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I generally find anet's customer service to be better than that of many other companies. I recently had a ticket that I had to mark as poor though - it was not the fault of the CS rep but rather the tools they had. Frustratingly there was a bug in the evaluation form that did not allow me to add that comment (that reminds me, I should go add that to the bug forum).

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@Zaklex.6308 said:

@"Blude.6812" said:2 thumbs up, but I won't (can 't) say more, but there does seem to be a disconnect with understanding the nuances of the english language.

That's always going to be a risk when you are dealing with an American company!

What is it that you are saying here? That Americans intrinsically are unable to communicate in English? That the linguistic skills of a citizenry that exceeds 320 million is substandard when compared to... actually, to what
are
you comparing Americans? I'm pretty good with nuance, and I can tell you I'm not pleased with yours. :D So perhaps you can explain the meaning behind what I sense is a sweeping and wholly-unacceptable comment?

The following comment in meant mostly in jest, but it does sort of bring a point home. It's not that American's are intrinsically unable to communicate in English, it's that we don't actually speak English anymore...we should really rename what we speak to American English...to differentiate from the Queen's English or that English spoken in England. I firmly believe our language is sufficiently different from theirs to warrant this change, though it's a long shot it will ever happen. Also, this brings up the basic fact that though everyone is taught English in school, you still end up with regional dialects...aka accents, of course that only applies to the spoken word. Written words should have the same meaning whether it's East, West, North or South...well, should being the operative word.

Having said that, the few times I've had to contact CS have been positive. I might've had to reply to a response rewording my original request to make it more clearer, but that's only because there are so many words that are similar and changing a word here and there can make all the difference in the world.

The Revolutionary War happened at a time when there were limited set standards for how the English language should be spoken or written. "The Queen's English" or ""Recieved Pronunciation" is largely an invention of the 20th century (Though the first divergences of Rhotic vs Non-Rhotic pronunciation between Great Britain and the Colonies were around the 1770s), and in fact a number of historical scholars believe that American English in certain regional dialects has actually changed less since the colonization than the English of the UK. It's notable that another British colony/now a country, Canada, tends to share more in common accent-wise with America than Britain for a similar reason, though they do tend to use the OED formalized spellings.

A large reason for the standardization was widespread availability of print making grammatical standardization a necessity. The biggest culprit of the split in spellings and word usage is probably Noah Webster, who published his American Standardized Dictionary in 1828. The former standard would have been Samuel Johnson's A Dictionary of the English Language. Webster was known as a language reformist, and wanted to simplify spellings by eliminating superfluous letters. Color instead of colour, wagon instead of waggon, etc. It's also important to note that at least some word usage was derived from a) new animals/plants/ideas that were unique to the Americas, and b) the much more diverse population, as many colonists to the new world were from non-English-speaking countries. It's worth noting, though, that even the Oxford English Dictionary published in 1884, while using more of the original spellings from Johnson's work, did not keep all of them and made more than a few changes on its own.

It's also notable that even in the UK, regional dialects are just as diverse as in the US.

Edit: This isn't to say that there isn't a case to be made for differentiating the two "Oxford vs American English," just that it's somewhat fallacious to call one the "correct" or "real" version of English over another. This whole thing was off topic, of course. I want to add that all of my experiences with customer service have been aces. Thanks ANet!

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I've had some pretty crazy interactions with Customer Service/support, but none of it that I would necessarily rank as "bad" beyond lack of training and some perhaps odd methods.Like when I bought an account bound item that I couldn't use. They wanted two screenshots proving that I had deleted it. It made no sense. The only option for me was...what? Lie about deleting it and have it sit in my bags/bank for the rest of time taking up an inventory slot?Again, not a bad experience, it just seemed a bit over-complicated.

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@"Danikat.8537" said:

As a native speaker of English English (born and raised about 20 miles outside London) I really don't think American English (which is what we call it over here) is that different.

As an American who spent part of her childhood/teen years living in England, who wrote for a UK publisher for years, and who has an internal American English --> UK English translator in her head ;) I agree. Despite Winston Churchill's definition of us as "two countries divided by a common language," there are very few basic differences, and those are easily reconciled.

