gives you the above guys with no Gonzalez names.

That is just one blip I have come across, there have been a few others.

[Yellow Ledbetters]

Shandler apparently sent out a tweet along the lines of asking him a question about Baseball HQ's customer service is like complaining to Derek Jeter about your seats.

From what little I have I seen of his work I would think a better analogy would be asking a garbage man about the pckup schedule. Good to see he still thinks highly of himself. I didn't see the tweet myself as I'm not a follower but if so that is the height of douchbaggery.

[Edwards Kings]

I didn't see the tweet myself as I'm not a follower but if so that is the height of douchbaggery.

So, in other words, you didn't see the tweet, don't use the service, and you have no idea what you are talking about, but you still trash they guy. Classy.

[Yellow Ledbetters]

The NFBC'er who told me is beyond reproach in his integrity. But since you hold a high journalistic standard jackass, I checked and yep he said it. Which makes him and you a d'bag. Good company to keep.