I will say after playing this game for an atrociously long time one thing that has gotten worse over the years is customer service. The automation is just so terrible.
I shouldn’t need to click through 50 menus to open a ticket like I’m trying to cancel my amazon prime subscription. It was nice actually talking to someone even if the resulting answer was we cannot help.
Idk usually it took a day or so when someone got back to me.
Well, a multi-billion dollar profit company cut their CS in favor of AI and self-help solutions because they had to pay for Bobby’s golden parachute. So, expect it to be just a good (bad?) in the future.
It’s harder to open tickets for things they cannot help with. It helps keep the queue down a little for things they can.
Manually clicking through a bunch of screens is the definition of a process that isn’t automated.
Usually submitting a ticket for things that the GMs can’t help with sends you on a wild goose chase on purpose. If you’re really having to look hard for the reason that you want to submit a ticket to get to a form where you can do so, there’s a pretty good chance that your issue falls into the we-can’t-help-with-this category.
The website could generally do a better job of specifically calling that out, though.
They don’t use AI for Customer Support (currently) no matter how many people insist that the response they got must’ve been put out by an AI. They have human reps that pick template responses. That may change in the future.
When I started in Aug 2017 CS was fantastic. Literally talked for one of the reps for like 45 minutes on a slow day.
Right now, I dont even bother with tickets. They send those auto responses that prove they arent even looking at them.
The second something bad enough happens and I cant get into my game, I’ll delete it and go play ESO.
They dont have people doing it anymore. They sacked them all for Bobbys golden parachute.
It’s hit or miss with customer service reps some will refund stuff some will flat out tell you sorry no can do. I’ve had them refund race changes revert purchases etc etc. Others just say nope not able to do that.
It’s obscene that we, as paying customers, have seen our support service go from in-game GMs to overseas minimum wage workers and auto-reply emails.
They still have CS yes. But they absolutely use AI. It’s mostly for chat moderation – not bans, but squelches. I’d be willing to bet they use some form of AI for moderating their in-game voice channels. (Like in Overwatch.)
I was being a bit hyperbolic as I leaned into the situation.
Even that’s not “AI”. Squelches are just triggered through simple scripting - player reports received = x, squelch is triggered.
That’s not to say that they won’t implement any kind of chat scanning AI in the future, just they don’t really have that currently.
What customer service? It’s actually pretty shameful. Blizz hasn’t spoken a word about it. Hard to believe this is the company that gave us things like Starcraft, Warcraft 2 and 3, Diablo 2, etc. Large chunks of the game have been having issues all week. Dungeons are hard crashing users and resetting right now.
Though, I guess, it’s not really. Just a sleazy corpo version with Metzen occasionally showing up to HQ to shout enthusiastically at the workers in his Thrall voice.
I made an edit to include an example – voice chat, such as in Overwatch. Have it listen to games where toxic chat was reported by a player, and then potentially find the snippet of where a “toxic comment” was made (whatever that means to the system, whatever it was trained on). – this way a CS rep doesnt need to listen to a 5-30min audio file, reduce it down to 5min per case or so, down from potentially 30min+. (6-10 tickets per day would be awful for their SLAs)
Laying off all CS staff was simply the next logical step when all they were allowed to do is copypasta responses in the first place.
“Delete your WTF folder and addons”
“Check Wowhead/forums”
“We can’t assist with that”
And of course, claiming to ‘investigate’ things that are really just blindly accepting in-game reports so a bot can get you banned but you alone can’t do a damn thing to them.
Whether the human actually read what you wrote or not is another question, though. 
Story Time!
Back in WoD, my Mage fell through the floor of his garrison and was perpetually falling. Couldn’t take actions, never died, couldn’t log out. I had to ALT-F4 out, then get on my Druid and submit a ticket SPECIFICALLY SAYING the problem was on my Mage (and gave that character’s name).
Got an email saying my ticket had been fixed. Yay!
Logged in that night… they teleported my DRUID to Orgrimmar.
Had to reopen the ticket and point out the Druid was NOT the character with the problem.
They definitely reduced what CS / GMs can actually do to help, and that came with the blatant worsening of the ticket opening process.
I used to be able to get a Live Web Chat option for just about anything and I’d always opt for that if I needed to put in a ticket.
Now, you basically only get real options like that if it’s specifically a billing issue, because that’s money.
Everything else you put in the ticket, then wait 9 days for chatGPT to tell you to visit WoWhead and link you an unrelated Support Article.
I can’t remember the last time I opened a support ticket.
I remember years ago when I was playing EverQuest, and a friend told me about the new World of Warcraft game being made, and how it would be the ‘EQ killer.’
He said that no one in EQ would be prepared for how amazing the customer service at Blizzard was going to be. And it was. You’d put in a ticket and within hours, even minutes, a GM would be in front of you helping you with your issue. It lasted years, too.
Such a shame to see how far this has deteriorated. But it’s not just Blizzard, it’s everywhere, most companies.
Last few tickets I’ve opened, as well as tickets opened by my friends, have all been met by variations of the same automated response, lying and saying they’d also experienced the exact same extremely niche issues that we’d had, and not actually making any effort to understand or help.
Felt infuriating and condescending.
When I requested to speak to an actual person I got a response that basically said there was nothing to be done (my issue was that I didn’t get an achievement for doing something that should have given me the achievement), they said they couldn’t actually grant it to me due to technical limitations, I guess I can only take them at their word.
Being told by a real person that I couldn’t be helped was a significantly better experience than being coddled and condescended by an AI. Regardless, it took me a week of going back and forth before I actually spoke to a human being and in the end I got nothing but a sour experience.
I hate Blizzard’s customer support, it’s a battle just to speak to anyone, and they don’t help. I was mildly inconvenienced by an issue, and enraged for a week by the customer support, I felt so annoyed and somehow it’s stuck with me months later.
I would genuinely rather have not opened the ticket.
This isn’t meant to imply that Blizzard is dying, because it’s not, but usually when cuts are made, as they have been over the years, the first area to suffer is customer service, because it’s the least critical to making money.
Also, in general, and this is more of me inserting my own observations and opinions, the general temperature of society lately is less conuducive to providing less customer service-esque qualities to others.