Oh, LeapFrog. You impressed me when you talked about the research that goes into the creation of your products. Solid products, solidly researched.
Then I got my hands on a Didj. You kindly gave me one; the other, I purchased from your on-line store. My preschoolers quickly became hooked on the simple Jet Pack Heroes game, a free download which they easily played at the kindergarten level. The premise of the game is to rack up points by shooting down what my kids called "ghost-es," it's an innocuous little game with a few educational components built in for good measure. We loved it. It was a perfect first electronic game, especially for long car rides.
But then I tried to spend the Bitz (points earned). I think my boys had somehow earned 150 Bitz which I learned we could spend on customizing their screens via the LeapFrog site. For Jet Pack Heroes, this meant we could use our earned Bitz to buy screen moods (chill, nightfall, strawberry) and keys which open secret rooms. I also spent about 20 minutes on the Didjerator and created 10 Didji characters for the screen hero. My kids loved the new customized looks of the Jet Pack Heroes game. All worked well for about a week.
Then everything disappeared in a poof. The custom moods and the characters - gone. Of course, my kids noticed right away. So off I went to sync up our units yet again. I spent about an hour spending Bitz on custom features (it was slow going) and thought I'd done everything correctly but when I turned on our Didjis after syncing, there was nothing there. I checked our account and the amount of Bitz in our account read a big fat zero, as if the Bitz economy were directly tied to the woes of the real economy. I went through the process again and again. But nothing I did on the LeapFrog site came through. I would have been fine with it, but my children refused to play the game without being able to select from different characters and micromods.
My boys put down their Didjis and refused to play without the added screen bling.
I emailed customer service, but eventually only received an automated reply telling me to check the product FAQs. I called customer service three times and they were absolutely useless. Calling LeapFrog's customer service (an overseas call center) was akin to throwing the user manual at a random person and having them leaf through it in an attempt to help me. Last May, I'd also tried calling them but kept getting voicemail even though I'd called within stated operating hours. I even lurked on the LeapFrog forums but saw no real solutions there. So, their customer service was horrible then and it's horrible now.
Oh and the Learning Path site is a maze to navigate. First, it welcomes me by name but then asks me to log in. I feel like I'm always logging and re-logging in - it's never clear whether the system has recognized me, even when I attempt to sync our Didjis. Finding my way around that site is confusing. I never feel like I know where I am or where I'm supposed to go. I think they need to re-design that site from scratch. I have never been able to use the Learning Path site to track my children's progress (not that I care to do so). Not sure why.
I wish our Didj had come pre-installed with Jet Pack Heroes, complete with the ability to customize the screen. But they strove to offer more than that by luring us to the Learning Path and they failed miserably. I want to talk to an informed customer service rep, one who knows the technical aspect of the games; not someone who is reading from the manual for the first time. I want you to email me when software patches are available. And psst, my husband suspects the software creation had been farmed out to contractors who may no longer be involved in the build.
LeapFrog, you really had my admiration up until I encountered technical difficulties. It's at the customer service level that your company fails. Why put so much time and money into the excellent research end of your products when you can't follow through at the customer service end? I really feel like I wasted my money on your product. I don't want to see you fail. You'd pumped up my expectations only to let them down with a thud. I think most of your customers give your products high ratings until they hit a glitch and have to work with LeapFrog customer service.
You have a problem, LeapFrog. It's floating around here and here and of course, here. Oh, and here. And also here. Wow, that was exhausting.
What next, LeapFrog?
Original post to Chalk and Cheese Chronicles.
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