I do wish I hadn't be asked to stop using proper spelling (back in the early days of Anet). To me, "armour" and "colour" just look right and proper. :)

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So I will make it short, this time it does not interfer more with the rules than the opinions already posted:I had two tickes open with no response and one follow-up with no response. They had been closed.Saying "everything is being reviewed" is a lie, sorry, it's like that.Ticket 6678352 (in English) and ticket 6689651 (in German) which has been closed 12 days ago - with no response.It was about the forum issues back then, when you could not edit posts. I've reported it and asked if I triggered a flooding protection. No response, nothing.

So far I have 3 closed tickets with 0 responses and 1 which helped me. 25% is not quite good for a customer service...

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@Gaile Gray.6029 said:

@"Danikat.8537" said:

As a native speaker of English English (born and raised about 20 miles outside London) I really don't think American English (which is what we call it over here) is that different.

As an American who spent part of her childhood/teen years living in England, who wrote for a UK publisher for years, and who has an internal American English --> UK English translator in her head ;) I agree. Despite Winston Churchill's definition of us as "two countries divided by a common language," there are very few basic differences, and those are easily reconciled.

I do wish I hadn't be asked to stop using proper spelling (back in the early days of Anet). To me, "armour" and "colour" just look right and proper. :)

I have spent all my time in the US but have had enough exposure to UK culture as a kid (thank you PBS and people like Douglas Adams) to cause people from there to wonder if everyone from Boston has a British accent.

You can practically track what computers I am on over the day. If it is proper spelling it is a machine I control. If it is 'american english' I am somewhere where I do not have access to the dictionary settings.

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Honestly, I see loads of posts saying CS is bad and slow.... yet I submitted loads of tickets and all of them got answered within a day, only once I had to wait for a week and it was because I submitted it when PoF launched and they even apologized for taking so long. I even had to let one of them login my account because I wanted some Achiev reward skins back and since I didn't remember when I destroyed them [as it was before wardrobe system] he needed to check my Achievements to see if I indeed did the achievements, that too was done in 2 days [he even asked if he has permission to login or not], and I had no problems with it or after it, they gave me skins I destroyed so I can add them to wardrobe and they were absolutely nice and polite, some of them are even funny.Which then makes me think, maybe it's the players that are maybe rude or unintentionally come off rude or just don't say what they want/need clearly.

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Overall my experiences with Costumer support have been positive. However i've been victim of some, lets say, over-enthusiastic moderation as well, usually costumer support does work towards reversing those, even if the reply only comes after the expiration of the moderation issues.I do agree there's a problem with "loss of content" when people's posts just get erased because they quoted someone that quoted someone that quoted someone that was warned.

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@"ReaverKane.7598" said:Overall my experiences with Costumer support have been positive. However i've been victim of some, lets say, over-enthusiastic moderation as well, usually costumer support does work towards reversing those, even if the reply only comes after the expiration of the moderation issues.I do agree there's a problem with "loss of content" when people's posts just get erased because they quoted someone that quoted someone that quoted someone that was warned.

Costumer support is a more specialised department though :)

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@"Zedek.8932" said:So I will make it short, this time it does not interfer more with the rules than the opinions already posted:I had two tickes open with no response and one follow-up with no response. They had been closed.Saying "everything is being reviewed" is a lie, sorry, it's like that.Ticket 6678352 (in English) and ticket 6689651 (in German) which has been closed 12 days ago - with no response.It was about the forum issues back then, when you could not edit posts. I've reported it and asked if I triggered a flooding protection. No response, nothing.

So far I have 3 closed tickets with 0 responses and 1 which helped me. 25% is not quite good for a customer service...

I'm sorry to hear that. Generally, forum-related tickets are forwarded immediately to me, and I promise you I review every single ticket and e-mail that comes in, and I respond to them all. I will look into what you've described and see what took place. If the ticket is old enough that it's been archived, I will not be able to respond to it, and it seems silly to generate a new ticket to talk about an issue that was resolved weeks ago, as you mentioned. But I will look into the forum-related tickets and see what I can discover. Thanks for letting us know.

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@costepj.5120 said:

@"ReaverKane.7598" said:Overall my experiences with Costumer support have been positive. However i've been victim of some, lets say,
over-enthusiastic
moderation as well, usually costumer support does work towards reversing those, even if the reply only comes after the expiration of the moderation issues.I do agree there's a problem with "loss of content" when people's posts just get erased because they quoted someone that quoted someone that quoted someone that was warned.

Costumer support is a more specialised department though :)

Yes, but the OP specifically refers to issues with the forum, hence my input.

