Customer Service

[Rhaegar]

Pirates of the Burning Sea Quality Assurance Manager Nutch has published a new Devlog discussing our Customer Service department, and some his plans for the future.

To read the article, click this link.

As always we'd love to hear your thoughts on this devlog, so please share them in this thread!

/ Rhaegar

[Ravenau deLusan]

I've always found the FLS Customer Service to be top notch and well above many other MMO CS depts. The only thing I find missing atm is an in game GM 24x7 that you can /tell to.

[Broom]

Originally Posted by Ravenau deLusan I've always found the FLS Customer Service to be top notch and well above many other MMO CS depts. The only thing I find missing atm is an in game GM 24x7 that you can /tell to.

Hum. I got answers to tickets I made in closed beta in June and July. I got answers for tickets I made in June just last week. Are we talking about the same customer service?

Linna

[kungtotte]

The longest I've waited for a resolution to any of my tickets is about two weeks (I can't remember as this is a couple of months ago), my last one was created on a Thursday and resolved on the following Sunday.

I suspect the type of ticket plays a big part in response-times.

[Garbad_the_Weak]

I was very impressed with the tech support in beta. I have also been impressed with their response time to server crashes. However, I have been very unhappy with their arbitrary and capricious handling of various rules. Several of my friends have left the game over some silly CSR decision.

I think FLS would do well to consider the value of a happy customer vs. an unhappy one (especially one that will tell her guildmates, post on forums, etc). I've seen the CSRs on several occasions enforce a rule at the expense of a customer that is really petty (for example, refusing to believe someone that they disconnected and lost a ship.....even if they are lying, would it really hurt anything to give it back? Whats the harm of getting scammed on an insurance plea relative to the value of a customer?). I think FLS needs to be way more flexible towards their customers.

The customer is always right, and the CSRs need to realize that.

[Dinbasi]

Does this mean the ticket I filed on 6-10-08 and Aether replied to on 7-23-08 with this response "I'll be updating this ticket later in the day, or early tomorrow with the result." should get me a response by Xmas ?

Request has changed some as Soicety has changed but a response would have been nice at the time.

[Deqlor]

Originally Posted by Garbad_the_Weak The customer is always right, and the CSRs need to realize that.

While I agree that the customer's needs are the top priority, which customer? The one filing the ticket? And what happens when that customer shares a space and an economy with other customers? IF we disregard the rules for reimbursement, we sacrifice part of the player driven economy. The customer ends up getting their line ship replaced, rather than buying or constructing a new one. If the customer scammed us, technically they scammed another player who would benefit from the purchase of those items.

So which customer is right, in this case?

[Vivian]

Originally Posted by Garbad_the_Weak The customer is always right, and the CSRs need to realize that.

See, here is where you ruin much of your arguement, with the good ol statement 'The customer is always right'. This is false. Very, very false. The customer is NOT always right, and is, in fact, often very wrong. It's a statement that's used by many, particularly Americans, to justify running roughshod over a company and/or it's policies in a move to get what they want.

The CSRs have a policy. The only way to be fair to everyone, even the one complaining, is to follow that policy. And frankly, anyone who ragequits over something like this, honestly, is likely to end up ragequitting about something very soon anyway.

[Nutch]

You will likely see more stale tickets getting answered over the next week. I talked about it a bit in my Dev Log, but essentially there are buckets of tickets that have sadly sat around WAY to long; hence the process tweaks to mitigate this moving forward.

Reimbursements are a tricky issue. Again I refer you to the dev log. We have to have pretty solid rules, communicate those rules, and treat everyone equally. Many times when we make an exception to the posted rules, the person tells his whole society and suddenly everyone wants special treatment. As you can imagine this turns into a Customer Service nightmare.