it’s always been a stupid thing, the name
it’s like they want to provide CS but don’t want to be on the hook for it
half of the replies are people explaining what the form is and is not
idfk what it should be
1 Like
So… you want Blizz, and Blizz only to respond to every single post made in the Customer Support forum. Most posts there have been answered on that very forum by CMs, MVPs, and players many times over, but every person wants to feel special.
Have you ever put in an in-game ticket? How long does that usually take to get resolved. Now increase that because of the new workload caused by those CS agents having to answer every single forum question over and over.
Be thankful that the CS forums allow other players to answer easy questions, otherwise you would be sitting there for a week with no resolution and no way to get help other than to post in GD… which we all know what kind of response you will get there.
2 Likes
To be fair, as someone with decades of retail, food service and telephone Customer Service job experience under my belt, the old-fashioned notion of “Customer Service” came about from the times when you could walk into a store and abuse, intimidate, haggle, froth at and browbeat the staff until they gave you what you wanted. People basically got used to the service model of customers being able to use service staff like punching bags and the company owners using them like a firewall. This attitude carried over into telephone customer service, where they could call and vent and scream at people who were obligated to listen to them.
This is the principle behind the people that you see saying “I want to call Blizzard Customer service on the phone and talk to a REAL PERSON!”, because they want to be able to do this still.
What the modern model of primarily email service is laying bare, though, is that said companies don’t actually care that you’re upset. They never have. They have occasionally employed people that you were able to make feel terrible in some kind of misdirected retaliation towards the company that they work for, but that anger and abuse never rose above the level of that person to affect any kind of real change. It just made that one person that you dealt with miserable.
Now, it’s very easy to send a preformatted template to someone telling them specifically why you can’t do what they want and go about your day. I can’t say that I feel particularly bad that the rampant entitlement and enabling of terrible behavior and treatment of service personnel that the old Customer Service model encouraged is going the way of the dinosaur.
why do people leave off “to be”
“needs renamed”
what is this madness
Oh, but it’s never just that person’s one post! They want to have a conversation. In the instances that people have been able to get a Blue response there they want to go back and forth and back and forth indefinitely, arguing, “making their case”, debating, rules-lawyering, nitpicking, etc.
People are under the mistaken notion that getting what they want, no matter if they’re in the wrong, what they want is impossible or not allowed, they’re asking for it in the wrong place, or the entire game would need to be reprogrammed for them personally, is just a matter of arguing about it enough.
They’re wrong, and their wrongness shouldn’t be encouraged.
3 Likes
I want an explanation, as a customer, of WHY the thing has happened, partially so I can work, on my end, to make sure it doesn’t happen to me again, canned answers don’t give me that because I can’t ask a canned answer tangential questions, THAT’S why I want to speak to a person.
People who abuse CS agents are just gonna be cruel to people regardless of where they go.
1 Like
I have decades of experience in retail, food and government customer service jobs as well and I actually have never found people want that. I have rarely ever encountered anyone who acted like that in fact. Some people have problems and they would like them fixed and most times you can help them, sometimes you cannot but rarely do you have a person who can’t accept that.
So I am not sure what country or locality you were operating out of but that isn’t what I experienced at all.
I will say customer service has gone all to hell in the last decade though because it appears way too many customer service people don’t think they should do anything to help.
The problem with that when it comes to account actions for cheating/exploiting/botting, the most common time that people are seeking a “why”, is that if Blizzard lays out exactly what they detected and how, that helps people circumvent detection in the future.
They’ll usually say in the original account action notification what exactly got someone an action/silence for spicy language or inappropriate posts, though. At that point there’s not really anything else to be said, and when people have wanted to make it into a case of “but what I said wasn’t that bad!” or get into the technicalities it has never gone well for them when they do get the Blue attention to the situation that they’re asking for.
Either way, following up on your ticket is a better way to get clarification on your individual situation, as that is a direct line to the person who is dealing with your case specifically. There’s no reason to take it to the Customer Support forum in an attempt to get that same aid there instead.
