Good Customer Service Goes a long way

I don’t know if historically in-game issues are worse now than they have ever been but they sure are bad. With all of the new technology that has gone into the latest patches and expansion, there certainly are more problems than I have ever seen. Personally, I have a character that is stuck between phases in Mt. Hyjal to the point where she can no longer pick up or turn in quests in that zone. I spent 3 hours with a GM who could not solve the problem and told me that an official bug report has been filed. I am also a guild manager who has lost quite a few members because they are getting disconnected in major cities or have extreme lag. The GM said they will keep working on a fix, however, it is quite frustrating to know that some of the quests that you want to complete, some of the achievements you want to work for, and some of the rep you want to gain from questing you can’t do until the one day when it all gets worked out. When this will be, who knows, because I was told over the phone by customer service that there is a very high volume of bug tickets and trouble reports.

This is where I think Blizzard needs to step up the customer service. Some people I know have gotten so frustrated with the problems that they refuse to play. This has a domino effect on the game including many guilds which is affected by the loss of players. When I asked the customer service over the phone what they would do to compensate players for this inconvenience, they said they would do nothing. They stated that I should wait and/or go play other zones that are accessible.

In my opinion that is very bad customer service. We are paying for a service that is full of bugs and cannot be accessed in its entirety, so yes, Blizzard, your customers should be compensated in some way to help ease the trouble.

Now I’m not talking about giving out free game time; that would just be too costly. What I think would be a good idea would be to give something in-game in exchange for the bugs that have not been fully worked out – those that leave players at a major inconvenience – not minor bugs and fixes that need to be done but those that make parts of the game inaccessible . An in-game, unique pet, mount, or achievement titles are some of the things that come to mind. These things really don’t affect the game’s economy or balance of gear. They just would be something to say to customers, were sorry for the inconvenience and it would not cost much for Blizzard to do something like this as well – just a little development time.

When I said this to the customer service person, he basically said all you are paying for is time to access the server and that this would not do well to serve the community. Are you kidding me? What he meant to say was that this would not do well to serve Blizzard – but perhaps, just perhaps this analogy is very wrong. Blizzard you would do a lot better at customer retention if your customer service was improved. It’s not just about being nice; it’s about going out of your way to keep your customers happy. And as far as serving the community, well, it’s about creating happy customers who remain loyal to your game. With the challenge of new competition this little bit will help keep Blizzard on top.

You can learn from Sam Walton of Walmart when he said, “The goal as a company is to have customer service that is not just the best but legendary.” I like that word legendary… And learn from Mahatma Gandhi’s famous quote, “A customer is the most important visitor on our premises, he is not dependent on us. We are dependent on him. He is not an interruption in our work. He is the purpose of it. He is not an outsider in our business. He is part of it. We are not doing him a favor by serving him. He is doing us a favor by giving us an opportunity to do so.”

Blizzard we know you are working hard to fix the bugs, don’t get me wrong; and I’m sure you know how frustrating it is for players who have to deal with them. This is not the point. The point that I am making is that this “I don’t really care, this is part of the game attitude” does not serve your customers well, and I’m sure your data on customer retention reflects it. So how about becoming a little more legendary, but this time make it the best legendary customer service a WOW player can expect! It would be nice to say WOW Customer Service is EPIC!