Why Are Ticket Queues So Long?

Support Customer Support
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I think you guys need a Gordon Ramsey to come through your company and fix the CS department. I’ve been waiting on a ticket for what will be over four days now. Imagine what Ramsey would say to you about that. You’ve got billions in resources and state of the art technology at your disposal yet the DMV with a fraction of the resources beats your wait times by like a hundred fold.

Is this being discussed internally? Does the team understand that long wait times drives down customer satisfaction and hurts the product?

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Yeah pretty sure it’s being discussed. Not much they can do. No point hiring 100’s more employees, train them up, only to have the ticket demand drop.

Ticket times are up due to various problems customers are dealing with.

It happens.

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This is more of a player-to-player helpdesk moderated by blue posters. The people who make decisions don’t really come here, so leaving feedback here isn’t a great use of your time.

That said, what is your issue? It’s possible that it was submitted in the wrong queue or region, which could cause it to be taking longer than it should. Also, it’s entirely possible that we could find an answer for you without having to wait.

Keep in mind that if you open a chat and then close the chat window, the associated ticket is auto-abandoned as it’s assumed that the issue is resolved or a resolution is no longer desired.

Also, they did release a new major patch about 3 weeks ago and re-released a game about a week ago, so I bet that their CS is pretty swamped.

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You can hire employees on a temporary basis using agencies like Robert Haft e.c.t… There’s large pools of well trained people just awaiting a temp job; as for internal details all Blizz would have to do is make a guide that explains everything you need to do in your CS role when it comes to the bulk of the tickets that are causing the long queue. As to my issue it’s an item restoration and I used one on Classic which somehow also applies to my retail license as well. The first rep didn’t even read the ticket closely and because of that I now have to wait several additional days for assistance.

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What is this DMV you are speaking of? I have not been to one since 2012 I think? Moved to a state that does it far more effectively.

That said, ticket times are based on the number of tickets in queue. There are a finite amount of resources to answer said tickets. So when people manipulate the ticket queues by intentionally using a false path, or when they are having a legit concern, queues go up.

What is the issue you are having? Perhaps we can help?

Edit to say GMs are hands off when it comes to item restoration, precisely because there is a self help tool. Now, whether classic restoration and retail restoration are tied to the same cool down, or if it is a bug I could not answer, as this is the first I have seen it come up.

If it is a bug, you will want to submit it to the Bug Report forum, so QA can take a look at it. However, I fear that whether it is a bug or not, a GM most likely will not be able to assist you. The cool down is hard coded into the system.

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Been suggested many times. It’s not something Blizzard does.

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But does the DMV have customers who submit tickets every day because their oil pressure is low, the wait time at the traffic light is too long, and some other driver gave them the middle finger? That would be more like dealing with WoW players and the DMV’s wait time would be more like a year or so.

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Then sadly there probably is nothing a ticket, or GM staff will be able to help with.

Restrictions

If you have an active World of Warcraft account in good standing (not locked or banned), you can use item restoration once every 15 days. The cool down period is shared between Classic and Retail.

You most likely will have to await the cool down to expire.

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Awesome Kozzae. It is not a bug. Good to know it is intended for the cool down to be shared.

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I get that it’s not something Blizzard does but it’s like saying oh there’s a fire but we’re not going to use the fire extinguisher because that’s not what we do. Then the fire just rages on. In this case the ticket queue times would be the fire.

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I have a feeling that you’re dramatically underestimating how long it takes to train up a GM given how complex their role is. In any case, this is not the appropriate place for feedback as the people who make those decisions do not view the support forums.

As Kozzae linked, that’s intended, and it’s unlikely that they’ll be able to assist. It’s probably best to close the ticket. :confused:

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Thanks for the info! I’ll wait the three-hundred and sixty hours to restore the item.

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Probably something like, “Why am I critiquing a video game support department? I’m a chef, you donkey!”

He may or may not go on to complain about something or other being raw.

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One of the Blues stated in the old iteration of the forums that training for GMs is a month long. GMs handle tickets for all Blizzard games, not just WoW. It is not something they can hire Temps for. It’s not something you just need to “make a guide” for the position.

There are restrictions to how many people they can hire. All their ticketing is done in-house. It is not out-sourced. Employees don’t do it at home. It’s a way of having control of the security of player data. That means there is limited space for GMs. Limited teaching space. Limited GM space. Limited parking space. This all limits the number of GMs they have. As well, there is a blip in ticket volume and ticket time after the release of a patch or expansion. It is financially inefficient to hire and train someone for a month to have them work for a couple weeks only.

DMV is not a good comparison. Think of a grocery store. The cash registers all have cashiers checking customers through, but they all still have line-ups to the other side of the store. Hiring more cashiers is not going to change anything as there are no more cash registers for them to use and no place to put new ones. And this event only happens twice a year, so renovating the store for space to put them in to cover this event does not make sense.

For the record, I had a ticket on my EU license that was open for almost four (4) days. I was annoyed with the time it took, but it didn’t affect my opinion on the “product”.

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9 days ago, you used the item restoration tool to successfully retrieve an item you deleted.

3 days ago you opened a ticket that appears to be a challenge to duel a Game Master. This ticket was essentially spam - this type of ticket contributes to the long wait times for legitimate issues.

1 day later, you updated your open ticket (2 days ago) and asked for some items to be restored - despite the fact that your account is currently on cooldown because you recently used the tool.

The Game Master who answered your question provided you with the correct information though. They would not be able to duel you, and would not be able to restore items to you.

You responded claiming the Game Master skimmed over your ticket, but they did not. The next Game Master recently responded and further explained that the items your requesting are not available for restoration.

This is outlined in our World of Warcraft Item Restoration article (provided in the second Game Master response) -

You can’t use item restoration to recover items lost through trade, crafting, and use. If you’re trying to recover a non-quest stackable item, you’ll need to contact us for assistance. For all other items, if it’s not on the list, it’s not available for restoration. Restored items, including bind on equip, cannot be traded.

Emphasis mine. I know this was provided by the Game Master, but I want to make sure I share this here as well for anyone who may have questions about this in the future.

We do our best to respond as quickly as possible. Following content updates, like the 8.3 patch, the wait time can go up some as we see players returning with game play questions, and account recovery assistance requests on top of the normal every day tickets we see. However, your case doesn’t appear to have experienced any unusual wait. The duration your case was open for was a result of:

  1. A ticket originally open as what seems to be a joke being then updated to request a service.
  2. A second ticket being opened since you did not believe the original Game Master when they provided accurate information.

If we disregard the spam request and go only from the time you added an actual issue, your wait time was actually shorter than average since your ticket had already been in queue for a period of time. Updating your spam ticket did not bump it back to the end of the queue.

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And there goes my sympathy for the OP. This is why the triage came to exist in the first place (well, one of the whys). It’s like calling 911 to complain about being woken up by an amber alert (yes, people do genuinely do this). Seriously, don’t abuse help and/or emergency avenues for any organization.

That’s not really an accurate analogy, nor can one really be drawn with the scenario you provided, but a better illustration would be having random bystanders steal a fire extinguisher from another building and not compensating the owner of that other building. Yes, it’ll help the problem, but it’s a bit crappy to do; since you decreased the capacity of the other building to respond to a fire, you used that other person’s property callously instead of having a proper bond with them, you still committed theft, and a host of other ethical and practical problems.

Blizzard doesn’t do temps because temping isn’t effective for most problems, and isn’t seen as entirely ethical, since it’s more teasing people with a job than actually giving them a job.

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