Good customer service. That term seems to be subjective. My idea of good and your idea of good could be very different, event if we are customers of the same company. Meeting expectations and perhaps smoothing some ruffled feathers would be a reasonable definition. But this is problematic; how much calming you need and how much I need could be wildly different. Some examples might help too. I happen to have a couple.
The first comes by way of Blizzard. Blizzard published and operates the massively multiplayer online game World of Warcraft. This is a big operation; as one of the most popular online games, World of Warcraft has millions of customers. My customer service experience came at an odd point in my relationship with Blizzard involving this game; it happened after I was no longer playing the game. After years of playing the game, a family affair around our household with my wife and son also enjoying the game, eventually our play dwindled. My son moved on first to more console gaming, and my wife soon after with a transition to casual web-based games. I was the last to give up the ghost and finally decided to cancel my account. That was simple enough to do. A very polite and well crafted message said Blizzard was sorry to see me go and came complete with comic caricature of a monster crying over my departure. Well played- who could crush that poor orcs heart by leaving him in the lurch?
Unfortunately the warm feelings I had about World of Warcraft and hesitation as I was leaving was wiped out with a couple poorly handled e-mails.
The first came as a security advisory a couple weeks after canceling my account. My account had finally expired. One of the niceties of the WoW account termination was the account remains active up until the current month’s expiration date. Nice in the sense that it gives WoW a chance to lull you back while also saving them from the trouble of refunding a prorated amount of the current month’s fee- again, nicely played, Blizzard. The e-mail indicated my account had been suspended. The e-mail went on to say Blizzard suspected my account had been compromised. They had changed the password on the account to protect it from illicit use, and had suspended it in case the problem was caused by malicious software on my computer. A bunch of boilerplate information followed, advising about how to update virus scanning software and use malicious software removal tools to get rid of any keyloggers that may have been installed on the computer where I played the came. The e-mail concluded by advising I could find more info online at WoW’s website. In spite of all the precautions and warnings, I suspected a simple explanation; my account had expired due to me canceling the account, but Blizzards account management system was erroneously reporting this as a security problem. Either that or someone with inside information from Blizzard was attempting to break into accounts when they saw they were about to expire to loot the characters. After all, a perfectly good online persona was about to be archived (online characters never really die) why not grab some rare items they may have laying around? And who would notice, the account was being terminated. Answer, I would.
I went to the website to investigate and found that immediately after logging in, I was blocked from doing anything else because my account was suspended for 24 hours. Fair enough, the links on virus scanning and keylogger removal were in a public part of the website that did not require login. Setting aside my “insider looting” theory, I figured some automated system had suspended the account pending the end of our membership; the timing was close, but not exact. I left it at that for 24 hours until I would be able to login again. Time passes and I’m still not able to login. After well over a week of the ‘24 hour’ lock-out, I sent an e-mail to Blizzard asking for more information. Their reply was a duplicate of the information sent in the original message and a link in a separate e-mail to a customer satisfaction survey. A couple days later, the account magically became unlocked. I checked the account history and noticed I had been issued a one day credit during the lock-out period, but since my account was locked out for much more than the one day, I wasn’t able to use the credit.
As you may have gathered, I was unimpressed with the customer servce experience. So true to the old adage that a dissatisfied customer is more likely to tell others about their experience, I completed the survey and noted my disappointment with their handling of the situation. My visions of this triggering a review of the situation and a response from the World of Warcraft folks were dashed when the last page of the survey announced that no further action would be taken as a result of completing the survey. I noted that the survey included a question asking if my problem had not been resolved, and the survey indicated they wouldn’t contact me even if it hadn’t. That had simply decided to do nothing.
So what can be learned from this? The people at Blizzard seem to have invested a lot in the game and it is popular. So maybe that is the thing they are good at and we shouldn’t expect them to have good customer service, perhaps on the theory they are too big to provide good customer service to individuals. But I have to believe they are spending a ton of money on something they tell their accountants is customer service, yet the products coming out of that part of the company (survey’s that don’t care and e-mails that are cut and paste copies of one another) are very poor. So where is the disconnect?
In my next post I’ll share a very positive customer service experience from a different company. Still very large (even larger than Blizzard) but able to deliver positive and inviting customer service, supporting the theory that big companies can provide good customer service.
