Customer Service

[Mispeled-benediction]

Let’s be perfectly honest here, not gonna mince my words, Blizzard has one of the worst Customer Service in this industry. That’s right, I said it and I stand by what I said.

Now that I got that off my chest, you can disagree with me on whether it’s bad or not, we can at least all agree that there can be improvements to it.

After the many interactions I’ve witnessed with Customer Service, while I can’t possibly know how they operate, one thing seems to be clear to me, the complete lack of communication inside Blizzard between the dev teams and the support team.
Whether this is due to customer service being overloaded and not having the time or willingness to communicate with other teams or simply due to policies at Blizzard preventing them from communicating between teams, this has to change.

Customer Service response is almost always just pointing to a support article that is often completely wrong. An article that could, and should, be corrected by the devs to accurately reflect the games they serve.

Take this article as an example: https://us.battle.net/support/en/article/000173306
It states that, for Classic, Ulduar hard mode doesn’t guarantee normal loot, which is blatently false as anyone who’s played original WotLK and Classic will tell you. Hard mode loot is on a separate table and killing a boss in Hard mode always guarantees one piece from that table to drop.

Yet, Customer Service uses that article like the gospel, even when presented with undeniable proof that this article is wrong they simply point you towards the feedback report or forums to complain (Well look at me now Game master X, I’ve done exactly what you asked of me), something that is wholly inneficient for obvious reasons and will never see this article fixed so that Customer Service can actually do their job properly.

I guess my question here is: Why does Customer Service expect the players to be the ones communicating with the devs rather than Customer Service communicating with the devs through internal channels?

And this isn’t the only issue with Customer Service either, but if I had to write all the problems I’ve seen with this Customer Service, no one would bother reading this post because it would be too long.

[Phenomenon-hydraxis]

I have fond memories of when Blizzard’s Customer Service within WoW was above par. I still have screenshots of some of the awesome conversations I had with GM’s. They didn’t utilize copy/paste crap, nor did they just “e-mail” you the answer to your ticket. They actually took time, and responded to your ticket. You’d get a blinking indicator stating “A Blizzard GM would like to speak with you, do you accept?” And it’d open its own new window and you’d be actively chatting with a GM. You could tell jokes, have a good time, and get honest to the point answers to your inquiry.

Now, you get the common copy/paste thing that barely describes the issue your having, with an auto-completed ticket even though nothing was fixed. then you have to create a new ticket for that ticket. Or you get a response that actually can help in the situation, but It’s still a shadow of what it used to be.

I think the last time I actually had an honest to god chat with a GM, was Warlords of Draenor.

Sadly, the decline of Blizzard’s Customer Service started during the merger with Failivision. And even though they huffed and puffed and stated “Nothing would change”, so much did. They lost their above par Customer Service, the game service took a hit and continues to take hits as Failivision tries to scrape every single penny they can from Blizzard. It’s why I seriously am hopeful for this merger with Microsoft (even though every single government out there is doing severe overreach in trying to stop it) because I believe Microsoft will finally get Blizzard out from under Failivisions influence.

[Ravij-wyrmrest-accord (Ravij)]

I too remember the days when you got a personalized response from a live GM instead of the automatic -expletive- we’re getting now.

When my account was hacked back in October 2022 it took nearly 3-4 weeks to get what was taken returned to me. While I was fortunate to not have been locked out of my account like I’ve heard some stories. I began to think of what IF I was locked out? Where is the urgency in recovering these hacked accounts of players?

I recall the process of trying to recover my stolen items/gold. I kept getting copy/pasted responses of the same text over and over unless I hit a secret keyword that somehow altered the content of the response and got me a live response. Every few days I would try to see where CS was at in recovering my stolen things and I’d get either an auto response or a tailored response that said they were working on the issue.

Frustrated as I was I did bring my complaints to the CS forum where I was met with players making assumptions of their own (one such post started with what made me feel like I was being accused of being negligent of the safety of my account) before an official post was made on my thread.
My account was hacked on Halloween - Thread

I don’t think players should be able to make assumption posts on the CS when an issue is as serious as having your account compromised.

When I finally did get everything returned to me? There was no GM to tell me everything’s been sorted. Just an email with an auto response “Be careful with your account next time. Add an authenticator!” I had an authenticator ON that account and the hacker still got in. I really miss being able to use the physical token I had and not the smartphone token they want me to use.

[Kalviery]

Hello, Council members.

Thanks for your feedback here. Customer Support usually just watches the Customer Support forum, so I apologize that it has taken a little longer to respond to your post here.

I’ve been with Blizzard Customer Support in various roles for 14 years. While I don’t agree with the framing of our global team above, I recognize that experiences vary from person to person, depending on the sort of issues you encounter and how often you contact Customer Support (CS), seeking help.

Regarding communication between CS and devs, while there are some issues presented here (which I’ll explain), we feel very good about the state of things. Back in 2008 when I joined as a Game Master, the communication lines were not as strong as they are now. Back then, as a Game Master (GM), it would have been considered unusual behavior for me to reach outside of my department for information about a game mechanic or bug.

Today we have dedicated channels where GMs and QA/Development teams constantly talk about issues affecting our players. During World of Warcraft content updates, multiple CS teams look for issues reported on our forums, the in-game bug report form, tickets, and a variety of sites such as reddit and Wowhead. We compile all of those conversations, and we help the QA team prioritize the work that follows.

