So Blizzard just closed a whole slew of open support tickets without reading them

[freighttrain]

Bull . Most people complain about rubbish things , in this case its CHEATS wanting their accounts back . If all you hate Blizzard that much , stop playing the game and even better stop posting here .
And to all those who don't realise or don't like that its a public companies LEGAL and MORAL obligation to make as much money as possible for their shareholders , go live in china or Russia and see how you like that

Its legal obligation is to make decisions in the best interest of its shareholders, which is usually means making a profit. Not making as much money as possible.

[Airwaves]

I used to know a gm. I moved cities and quit wow so don't talk to him anymore. But people ask the most bullshit things though tickets. I can't blame blizzard for it since 99% of tickets are people asking dumb questions.

[freighttrain]

I was never once rude or arrogant about the issue. I have an ongoing harassment case. I thought it was taken care of, but yet the problem persists. After waiting 4 days for my ticket to get answered and they close with "look it up on wowhead" does kinda get me steamed a bit. Also you picked out 1 hypothetical thing in my post? lol

*edit*

Also, I am going to say, this is a very sore subject with a lot of people at this moment. Considering what just happened. No one is right and no one is wrong. Everyone is entitled to their opinions. However, poor customer service does lead to loss of subscriptions, wages, etc.

And this one time it slipped through the cracks. It happens to everyone at some point. Just resubmit the ticket or better send them an email and /or call them directly if you feel your issue is not being resolved properly. It does not mean Blizzard does not care about their customers.

- - - Updated - - -

All customer support teams have to deal with useless issues, it is part of the price of doing business and why first line support have scripted answers such as, the infamous "Have you tried turning off and back on again?" You don't see Dell closing their support tickets on the off chance that a few people forgot to plug their monitors in or banks not answering the phone because someone might broken their card trying to open a locked door like in the movies.

When a customer takes time to contact a business the issue is important to them even if it is easily solved and as such should be treated as important by the business. Whilst many issue can be solved by customers if they took time to search the internet an answer from Google does not help customer loyalty.

Right. It is important to them. I have also learned that you do not need every customer. Sometimes they are just wrong. It is OK to cancel a customer, or allow them to walk away instead of bending over backwards to please someone who will turn around and complain more to get free/discounted services. I am in a business where my customer count ties directly to my pay, and I have cancelled customers because I know the routines they pull to milk free stuff and abuse my resources. Sometimes it is not worth the hassle. Again, if it is something they cannot handle, something that can be resolved through the self help options, or just a waste of time, it should be dropped.

[Eldonia]

Well this makes that horribly stupid response I got last night make more sense. I've had to put in a ticket over and over again over the past 2 weeks and the response I got last night was almost laughably bad. So I guess it makes sense now. I got the exact same e-mail that's been posted already in this thread. None of that had anything to do with my ticket. I've been getting really frustrated with their customer service, nice to know its not only me they treat like crap.

[Templis]

I rarely open tickets. But a couple weeks ago I got hacked and had all my gold stolen. I opened a ticket and I had everything restored by a gm while I was offline. I just provided as much info as I had like date,time,what was missing and all done within 2 days.

Back in vanila and bc tickets only took a few hours to get a response and would be more frequent because it seemed to be more buggy.

The support structure has probably gone through many overhauls since then, especially with how much the game changed. Back in BC I put in a ticket because a quest mob in Nagrand was bugged out, and a GM appeared within 15 minutes for a pleasant chat and a mob reset.

These days the average wait time is closer to 3 days, less if it's a severe issue like account compromise. Communication with the GMs feels a lot less personal than it did back then. They still do a great job, just with more of a corporate veneer.

[Sansnom]

I hear you...

My husband waited four or five days for an answer to his ticket after he server transferred and faction changed one of his toons and got the "flagged for rename" bug. He put the ticket in and didn't want to rename his toon for fear it would screw things up so he hasn't been able to even play that toon while the ticket was in. Today he got the same response everyone else did...a closed ticket with a message telling him to put in a new ticket and giving him a special "code word" to use.

I'm not really sure why they couldn't just deal with the tickets that need dealing with and give the general generic response to all the people claiming they didn't bot or what not, if that was what was clogging up the ticket queue.

My guess is that they decided to use a multi-tier support system where the lowest just filter out tickets quickly while the the upper tier handles the issue. The response your husband could just a way of helping them to filter out problems that are still active. If it still a problem for the customer, they would have a code to move to the next tier.