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@ReaverKane.7598 said:

@ReaverKane.7598 said:Overall my experiences with Costumer support have been positive. However i've been victim of some, lets say,
over-enthusiastic
moderation as well, usually costumer support does work towards reversing those, even if the reply only comes after the expiration of the moderation issues.I do agree there's a problem with "loss of content" when people's posts just get erased because they quoted someone that quoted someone that quoted someone that was warned.

Costumer support is a more specialised department though :)

Yes, but the OP specifically refers to issues with the forum, hence my input.

Ah - lost nuance again! Costumer support vs Customer support. Costumers help you get dressed ;)

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@costepj.5120 said:

@ReaverKane.7598 said:Overall my experiences with Costumer support have been positive. However i've been victim of some, lets say,
over-enthusiastic
moderation as well, usually costumer support does work towards reversing those, even if the reply only comes after the expiration of the moderation issues.I do agree there's a problem with "loss of content" when people's posts just get erased because they quoted someone that quoted someone that quoted someone that was warned.

Costumer support is a more specialised department though :)

Yes, but the OP specifically refers to issues with the forum, hence my input.

Ah - lost nuance again! Costumer support vs Customer support. Costumers help you get dressed ;)

AH, lol, didn't notice... Yeah, English isn't my first language, sometimes i have trouble remembering which is which. Sadly the Orthographic corrector on the browser didn't pick that one up.

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Compared to other companies the CS here is a dream. I put in a ticket at another place that another team made an error on my account ,which disabled it, and that team was not answering the ticket asking for the change to be reversed. The CS rep there told me the only way I could communicate with that team was to put in a ticket saying they were not reading their tickets. Spot the logical loop. After that communicating with anet about things was pure nirvana.

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@Gaile Gray.6029 said:

@"Zedek.8932" said:So I will make it short, this time it does not interfer more with the rules than the opinions already posted:I had two tickes open with no response and one follow-up with no response. They had been closed.Saying "everything is being reviewed" is a lie, sorry, it's like that.Ticket 6678352 (in English) and ticket 6689651 (in German) which has been closed 12 days ago - with no response.It was about the forum issues back then, when you could not edit posts. I've reported it and asked if I triggered a flooding protection. No response, nothing.

So far I have 3 closed tickets with 0 responses and 1 which helped me. 25% is not quite good for a customer service...

I'm sorry to hear that. Generally, forum-related tickets are forwarded immediately to me, and I promise you I review every single ticket and e-mail that comes in, and I respond to them all. I will look into what you've described and see what took place. If the ticket is old enough that it's been archived, I will not be able to respond to it, and it seems silly to generate a
new
ticket to talk about an issue that was resolved weeks ago, as you mentioned. But I will look into the forum-related tickets and see what I can discover. Thanks for letting us know.

It's archived (3 months old....) and I have already written an eMail to the forums@anet address a few hours ago. Mails written to the "forum eMail address" end up in the same system (Zendesk) like the support mails (support@anet), so they are both basically the same. In fact, there is even 1 more mail without any response, but I was not quite friendly in it, so while it's not quite professional to not respond to it, I can understand it for that particular mail.

But else, fully ignored tickets by the customer "support" were:6592133 - September 12, 2017 21:36 - Closed with 0 response - FORUM RELATED!6678352 - October 28, 2017 20:43 - Closed with 0 response6685973 - November 03, 2017 19:46 - A follow-up for the October inquiry, asking if someone's working - Closed with 0 response6689651 - November 06, 2017 20:00 - The same as ...133 and 352, just in German - Closed with 0 response

Sorry, that's not "top notch", that's pretty awful. Nobody died from it, and I still love the game, but when I hear everywhere that "everything's responded to... even in 24 hours if possible" while ignored, vacant and closed tickets are piling up in my inbox, then I was being lied to. It happened 4 times. Not just once. So I can understand the OP of this thread somewhat when it feels like they don't understand what I was telling them and just delete and close it or whatever.

So my last last half year contacting the support did achieve nothing.

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@"ReaverKane.7598" said:Overall my experiences with Costumer support have been positive. However i've been victim of some, lets say, over-enthusiastic moderation as well, usually costumer support does work towards reversing those, even if the reply only comes after the expiration of the moderation issues.I do agree there's a problem with "loss of content" when people's posts just get erased because they quoted someone that quoted someone that quoted someone that was warned.

