I agree Blizzard is not perfect. I’ve been a customer since 2004, I’m still here. Not looking for an argument.
I work in the service industry, I deal with customer complaints as a supervisor I believe in being fair with our customers. If we do the deed we need to compensate at an appropriate level.
My customers can actually speak to me, unlike Blizz who hides behind websites and tickets. Do you remember the time when we could actually phone Blizzard and speaj to a human being? I do and it was great.
This is inaccurate, though. Blizzard temporarily shut down their live chat and phone callback services amidst the pandemic and a sudden wave of tickets following three product launches and a few ban waves positively inundating game masters on that front.
When that sudden influx has been satisfactorily dealt with, there’s no reason to think those services won’t be back for what issues require them.
Blizzard did not have phone advisors when the pandemic started it was chat. That excuse is over.
It’s not appropriate for people to wait days on end to get tickets resolved and sometimes be locked out of the game (for many reasons) It’s poor customer service. They are a huge company there is no excuse.
I will say one thing the cost of a sub has hardly changed, I will absolutely commend them on that.
Oh, you misunderstand, no offense was taken. I was assuming you were looking for a good-faith discussion about their systems starting a decade back and was simply mistaken given that reply, that’s all.
If your financial situation is such that missing out on one dollar’s worth of game time (two days) is a burden, you might do well to reevaluate your personal budget.
I’m also confused why you bumped a days-old thread to start an irrelevant rant.
The reason that went away was that people were calling in for anything and everything including mostly things that could not be assisted with over the phone. IF you could get into the hold queue, it might be a few hours waiting before you actually were able to talk with anyone.
Part of a call agents job is to handle objections. As a former Compliance Manager and QA Team Leader for financial services call centres for over a decade, and someone who had a 80%+ retention rate of home mortgage customers during the 2008/9 GFC - I’d be scoring their calls harshly if objections weren’t able to be handled.
But not for Blizzard.
When Blizzard moved to the current ticketing system, particularly when call backs and live chat were available, there were more ways then ever before for customers to contact Blizzard. Tell me, is that still bad customer service in your eyes since they removed one contact point, but added several more in place?
As do I - but I also firmly believe that the customer is not always right.
If you want to talk about companies hiding behind ticket systems - try getting in contact with Telstra (Telco in Australia, if anyone didn’t know) in a timely manner, or not having to repeat your request over and over to the multitude of agents who you will encounter. Compared to Telstra, Blizzard is A+
Yes they did, they shut down the inbound number (years and years ago) but if your problem was about a subject that could be solved over the phone (i.e. tech support, account problems, billing) they had a call back feature. That was absolutely there when the pandemic started. They had to shut down the inbound number because people thought that they could call in for any reason at all, that was never ever the intention of the phone system, it was there to solve specific account and tech issues that were better handled one on one (like payment issues).
Players abused the system and it ended up breaking the entire thing. IF you could get through (you would get a busy signal 9 times out of 10 for hours to days), you would be placed in a hold queue for hours. They are not a call center customer support business, in fact most games don’t have any dial in phone system at all. Again the phone system was meant for a specific type of issue, but because gamers tend to be an entitled bunch that wants things exactly how they want them and now, people were mostly calling in for help with quests; or to ask a GM for a joke; or to yell at a GM because they didn’t like what was done with something with the game development.
You don’t play many games do you? I’ve never seen any game company that doesn’t take days to answer and none of them, that I know of, have phone lines. Blizzard is usually very good with tickets and any issue that locks someone out of the game completely are prioritized. Yes recently the ticket times have increased because of a number of events and issues that happened one right after the other or all at once. They have done a heck of a job getting those wait times down, they also have done a wonderful job of putting systems in the game to try and allow players to help themselves, for instance when your character is stuck they have a self help move character feature that fixes most stuck issues.
Yeah, 18 years of experience here in a leadership role dealing with customers.
I don’t think it’s great customer service at all. Yeah, it’s automated, etc but there is nothing better than dealing with an advisor, the chat was good, I lead a chat team, and for people that like that kind of communication it is great!
I firmly believe the customer is not always right too. I am speaking about when a company makes a mistake it should be owned with not a lot of work from the customer.
Very true. That does not mean they cannot do better. It is just accepted as the way it is. It would be refreshing if a some gaming company bucked that trend. Thanks for the discussion!
I would say they pretty much have, they aren’t perfect by any means, but I think they are better than most game companies when it comes to CS. I’m not really holding the closure of the call back and live chat parts against them as they weren’t really prepared for the pandemic (none of us were) and they have a lot of proprietary systems they use that aren’t easily set up for work from home. Can they do better? Sure they can, and the Blues here will tell you the same thing.
But yes thank you for the discussion and being able to discuss it maturely, it is always nice to be able to do that.
