Why is the customer support so useless? I ask a very technical question and get told random stuff about cheating and then told to go to the forums, as if random people on forums are going to know how the game works in low-level details. They completely ignore my suggestion as well and just overall are entirely reluctant to help or call someone higher-up.
I’m really pissed off at how they shrug us off just to mark the ticket resolved and get bloody paid for “working”. Absolutely unacceptable.
Right now a portion of California is on fire. (Their home base) so even though it is Irvine where they are out of. Activision’s headquarters is in Santa Monica. Which is near the Palasides Fire outbreak.
Palasides fire is West of Activision’s headquarters so gonna bet all customer service from there is suspended at this time.
5 BLOCKS to be exact from the Evacuation Zone.
So yeah, not expecting Customer support to be at their building anymore.
Why would the fire matter when their support agents don’t live or work in the US? From a former GM Impressive-Part7211:
"The last customer service humans at Blizzard were laid off Jan of 2024. All GMs now are outsourced.
Source is myself (former GameMaster, Austin office, from 2015-2022) and all of my friends that were laid off in Jan. I was there when the first “temps” were hired, it was for the Battle For Azeroth launch. We were told they were just temps to help with launch. From that point on no new GM classes were hired, only outsourced temps and all GM locations were closed. Cork in Ireland was first, then Versailles in France, the few GM teams in Irvine were next and finally Austin where the vast majority of GMs were was cut off. 4 GMs kept their jobs by getting promoted to other departments and since then all GMs are outsourced overseas. You MIGHT get lucky with a very complicated issue and get a CSC, Customer Service Champion, kind of GMs for the GM’s, but that’s it"
Thank you for posting that.
This is exactly what the rest of the corporate world is doing with their “customer service” facing departments.
Callcenters. Flowcharts. Cheap labor.
No actual understanding about what they’re helping you with, no incentive to be actually helpful, just process tickets as fast as possible because that’s the metric that matters.
Blizzard employees in general are pretty useless but yeah, at some point they decided they don’t even need customer service at all and “outsourced” it which basically means ending it.
Even managers of pretty big pro teams can’t get any kind of help from Blizzard
https://www.reddit.com/r/Competitiveoverwatch/comments/1hxwl0v/oncee_again_manager_look_for_help/
It’s quite possible it’s not even a metric they measure. Blizzard realized they zero product gain from delivering any kind of customer service so they don’t do it anymore
I dunno about blizzard, but that’s how those outsourced centers work. The people make literal pennies on the dollar compared to local workers and the only way they measure that productivity is how many tickets get processed per hour/day.
Doesn’t matter WHAT they do with them either, just as long as they took so many out of the queue, they get paid. If they don’t meet that metric they get fired and some other drone gets their seat/position.
The quality control on those processes is near non-existent and the churn is insane.
But it saves the businesses b/millions of dollars in what used to be an expensive and usually union position and that is all they care about anymore.
At this point it’s genuinely better for Blizzard and similar companies to employ chat GPT instead of humans.
We get more interesting, informative, and natural conversations with ChatGPT than we do with those robotic humans whose answers are 90% copy-pasted.
So if we can’t even speak to the company, how are they considering our feedback exactly? Is that also collected by those outsourced drones? This is just making it look like the company is running like a headless chicken.
The NUMBER ONE priority for a company should be customer support, and they decided we as customers weren’t worth considering. They’re treating us like crap to make a few more bucks of revenue. Am I the only one annoyed by this?
Plenty of people including myself are more than annoyed. I went from happily supporting the company to deciding to never spend a dime on another blizzard game and all it took was a false ban and having to wade into their support system for half a year to resolve it.
Eventually there will be a tipping point with the current system where the money saved on cheap labor is ultimately lost because people cannot trust their account will just be taken away randomly so they stop spending.
I don’t even care about outsourcing support as long as that support understands English and more than anything gets actual training.
Of course not. Which is why you need to harass them over and over and over while not losing your cool or verbally abusing them to get your answers. At some point it makes no sense not to answer you if you’ll just keep asking until they do.
I’ve been telling this for the longest time to everyone and my friends especially, don’t spend money on this company if they can take it away at any moment for any reason and refuse to even provide adequate support.
What do you mean exactly? That they will eventually give the right response? Are there any actual “humans” remaining in the support chain? (By humans I mean people that aren’t outsourced, they might as well be replaced by an LLM if they’re that useless)
Oh gosh, I read “Palestine” and I was like “oh no, not another Jamie Lee Curtis bad take AGAIN”…
Fair point but even when everything’s fine at Blizzard’s (which hasn’t happened in quite some time, given all the scandalds and internal issues) customer support has always been quite bad, compared to when they pretty much had just World of Warcraft to worry about (more than a decade ago).
I remember customer support to have been quite good in 2007-2010. I guess those were “different” times.
According to some (not actually verified btw), if you choose the right problem to complain about (Submit your support ticket under the category of ‘region change’, ‘technical support’,) or just get lucky, you might actually get to a US management level CS person who will address your issue like an actual person who understands the game or at least the services provided.
So the advice from the user base is lie about what’s wrong to try and get an actual savvy support. Which is BONKERS.
It’s been a hot minute since I’ve tried that. OW is really the only blizzard game I mess with at all anymore and as I’m a relatively benign presence I don’t really get much reason to interact with CS.
tbh this is the worst customer support I’ve ever seen for a game. They definitely need to work on their support department.
at this point i dont know if erasing the department wouldnt be better
Because they want robots to do the work for them.
That’s why, for some dumb reason, the robots can action your account instead of just flag it.
The only thing the people who work at Blizzard wanna do is tell us to go f/ ourselves by saying the reports were true (when they weren’t in all cases because they only look at what you said not the entire chat for context.)
“Yeah, we can’t have you calling someone who called you a slur stupid. :\ That’s against ToS.”
Be freakin’ for real. xD
I got called the R word just last match couple days ago. Havent touched the game since season 8. The player didnt get banned whatsoever. Why is there so double standards and hypocrits in the customer support
Contacted CS about my account closure, got told 4 different reasons and excuses each time as to why my account was closed with nothing to back it up. I’ve done my own investigating for my account to get it back and support are refusing to help, automated AI responses each time. Frustrating!