I wanted to attend to this one. Do you mean in-game moderation or forum moderation? If forums, I sure want to look into that, and invite you to e-mail Forums@Arena.Net if you have questions.

As far as removing quotes of unacceptable content from the forums: I am working with the moderators to be sure that they let each person whose post was removed know:

  1. why it was removed
  2. that they are welcome (in most cases) to repost if they can do so without quoting or referring to the removed content
  3. that the removal in nearly all cases does not impact their account

For instance, Fred Player.1234 says something offensive and below that, Mary Ranger.4291 posts to say "Hey, don't do that!" or even posts without realizing that the content they've quoted is unacceptable. (It might contain a call-out, an insult, a link to unacceptable content, etc. -- it's not always easy to see every single element in a light reading.) So when Mary's post is removed, we want her to know the details of why it happened and how benign the outcome was for her account. (The message that the mods send does, unfortunately, begin with, "You have been warned" but that's not something that I can change. I trust that anyone receiving such a notice will read the details to fully understand how the action didn't impact them in any way.

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@Zedek.8932 said:

@Zedek.8932 said:So I will make it short, this time it does not interfer more with the rules than the opinions already posted:I had two tickes open with no response and one follow-up with no response. They had been closed.Saying "everything is being reviewed" is a lie, sorry, it's like that.Ticket 6678352 (in English) and ticket 6689651 (in German) which has been closed 12 days ago - with no response.It was about the forum issues back then, when you could not edit posts. I've reported it and asked if I triggered a flooding protection. No response, nothing.

So far I have 3 closed tickets with 0 responses and 1 which helped me. 25% is not quite good for a customer service...

I'm sorry to hear that. Generally, forum-related tickets are forwarded immediately to me, and I promise you I review every single ticket and e-mail that comes in, and I respond to them all. I will look into what you've described and see what took place. If the ticket is old enough that it's been archived, I will not be able to respond to it, and it seems silly to generate a
new
ticket to talk about an issue that was resolved weeks ago, as you mentioned. But I will look into the forum-related tickets and see what I can discover. Thanks for letting us know.

It's archived (3 months old....) and I have already written an eMail to the forums@anet address a few hours ago. Mails written to the "forum eMail address" end up in the same system (Zendesk) like the support mails (support@anet), so they are both basically the same. In fact, there is even 1 more mail without any response, but I was not quite friendly in it, so while it's not quite professional to not respond to it, I can understand it for that particular mail.

But else,
fully ignored tickets by the customer "support"
were:6592133 - September 12, 2017 21:36 -
Closed with 0 response
-
FORUM RELATED!
6678352 - October 28, 2017 20:43 -
Closed with 0 response
6685973 - November 03, 2017 19:46 - A follow-up for the October inquiry, asking if someone's working -
Closed with 0 response
6689651 - November 06, 2017 20:00 - The same as ...133 and 352, just in German -
Closed with 0 response

Sorry, that's not "top notch", that's pretty awful. Nobody died from it, and I still love the game, but when I hear everywhere that "everything's responded to... even in 24 hours if possible" while ignored, vacant and closed tickets are piling up in my inbox, then I was being lied to. It happened 4 times. Not just once. So I can understand the OP of this thread somewhat when it feels like they don't understand what I was telling them and just delete and close it or whatever.

So my last last half year contacting the support did achieve nothing.

It is entirely possible that your email service is blocking the responses. Check your spam folder and ensure that ArenaNet's email server is added to your system's whitelist.

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@"mtpelion.4562" said:It is entirely possible that your email service is blocking the responses. Check your spam folder and ensure that ArenaNet's email server is added to your system's whitelist.

Nah, the mailbox is fine. I was getting this data directly from the support webpage https://help.guildwars2.com and they all have the nice line:This Ticket is closed for comments. You can create a follow-up.

They just waited it out and let it auto-close after 3 months by their support software (Zendesk).League of Legends, or better RIOT, uses the exact same, and they also want to have feedback after 2 days how they performed. Nothing happened, because nobody actually answered, so of course, even the Zendesk software marked it as vacant.

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@Zedek.8932 said:

@"mtpelion.4562" said:It is entirely possible that your email service is blocking the responses. Check your spam folder and ensure that ArenaNet's email server is added to your system's whitelist.

Nah, the mailbox is fine. I was getting this data directly from the support webpage
and they all have the nice line:
This Ticket is closed for comments. You can create a follow-up.