As you know, a great deal of inquiries from players can be answered by our knowledge base. The knowledge base is large (over 1200 articles for World of Warcraft, all localized into many languages!) and it’s a pretty epic job to keep it up to date for World of Warcraft and all the other games and updates we support. We empower our frontline CS teams to create and update our support articles—effectively in real time—whenever they get new information. Ideally, this means other GMs and other players can get details or help without needing to open a ticket. It also empowers us to link players to support articles wherever we believe one exists that contains relevant information.

Of course, that’s in a perfect scenario where everything is right 100% of the time. That’s not always going to be the case, and with the specific article linked above, we didn’t hit that target.

That article was inaccurate. Looking at its history, one of our authors misunderstood some mechanics around loot tables, and the misunderstanding made it into the public article. We’ve corrected that article and made sure internal feedback on it reaches the right individuals and teams.

I’m sorry we had this error and that it affected you. Overall, we believe the benefit of quickly getting information in front of players is worth the risk of an error making it through. We do regular audits of our support articles and prioritize those that deal with major contact drivers or concerns. As I mentioned, the knowledge base is large, and it’s localized into more than a dozen languages. It takes time to audit everything, and that’s a process we are actively improving so that we can catch articles like this one more quickly.

Customer Support routes player reports of bugs and game mechanic feedback to the forums for a few reasons. While we have solid communication between departments, we’ve never been a manual feedback response team. We don’t want to position GMs to speak on behalf of game designers. Going to the forums is also a better way to spur the kind of ongoing player-to-player discussion that helps give our community and dev teams insight into collective player sentiment. To reduce wait times for players that have critical issues preventing login/play, we place references to the forums and support articles ahead of opening a ticket, because often, that’s the best way to save someone that time.

In the specific situation outlined above, the information available to the Game Masters was incorrect, so the recommendation of providing feedback about the game mechanic was also not the right course of action. That’s something we’re addressing with internal follow-up.

All of our teams: Customer Support, QA, Community, Design, and Publishing have grown a lot over the years, and we’re here because we want to be here for you. We’ll continue to evolve and look for areas of improvement going forward. We do wish we could be everywhere that players raise issues. There’s no silver bullet that solves all of the problems a customer support organization faces, but our role is to advocate on players’ behalf and importantly: to reduce your reliance on us, so that you can maximize your game time. Our goal is, as ever, to supply fast, accurate, and helpful information, and we’re getting better at that all the time. We’ll continue working on it and considering feedback such as this.

Thanks for being part of our community, and for caring about how we help.

[Turkeycat-dalaran]

Hey Kalviery, thanks for the insight

edit: fixed link to go to the right article, woops

I’ve also had troubles with CS giving inaccurate info and other troubles, in particular GM’s have been particularly unwilling to help with quest issues where breadcrumb quests are involved, I’ve lost count of the amount of times me and my friends have gotten a reply including “Good news! this quest is a breadcrumb you can safely skip it”
even after specifying in the ticket we know its a breadcrumb we are working on completion

two times in particular we’ve had incorrect info given to us,

1, Into the Abyss (ID 14481) We were having an extremely difficult time getting this quest to show up and couldnt figure out what was wrong, we tried who knows how many different attempts, and eventually contacted support.
First we were told we needed to complete the BFA intro to be in the right phase, which we had, then that we needed to have not completed “To the depths”, however we tried on multiple characters that hadn’t and it never worked, then that we could just skip Into the abyss, then a second and third time, then to submit a bug report which we did. then a confused GM looked at the wrong character. then one final time to just skip it.

Awhile later we tried the quest again, with the same problem and sent in another ticket to which we were told
" The main thing for Into the Abyss is that the character who is picking up the quest needs to not have visited or seen Recruiter Burns before picking up the quest. And since new characters enter Stormwind through the Harbor in most cases, they will have disabled that breadcrumb quest when walking past the Recruiter. "

So we got a fresh character (iirc panda so they landed out front of stormwind instead of the dock) and it still didnt work

Two years later we still haven’t managed to get this quest, however it is still listed on a support article https://us.battle.net/support/en/article/179798
right after “A personal summons” which has been impossible to accept since legion the quest is still in game but the questgiver isn’t

More recently I tried to get help with “Much to Learn” the first quest of wandering isle, which is currently bugged (questgiver object book "to be a pandaren isnt spawning)
I tried on my main and a fresh newly created panda.
I had once previously gotten a quest start of a bugged quest so I didnt have to wait for a fix, and didnt think it would be a problem to ask for that help again,
first reply told me it was working as intended, which it clearly isn’t
second told me they werent aware of any issues with this quest and to try reloading and try again, and if that didnt work, to re open the ticket, which I tried, then did re open
third told me again to reload… which I just had
forth told me Only neutral pandas were eligable for it (which I later learned is actually true, when the other Race IDs were added to wandering isle quests, this quest was missed, but thats a separate issue)
fifth told me the same
sixth once again told me there was no known issues with this quest, which I confirmed there was with a newly created panda
After 6 tries I gave up on that one

last example: incorrect support article https://us.battle.net/support/en/article/14282
this quest has been bugged for quite some time, but this support article lists it as removed for some reason, We think it broke with the WoD pre patch, buts its definitely still in game, the name of the quest was even updated in shadowlands, we just still cant accept it

Im sorry if this comes off as overly critical, I want to emphasize how nice CS has been to me in tickets over the last couple years, the help just hasn’t been as good as the manners