They laid off 600 CS people in 2012. There have been no CS layoffs since, and many of those laid off then were re-hired.
Were you thinking of the Marketing, Publishing, Community Manager, and esports layoffs in 2019? Those were all front facing promotions type positions, not Development or CS positions.
to say the customer service was poor would infer that there was any service at all
I didnât see the original post name any specific issue. People are having to pay gold to regain items they already had (looks like mainly on druids) and maybe other things I am not aware of. It might be due to the squish, but there are a few issues right now.
Iâm just hoping they resolve them since they seem to know about them.
I am not saying you did call in or did not get great help. I am saying they were not supposed to be assisting with many of they issues people called with. It encouraged people to call for things they should not instead of using the ticket system. Eventually, rather than say ânoâ to people to reduce the phone queue, they re-designed the system so the phone queue was eliminated completely.
People can still get live help, but only for the actual Billing, Account Access, and Tech Support stuffs.
It is not ideal, not at all. EVERYONE prefers to deal with a real person and almost everyone hates navigating menu systems for support.
The best bet right now for anyone who is frustrated with the menu system is to go to the CS forum and ask the regs for a direct ticket link. They can find the best one in minutes instead of you wasting time searching.
P.S. I forgot to mention the other day, I really like your transmog!
Yeah I know, which is what I dont personally like and am suggesting it would be nice to change since our forum is different for WoW.
I know, but I am saying that if you submit a ticket regarding the forums (which is possible) it would be good if it went to a CM or forum moderator instead of a GM who will end up saying âwell, GMs dont handle forum stuffâ.
Of course this is all just my thoughts and suggestions.
I would also recommend to people Tech issues that arenât solved or currently actively being written about on the Tech Help Forum you should create a ticket for help, especially anything causing serious issues on your computer. The support is way more on the point and actively helpful for more serious things.
Ah, I understand your point.
I think we used to have a specific forum for WoW Forum feedback once upon a time. That was when each game had custom built forum software so feedback for it was best handled via the game forums so that the proper forum build was being addressed.
Now every Blizz forum uses the same software called Discourse and it is handled by the one Web team. Any suggestion you make impacts all the games. There are some tweaks they can do per forum set based on options (mostly trust level settings), but most of it is handled by requesting updates to the overall software package impacting everything. The Web team puts together a request list and submits it to Discorse for a new update then deploys it across all the Blizz forums.
D2 used to have a blue sitting in the support chat. Very irritable person. I had only ever needed an important question asked once and this person basically in summary said A: I typed too slow and B: not a server side issue guess your SOL.
That was back in '00âŠtwenty years ago. I have no doubt 70% of it consisted of muh toon d/c and I didnât get my loot. Or my HC toon died due to lag.
I whine about the average 48 hour turn around on support, but consider that the number of real and honest complaints/suggestions are few. Need a reference, look here.
level swish is a bad , then stop make the levels more
This guys not going anywhere itâs all a show
Can I have your stuff? 
Hereâs what I know. I filled out only a couple tickets in Vanilla. Maybe 3 or so. Each time I was talking to an actual person within 10 minutes.
Compare that to today. First of all, even writing a ticket is a huge process. They send you through all kinds of links to articles trying to address your problem. But letâs say you persevere and actually fill out a ticket. Now you have several daysâŠmaybe a week before an actual person investigates the issue.
This is not acceptable. They went from one of the best customer supports toâŠone that doesnât exist. I can only assume this is Activisionâs influence, since itâs clearly a cost cutting measure. No company that wants to make a quality game with quality customer support would have this kind of system. Theyâve taken humans out of the equation as much as possible, and itâs only going to get worse.
Iâm curious as to what game company has a phone line that you can call and rant at the people answering about game design, like the people doing phone customer service have any connection at all to the people doing said design. The people who design the game donât even know those guysâ names. They might vaguely recognize them if they pass in the hall but probably donât even bother to nod. Venting your spleen on a person who is paid to âmmm-hmmâ and âI apologize for any frustration that youâre havingâ at you, absorbing your anger like a sponge and acting as a firewall between you and the people who make any decisions about anything, isnât going to change anything.
No, they wonât âpass on your feedbackâ. Theyâre going to turn to the person sitting next to them after the call is over and vent about the whackadoo who took up a bunch of their time and acted like a total Karen. The best way to have feedback that people do look at, aggregate and pass along to people who are paid to look at trends and metrics is to post on the forums, even if no one responds back to you with a frowny face and an apology. Making the person that you talk to feel bad isnât going to hurt the company that they work for in any way, itâs just going to add another pebble to the pile of their terrible day.
sounds like you just want somebody to rant at because you donât like stuff. That is NOT what customer service is for.
Just post your rant here like all the others.
Fun trivia. The Development teams for the games are in Irvine, CA. Almost the entire GM/CS Support team, including some of the Forum Support Agents in TS/CS, are out of Austin, TX.
They donât even pass in the halls.
Really? Back in the day they had CS reps in Irvine too, I used to work a couple of blocks away. I pulled a weekend shift one time and went to the Pieology at the Spectrum, I was dressed down in a gaming shirt and the lady working there asked if I worked for Blizzard 
It makes sense that theyâd consolidate departments in one location, though, easier to manage that way.
They do have some of the CS staff still in Irvine, esp management levels. However, the bulk are in Austin. It is helpful for staff as it is not a high paid position and the cost of living in Austin is better than Irvine, CA.
I once had the chance to visit the CS team in Irvine and get a tour of the systems in action at the time. Of course, they only let me see my own account + generic tools, as you would expect. They are very strict about customer data privacy.
They have a program there called CS For a Day that is open to anyone in the company (I think), and encouraged. They want colleagues to experience what the front line support concerns from players are as well as the systems used to resolve them. Mike Morhaime did it every single year, sometimes twice, just to make sure he was in touch with current support topics.
Yeah, the cost of living down there is no joke. My commute was about an hour and a half in traffic each way so that I could live somewhere slightly more affordable. Granted, without traffic it was only about 25 minutes tops - another thing I donât miss about SoCal! Maybe with the pandemic shifting workforces all over the place theyâll be able to look at more remote CS staff from all over, who knows?
Iâd be willing to venture a guess that the âCS For a Dayâ program probably got a lot of quality-of-employee-life measures like automated self-service options and limited phone support for specific billing and account issues put in place in the first place!
This is my hope too, for people not just at Blizzard, but all over the world. Some people love office structure and that is cool if they want it. Many others though canât afford to move in order take a position. Opening it up to telecommuting means a broader work force to choose from.
I own my own home on the East Coast. I asked Mike if they would consider any East Coast offices, esp with the expansion of esports as a major initiative. Not that he was going to tell some rando like me his infrastructure plans, but still.
Blizz has been notoriously anti -work from home for security reasons. They donât normally outsource things and wonât let staff work from home, until now. I really do hope they get that settled and make it permanent. Such a QoL increase for all those with long commutes and high costs of living!
I feel pretty confident is saying this is a blatant lie. And I know there is absolutely no way you can prove otherwise. But I guess thatâs what Forums are for. We can just claim whatever we want.