They just waited it out and let it auto-close after 3 months.

Right, but they may have sent you an email and when you didn't get it you couldn't respond and when you couldn't respond they auto-closed after 3 months.

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Zendesk works like this: You get an eMail in your "normal" eMail inbox - but at the same time, in your personal page at https://help.guildwars2.com, all the mails are copied and displayed again. I was using a direct mail for "forums@anet" and it shows up in my webinterface, too. It's like a mirror of all the conversations. If my actual @live.de mail would have been the problem, I could see the responses in the webinterface. Nothing. They did not respond to at all, clear and simple.

When I check the ones that have been solved, even 6 months ago, I can read through it again, like a little forum thread. Nothing so in those tickets I mentioned.

Excelsior.

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@Gaile Gray.6029 said:

@"ReaverKane.7598" said:Overall my experiences with Costumer support have been positive. However i've been victim of some, lets say,
over-enthusiastic
moderation as well, usually costumer support does work towards reversing those, even if the reply only comes after the expiration of the moderation issues.I do agree there's a problem with "loss of content" when people's posts just get erased because they quoted someone that quoted someone that quoted someone that was warned.

I wanted to attend to this one. Do you mean in-game moderation or forum moderation? If forums, I sure want to look into that, and invite you to e-mail Forums@Arena.Net if you have questions.

As far as removing quotes of unacceptable content from the forums: I am working with the moderators to be sure that they let each person whose post was removed know:
  1. why it was removed
  2. that they are welcome (in most cases) to repost if they can do so without quoting or referring to the removed content
  3. that the removal in nearly all cases does not impact their account

For instance, Fred Player.1234 says something offensive and below that, Mary Ranger.4291 posts to say "Hey, don't do that!" or even posts without realizing that the content they've quoted is unacceptable. (It might contain a call-out, an insult, a link to unacceptable content, etc. -- it's not always easy to see every single element in a light reading.) So when Mary's post is removed, we want her to know the details of why it happened and how benign the outcome was for her account. (The message that the mods send does, unfortunately, begin with, "You have been warned" but that's not something that I can change. I trust that anyone receiving such a notice will read the details to fully understand how the action didn't impact them in any way.

I did, we talked about it already at length ^_^I was actually cut short on that original message but had to leave and left my comment a bit in the open. And i do realize (like we discussed) that sometimes there's a point where moderation seems unfair to the recipient of the moderation (like the example of people getting their content deleted because of quoting) but it can't be avoided or else you'd require 10 times the staff to do it. It's one of the costs of automation.So to conclude my statment: I agree there's a problem with that loss of content, but i do understand there are limitations to what can be done within each specific forum's platform.

One thing i do believe shouldn't be too hard to accomplish is linking the original thread to those warnings, it can probably even be automated in the moderation tools.I hope you forgive me posting this picture, but this is the model message you guys use:sFcpzQ0.pngIt does have the quote of the message. But sometimes (and i think this was the case) i didn't have the faintest idea in which discussion that had been posted.

Also, a mention of exactly what was the offending message might help.I've been warned a few times in the past, and some of the times i have to guess what was the offending statement. Not great. At least bold out the offending part or something.

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@"Menadena.7482" said:Compared to other companies the CS here is a dream. I put in a ticket at another place that another team made an error on my account ,which disabled it, and that team was not answering the ticket asking for the change to be reversed. The CS rep there told me the only way I could communicate with that team was to put in a ticket saying they were not reading their tickets. Spot the logical loop. After that communicating with anet about things was pure nirvana.

Ah, sorry, I've been a Bookah.It's a different game. Now that's weird. But I would not connect "Nirvana" with anything good though.

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@Gaile Gray.6029 said:

@"Danikat.8537" said:

As a native speaker of English English (born and raised about 20 miles outside London) I really don't think American English (which is what we call it over here) is that different.

As an American who spent part of her childhood/teen years living in England, who wrote for a UK publisher for years, and who has an internal American English --> UK English translator in her head ;) I agree. Despite Winston Churchill's definition of us as "two countries divided by a common language," there are very few basic differences, and those are easily reconciled.

I do wish I hadn't be asked to stop using proper spelling (back in the early days of Anet). To me, "armour" and "colour" just look right and proper. :)

You have my full, Canadian support in the use of "armour" and "colour"... eh...

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