Leapfrog Customer Care

After a long stretch of bad luck, I finally found good customer care!  Leapfrog went above and beyond to help a rather loyal customer of theirs.  We have plenty of Leapfrog toys in our home.  To fully appreciate what Leapfrog did for us, let me tell you the story of my Leapfrog Didj.

I purchased my son's black Star Wars version of the Didj direct from the Leapfrog website in November 2008. I also got two games - the Star Wars game and the Foster's game. It was pre-loaded with Jet Pack Heroes. It worked fine for several months. I do not remember exactly when, but I do believe it was probably last June 2009 that I hooked it up to the Leapfrog Connect website to check progress, etc. I was required to run an update. After the update, the Didj wouldn't work at all. First, it just wouldn't read cartidges, so I ran it again, thinking perhaps I disconnected too soon or something. After I ran it again, It didn't power back up. I tried changing to new batteries and that didn't work. I tried looking up similar problems to see if there was a fix or something that others experienced. I didn't have time to call customer care about it, so I put it up on a shelf so that my son wouldn't see it (out of sight out of mind - he's three. And yes, he actually does play the games on his own). I somehow managed to also forget where I put it.

I finally just found it last month. I had put it on a shelf completely out of my own view. Now that I had it again, I put fresh batteries in it and hooked it up to the computer to try and see if a brand new update might fix the problem. When it was plugged into the computer, it did power on. I was able to run the update and my son could play Jetpack heroes because it was pre-loaded on to the system, but he couldn't play the cartidge games,  I tried cleaning the cartridge, but that didn't seem to work. I just get the little Didj character scratching his head telling me that he can't read the cartridge.

I happened to post about it on the Facebook fan page and the nice gal that moderates the Facebook page suggested that I call customer care for a replacement.  I was suprised because I felt that it had really been too long to expect anything from Leapfrog.   But I gave it a try.  Basically, they told me that since it was out of the 90 day warranty, I was out of luck.  So, just to keep the Facebook moderator in the loop, I told her what had happened when I contacted customer care.  She then took it into her own hands and I had a new Didj in my hands within a week!

The timing was pretty good because as you may have noticed from a previous post, we are having our living room repaired.  So this "new" toy will hopefully help to keep his mind off of the fact that our house is in complete disarray!  He was pretty excited to get his Star Wars game in there and start playing again.

Matthew was really happy to see his new Star Wars Didj.  Hopefully this one will last a lot longer!  He has already started to download new micromods and spend his rewards.  I only wish I knew how to transfer the things he had earned on the old Didj.