Customer Support depresses me

To avoid any confusion from previous posts. I will highlight the company I worked for at the time was not blizzard and nor did they do anything for blizzard.

Most CS positions loop back to the same rules. Either get 5 stars or loose your bonus.

What do you mean its a company issue they are complaining about?? Make the customer smile about their lost money/time!

Personally, as much as i like WoW, im pretty salty about Blizzard.

Its like they KNEW that Shadowlands and C.O.D - Cold War would flop and have tons of complaints.

So they hired GMs on mass just in time for Shadowlands launch. Once 5 or so months past and the refund requests were not so frequent, they also fired on mass. My entire team was gone despite the good reviews.

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I was absolutely left with that impression afterwards.

“You have an issue? Here are some minimum-effort suggestions. Still have an issue? Have you had a look at our minimum-effort suggestions?”

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It could be worse. Theres a delivery company near me that doesn’t let you even communicate with the bot until their software admits the parcel is lost.

I had been waiting 18 weeks of daily emails
Saying “your delivery is delayed” before the system admitted they’d lost it. The bot option then appeared and its advice was “we can’t deliver it now, sorry”

Last month I had an issue with the weekly chest, raised a ticket and the customer support said there had never been any issues with the chest.

My reply was that there had never been any issues with guild vaults, until there was one that caused mayhem.

They refused to help further. Useless, you could do a Musk and get rid of the majority and replace them with simple AI.

What is kind of sad is the wowhead article thing seemed to be a queue clearing method they used from time to time. Now it seems to have become standard practice.

The thing is I imagine in many cases it works, some parts of the game are unclear and wowhead has usually made them clearer.

This points to me to a larger issue that the game explains what it wants to you to do badly.

Logically you google a problem first. I have often found solutions from other players in comments on wowhead.

Ticketing is a last resort or is something that requires GM intervention.

We know this, that doesn’t mean everyone does. Last time I spoke to gm was over a year ago regarding a hearthstone issue, and they solved it just fine.

I go back to my customer service days and many questions could be answered just by visiting the homepage and reading the information back over the phone.

However today that same company uses a bot that tries to get people to do that before revealing the phone number. One of my old colleagues still works there and tells me that despite this many of their interactions could be resolved by googling or reading first.

Never underestimate people’s ability to lower your expectations

People don’t report bugs in game and make tickets or post on CS forum. I have never said people don’t do wrong. Pretty sure we made that point earlier.

However that still will never excuse the poor state of customer service many receive today.

Here I completely agree, and really I think all companies should be obligated to have some sort of phone support.

My point was more don’t punish the staff for following orders. You may believe that bad feedback makes a difference and perhaps with blizzard it does I haven’t worked for them. However my experience of working customer service is the comments aren’t even read and instead the process is mathematical with only the ratings doing anything. And usually that anything is punishing the employee.

I’m glad I left customer service behind long ago

I dont punish staff, I merely give accurate feedback when they fail. I can’t keep explaining the same thing over and over so I’m going to stop replying.

If it’s something they can’t do it’s not the same as providing a bad service.

I believe most of the GMs are gone and most if not all of the inquires are answered by AI.
Why?
Short answer:
Cost reduction, and can handle more cases a human ever could.
Long answer:
An AI program doesn’t need to eat, sleep, take a smoke break, doesn’t get sick or goes to maternity leave,doesn’t ask for a raise because it doesn’t need to be paid anyway, it only needs the necessary IT resources to run.
Like it or not, this is the future of customer support, especially on large platforms where the sheer amount of inquiries would be next to impossible to be handled by human workforce, or would be too costly to do so.

Not to be an a-hole, but if even Punyelf can’t defend it, you know it’s bad.

:smiley:

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I’ve only made a few tickets over all these years. And sometimes they could help, and sometimes they could not. I didn’t expect a yes, or a fix. The interactions with the human beings themselves were always great and I’d rate that. It sucks if some players automatically rate it as bad service when they don’t get their way, these are obviously two very different things.

As said before tho, no idea what it’s like now. Trying to make a ticket is so bloody frustrating these days that I’ve given up. I think that is awful service, but that’s on Blizzard, not the humans doing the work :wink:

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It really is time governments mandated some form of phone support for customers.

I completely agree with you and have had similar experiences. It’s incredibly frustrating and disappointing how customer support in games has evolved—or, rather, devolved—over the years.

There was a time when GMs felt like part of the community, engaging with players directly, understanding the issues at hand, and making you feel like your concerns mattered. Now, like you said, it often feels like the response is automated or heavily scripted, with little to no effort put into actually resolving problems or even acknowledging them properly.

I’ve also gone through the cycle of submitting tickets, waiting days, only to receive dismissive responses or links to articles that don’t even address the issue. It’s especially disheartening because the small hope you have when submitting a ticket gets crushed every time.

Looking back at old tickets from years ago compared to now, it’s like night and day. GMs used to make you feel like your concerns were valid and that they were there to help—not just to redirect you to some FAQ page. I honestly wonder the same thing: what’s the purpose of their role anymore?

It’s sad to see how far things have fallen.