I’d settle for the phone call system, then it’s private, quick and efficient. Also, personally, my issues aren’t nearly as frequently about being banned and more often billing irregularities or software failures.
I find it really, really, really, really…really hard to believe that in decades of customer service roles, you’ve only rarely come across someone who won’t accept “no” for an answer.
Is it the actual employees making that choice, though? Or is it the company that they work for, that are using their service staff like a living barrier about that between the customer’s anger and themselves? Customer Service reps are almost never empowered to actually make any decisions to help anyone. But people assume that that one person that they’re talking to is specifically withholding what they want from them because of…who knows what reason? A personal grudge? Which only escalates the situation.
That’s not new, it’s only just more visible now that it’s easier for Customer Service staff to electronically decline a request and close it out without having to absorb the blow-back of the customer’s anger.
never put your personal information on a forum. doesn’t matter if they are nice or not. if personal information is needed request a private communication channel like email or a ticketing system. even then it would be questionable to me on the safety of that information.
if your argument is that people can be jerks … no one can refute that
but, no, being able to take care of complex account issues over the phone was invaluable. I’ve heard stories of account screw ups where the well trained and seemingly happy blizzard people helped make magic happen and got things right again. I myself, had to resurrect my account as well as an even older defunct one and I was grateful to be able to do that with a real person in real time, take care of it right on the spot. They were motivated to help, it was very obvious. Their motivation was not “to avoid work” and I was grateful for the help.
Yes I’ve gotten decent help through the CS forum, but about nothing complex or different.
I’ve never heard of is some story where a player brags about how they had to “rip the blizzard csr a new one to get what they wanted” … … … I guess that happens but in general when people have a real problem and are desperate it doesn’t seem like trying to piss off the person who can help is a good idea.
Also ---- support on other games is absolute crapsauce. So bad it’s unreal. I remember having bugged items taking up inventory spots in one game and literally the solution was to delete and remake the character because they couldn’t fix it. Another game I remember all character customization just randomly got zorked and you walked around like a textureless grey blob until you decided to remake your character. This is with real games too, subscription and everything.
In the past Blizz CS was the rare animal, unicorn crossed with fairy dust, hard to believe that it even exists and it was good. Now? I think the people there do what they can, REALLY, I do, they try hard. But no — I find it hard to believe it’s the same.
It’s a corporate structured game now, it shoots for only as good as it has to be, not great. And that has nothing to do with the good people who are trying to help. It’s a structural priority issue.
Yup, and they’d just rather let the customers who pay them provide “support” for others. It shines very well in Blizzard’s case with the forum where you’re greeting with extremely hard-to-read posts by people shooting for green text. Which would be fine if they chose a different name for the forum, although I still think at a minimum basic writing skills need to be mastered before being allowed to post there.
It’s a part of certain dialects in America, especially in Western PA (like Pittsburgh and its suburbs) and areas surrounding that. I’m from that region and still have to catch myself when I’m writing something so that I don’t do it. It’s a dead giveaway that someone is from the region though.
1 Like
Actual customer support is nonexistent in this game they just send you to the wolves (player base). I keep hoping things get better but its not looking good.
I just haven’t. Maybe my retail/restaurant experience was back when people were more polite. That would be about 30 years ago.
I find that this happens pretty much everywhere other than one town I used to live in. It is a culture thing now.
It still is. The problem was that the phone number was specifically for billing and account-related issues, and people were calling in to ask for help with quests, and game hints, and any number of issues wholly unrelated to billing and accounts. By the time they pulled the plug, people were spending hours on hold, if they could even get through to be placed in the hold queue, often to be told that their issue could only be addressed via an in-game ticket.
Now, you can request a callback, but only if your issue is something that can be addressed by the billing and accounts teams.
Ticket systems are fine to an extent. They become very troublesome when response times are long. Rockstar’s support is done through ticketing and I’ve had responses within an hour or two, something Blizzard used to do just fine but as of late, wait times can go days or longer.