Valve Admits Steam Customer Support is Terrible

Twirlywoos

Twirlywoos

Twirlywoos

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Don't be fooled they won't change anything because they hold the monopoly and sheep are afraid of competition and not willing to give third party digital distribution platforms a fair chance.

While Steam has grown to one of the largest digital games platform and storefront, the customer service has been pretty dismal. Earlier this year, Valve received an F from the BBB (Better Business Bureau) due to their poor customer service. At that time, Valve promised to change things up and improve customer service. Two-quarters later, it doesn’t look like it has gotten any better and Valve is still admitting they need a lot more work to make the service better.

The biggest quagmire facing Valve is how to deal with the long customer service wait times. There have been many cases where customers have submitted tickets asking for help to resolve their Steam issues only to get their first reply several months later. One would imagine for more complex problems, it would take an absurdly long time to get the issue resolved.

Part of the problem is due to the huge success the service has had, with well over a hundred million users. With such a large base, even 1% of users having an issue in any given period of time would lead to a million customer service tickets. The answer, of course, would be to hire more staff, but it isn’t that easy. According to Valve, third party customer service providers are pretty anemic and hiring and training their own support staff had been a long process.

With customer service brought back in-house, Valve is hoping that customer service wait times will be acceptable by Christmas this year. Given the previous record, though, one probably shouldn’t get their hopes up too much. It’s about time that Valve got on their customer service problem and brought it up to par.
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http://www.eteknix.com/valve-admits-steam-customer-support-is-terrible/
 
Can't say I've ever needed to contact steam support and I've been a steam user since it first launched. Nice to hear that it is improving though.
 
Will have to see if they make improvements but thankfully whenever I've contacted them have had all issues sorted out quickly.
 
Never had to contact them once, if businesses are bad then start to improve that's all they can do, can't fix it all in a day.
 
Nothing will change they have been saying this for ages, it's a joke how bad they are. It's part of the reason why the love affair for Steam is laughable. 80% of it bloated junks these days too.

Taking weeks on end to get back to people and in some cases not bothering at all is shocking.

Many occasions accounts have been hacked/locked etc... and it's taken months for them to sort it.
 
No1newts said:
Never had to contact them once, if businesses are bad then start to improve that's all they can do, can't fix it all in a day.
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They won't improve, they have been saying it for years and in fact they have gotten considerably worse.

They know the sheep will still be there defending them regardless.
 
... At least it's not origin....

Think the best solution would to be have a no DRM platform like GOG, but that's not going to happen for big games ever.

Best of a bad situation IMO
 
Yea, it's notoriously bad.

They apparently never really built up the support infrastructure to deal with their large customer base, and it's compounded by the fact that Steam is still growing that base at a pretty rapid rate, leaving them farther and farther behind.

Glad to hear they're at least focusing on it now. It may not ever be Microsoft level of customer support, but they will hopefully make some meaningful improvements.
 
It is shockingly bad, speaking from personal experience.

I 'emergency locked' my steam account via my phone whilst I was away when they sent me an email saying a Russian IP address was trying to access it.

For them to unlock it for me took them a month! During this time with a locked account you can't buy or activate any games, amongst other stuff.

It's the only time I've ever had to contact steam but it's truly pathetic customer service when you need to.
 
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regi said:
... At least it's not origin....

Think the best solution would to be have a no DRM platform like GOG, but that's not going to happen for big games ever.

Best of a bad situation IMO
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What's wrong with Origin? (that nuking EA wouldn't solve?;)).

I can quite believe Steam's CS is bad because they started out as a developer who didn't have any experience really with CS until they started Steam (and then I think for a long time much of that support wasn't done by them).
Whilst EA have been a publisher dealing with end users for a good 20-30 years, and dealing (very poorly at times) with online customers for at least 15 years (half the time EA's CS don't even know the names of some of the games they're meant to be supporting).

I've never actually had to contact Steam support for anything, which I suspect may not be uncommon (assuming you remember your passwords).
 
Origin probably provided the best customer service I've experienced when I lost access to my account, took a minute to call them up and then about 5 minutes to get the entire issue resolved, Steam on the other hand were the exact opposite. It took me 2 weeks to get a response from them! Credit where credit is due though as they gave me my refund in the next working day.
 
Werewolf said:
I can quite believe Steam's CS is bad because they started out as a developer who didn't have any experience really with CS until they started Steam (and then I think for a long time much of that support wasn't done by them).
Whilst EA have been a publisher dealing with end users for a good 20-30 years, and dealing (very poorly at times) with online customers for at least 15 years (half the time EA's CS don't even know the names of some of the games they're meant to be supporting).
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Also to add to the above, when a company grows as quickly as they did when Steam took off it can be near impossible to get ahead with the service level that is needed.

I've spent the last 7 years in a constant customer facing role with online support and each time we launched a new product you could never estimate the level of support you would need to provide. You could take a good guess but due to odd tech issues etc sometimes it's impossible.
 
Twirlywoos said:
sheep are afraid of competition and not willing to give third party digital distribution platforms a fair chance.
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As much as I dislike Steam, it is NOT because it is a poor platform, it is the best platform we have at the moment.

If I cannot get a DRM Free purchase, Steam is the superior option.
 
AHarvey said:
Also to add to the above, when a company grows as quickly as they did when Steam took off it can be near impossible to get ahead with the service level that is needed.

I've spent the last 7 years in a constant customer facing role with online support and each time we launched a new product you could never estimate the level of support you would need to provide. You could take a good guess but due to odd tech issues etc sometimes it's impossible.
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+1

Reminds me a little of TalkTalk. If I remember rightly, at one point their business essentially doubled in one year, and they were poorly placed to deliver a good level of customer service.
 
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