What is the point of 'internal standards' on support? And other customer support musings.

[Sophiie 50]

Serious question.

 

If all you're allowed to give is a receipt of acknowledgement on cheaters (which is completely reasonable, by the way) - then why even have internal standards on CSRs that delay ticket response times to the point where customers are waiting for more than 20 days on tickets?

 

Back in Reloaded times, there was never a ticket queue of more than 150 per day with about triple the playerbase and judging from the forums about half the CSRs. Most of these complaints were about a players' banned accounts, lost accounts/login information scammed items (prior to the trading system) and technical support issues. In fact, by the end of a 8-hour CSR shift, there would be no more tickets and CSRs could actually get other things done.

 

In terms of time spent on tickets, I'd say the most was on scam tickets. At most, a scam case could take up to 2-3 days to resolve - this was before trading was implemented under Little Orbit's tenure and required a lot of research. Scamming should not be handled by CSRs anymore, if they are still handling those tickets it needs to change with a secure trading system in place now. Beyond that, there wasn't really much back-and-forth between CSRs and players and for good reason. Copy and pasted responses do not allow for ambiguity between decisions you make as a CSR team.

 

I have a serious question about this methodology: Why are you not allowing copy-pasted responses from Customer Support? There is nothing wrong with getting a pre-templated response. They didn't result in a loss of quality of the responses, the problem was largely with customers not getting the responses they wanted from customer support and that's where the majority of the complaints came from, not that they were copy and pasted - it's that the customers could not be helped. If anything, please let the customers know they can't get a response and clarify that they cannot get a response. Education of what customers can get information on is absolutely the key here, not disallowing copy and pasted responses.

 

I mean, if you can't give someone an account's details because they can't prove that it's theirs, does it really matter if it was made by hand or a template to tell them that? Sure, it's more personal, but emotion isn't always expressed well in text. And there is plenty opportunity to be personal and courteous in instances where you can actually help a customer.

 

I'd be extremely curious as to what lead to the decision to do this.

 

On that subject, customer service is a bandage for a faulty product. Every time you can deal with something programmatically, you definitely should.

 

As a customer, if you had asked me to submit a support ticket like as stated in this news post:

 

 

...I would feel extremely insulted that the issue could not be resolved by the game's developer or publisher automatically. There is no reason that people should have to submit a support ticket to get something like that. If I was in the developer/publisher's position, I would immediately rectify this by resetting the trial flags for each account affected. You have the transaction logs with third-party (and definitely first-party side) so the data is available, it's just a matter of acting on it to make good on issues like these.

Matt, please consider going easier on the CSRs so that APB: Reloaded does not suffer from these CSR wait times. They do not deserve having to put in additional work to satisfy the complaints of the vocal majority forum trolls which account for 5% of all active accounts. Additionally, neither does the playerbase.