I've been hearing stories about Bioware's customer service being terrible, but I didn't pay them too much heed. Some people always complain about customer service, and anyway, I'm willing to cut the company some slack for being new at handling this particular beast. When my trooper was bugged out and I couldn't play, it would have been nice to receive some help, but I figured that they were probably swamped with tickets at the time - and hey, in the end I did figure out a way to solve the problem myself.
However, today's experience has me a little bit worried I have to admit. It wasn't even anything big - I just observed an inconsistency in a quest chain about three days ago, and submitted it as a bug report. Without spoiling anything, due to my choices the quest ended one way, but the follow-up I received in the mail talked about a different outcome that didn't match up. So I thought I'd be helpful and submit that as a bug report. I kept it fairly curt and just described the quest in question since I couldn't remember its name. My ticket was a total of three lines long and I expected them to just forward it to whoever handles these kinds of bugs and not respond to me at all.
However today, three days later, I received the following response:
"Greetings [name],
I am Protocol Droid U3-F6 of Human-Cyborg Relations...
I have received your transmission regarding unscannable gathering nodes."
Wait, what? I tell you about a bug with a quest and you come back to me about unscannable gathering nodes? You couldn't even read three lines of text?
Since the message also included a request for more information, I wanted to give the guy the benefit of the doubt at first, thinking that maybe he had just copy and pasted the wrong "please provide more details" message, but when I tried to update the ticket with more details (courtesy of Torhead, which apparently has more information about the game than the average customer service rep), it just came back with an error message. Everything I had written just disappeared and I gave up.
At least the end of the message contained one of those "give us feedback about our service" links, which I followed and filled out. Sorry, U3-F6... I did give you full marks for politeness because I really can't fault you in that area, but everything else was a big fat negative. It's a real shame because I wasn't even expecting a response to a simple bug report, but if you do bother to reply, the very least you could do is talk about what I actually wrote instead of some random stuff about gathering nodes.
I'm willing to cut the company some slack for being new at handling this particular beast.
ReplyDeleteI think it is rather unreasonable to expect that everything works smoothly at a lauch of this size and several complaints one hears buzzing around in the blogoshpere certainly make it seem like their respective authors are happy tearing apart every little detail.
With that in mind, however, I find some of those reports slightly alarming, including your post today and this one by Njessi. The latter is particularly disturbing for me because is displays a thorough lack of understanding on the part of Bioware's customer service.
I can understand slowness or slight misunderstandings, but when the reply is a complete non sequitur to the ticket, that's kind of worrying. On the plus side, I realised that I could reply by e-mail as well (after repeated attempts at updating the ticket in game turned out to be futile), and I did get a reply that made sense to that follow-up mail. I made sure to give the CSR who wrote it a good rating.
DeleteAlso, congratulations on starting your own blog! :) Your first two posts look promising already, I'll keep an eye on you!
Dear Shintar,
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Sorry, but I'm not interested in monetising my blog; I prefer to remain independent and ad-free. :) Not to mention that I personally think that guides for online games are a bit of a waste of money as you can usually find tons of similar information for free anyway. However, since your comment wasn't just some mindless spam (it did land in Blogger's spam filter), I published it so that people can check out your site if they do feel so inclined after reading about it.
DeleteI had a similar TERRIBAD customer service experience last week. I have submitted the "request for further information" and am being terribly patient giving them an opportunity to correct it. But I suspect my blog will be bearing a 'customer service sucks' post in the next week =/
ReplyDeleteMy own experiences with customer service ranged from "okay in game" to "horribly annoyed during Saturday morning maintenace" (*cough* which I posted about http://siththathurts.wordpress.com/2012/01/28/maintenance-times-we-dont-like/ *sneakylypromotingownblog*).
ReplyDeleteThe ingame replies are still clearly odd, though. I do get replies to bug reports (which bring up a massively large window, so they are not exactly convenient while questing), my reported player names ask for a screenshot (really? you can't dig through your chat logs for the line I posted verbatim?). Polite and they try to be helpful, but often not terribly effective is how I'd label CS at the moment.
There is still room for a lot of improvement.