I am not saying I agree with this but just guessing that could be what is happening.

[Deleted]

All the crying, I for one, am extremely satisfied about the customer support. I've had a lot of issues and everytime they got resolved, even when I was in the wrong.

[Yimereh]

I know it's been mentioned but a HUGE 3rd party community got attacked the other day with this ban wave. They(apparently) have inside information that approximately 500k accounts were closed yesterday across US & EU largely in relation to this 3rd party community. All of these people are opening tickets and having everyone they know opening tickets.

Blizzard's ticket support is basically under attack with an absolute mountain of tickets from players who cheated and are pissed off that they got banned. I sincerely doubt that they are closing tickets through randomization. There is absolutely no way a company like blizzard would leave their ticket support team without any viable strategy to deal with a ban wave of this severity. It would probably involve some system that could filter low priority/non priority tickets which would be flooding in by the tens of thousands.

[-Superman-]

Sometimes, you have to wipe the slate clean and see who still has a legitimate issue. It's called a scream test for a reason.

[Stonecloak]

People underestimate the surveys as well. Have a good rep for giving good marks on servers? Well guess what. Gm's will be that much more inclined to help.

[-Superman-]

People underestimate the surveys as well. Have a good rep for giving good marks on servers? Well guess what. Gm's will be that much more inclined to help.

Which is why I always give perfect scores and never have to wait more than 24 hours for an awesome resolution.

[Toiran]

I'd hate to be a GM.

The blue post even stated that out of 1000 ticket's, they'd only actually be able to help 50, because other problems get resolved, or are duplicates, or ridiculous tickets wasting time.

Makes sense to me to wipe them, sure it sucks for people having real issues, but blame the guys spamming pointless tickets.

[Zemuron]

You want new content or customer service? Blizzard doesn't have time to address a bunch of petty problems. Their resources are hard at work on new content and character models.

[warlock_alt]

I feel like it is necessary to point out that each closed ticket received a code that would allow the customer to resubmit their issue as a new ticket in a special expedited queue. Sounds to me that they handled things properly, but I don't have an axe to grind.

[Shaqur]

They had to close them cos around 500000 accounts got banned for using rotation bot.
So imagine how many appeals they are getting at this moment.

[Mawnix]

Question:

All of you bickering.. did any of you actually read the other comments in the thread or are you so focused on being wrong (I aim this at both sides) that you only focus on what one another are saying??

Yay for ignorance.

Destil out.

[-Superman-]

Question:

All of you bickering.. did any of you actually read the other comments in the thread or are you so focused on being wrong (I aim this at both sides) that you only focus on what one another are saying??

Yay for ignorance.

Destil out.

Your only response was to walk in, insult everyone, and then walk out. Not sure what you were trying to accomplish.

[Amerissis]

Lets theorize here for a moment.
200 tickets are open in a day. 20 are stupid dumb look it up stuff on google. And the rest are game related issues. Harassment, stuck, missing items, oops, I disenchanted this shit by accident, etc.
Now, they go and close these 200 tickets without reading them.
Next day. 300 new tickets arise. They do the same thing, close all 300 without reading them.

Nice theory, but that's not what is happening. They get thousands of tickets a day, they never close them without reading. Until now. They might have a backlog of 10.000 tickets and they know going through all of them would take so much time that 95% would already be solved by the user anyway or is a complete nonsense request. So they closed all of them, giving a special code in case you still need help. If you still need help, you will use the code and get help SOONER then you would have if they hadn't closed your ticket.

And yes, they will be getting thousands of useless nonsense tickets a day. Not just 200 or 300. I work in a company with 150 employees and already get at least 5 stupid questions a day that just waste my time (questions they could have solved themselves or are not about anything I can help with). Seeing Blizzard has 7-8 million customers, they could get 200.000+ stupid questions a day!

[gamingmuscle]

I feel like it is necessary to point out that each closed ticket received a code that would allow the customer to resubmit their issue as a new ticket in a special expedited queue. Sounds to me that they handled things properly, but I don't have an axe to grind.

It's not the best customer experience...nor is it the worst. Depending on their volume and ability to handle it, it may have been the best option.

[Jaylock]

You'd be fired for doing your job? Weird.

Yeah that is wierd. Considering especially that if an employee of mine essentially spit in the face of my customers and told them to fuck off, yeah id say I would have to fire them too.

Thats exactly what the GM department did to all those paying customers. Watch Rainmaker. Blizzard is the insurance company in that movie.