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State of Support 7/7/2016
Hello everyone!
As many of you know, customer support has been dealing with a large backlog of tickets since the Secrets & Shadows update. As a result, ticket response times have been much longer than we would like.
We know that no one wants to wait a long time for a support ticket to be answered. At the same time, we don't want to give low quality responses to get through tickets faster.
What are we doing about it?
In order to improve ticket response times, we have increased the size of our support team. Many of the GMs have also been working extra hours to help clear the ticket backlog. It will still take time to get completely caught up, but we have made a lot of progress in the last couple weeks.
What is the current response time?
Currently, the response time for new tickets is about 5 days. For more urgent issues such as launcher errors and stuck characters, the response time is closer to 2-3 days.
What to expect going forward
Although we have made a lot of progress, we are working hard to improve response times even further. Our goal is to get back to response times of 24-48 hours (or less) for all issue types.
Thank you for your patience and understanding
As many of you know, customer support has been dealing with a large backlog of tickets since the Secrets & Shadows update. As a result, ticket response times have been much longer than we would like.
We know that no one wants to wait a long time for a support ticket to be answered. At the same time, we don't want to give low quality responses to get through tickets faster.
What are we doing about it?
In order to improve ticket response times, we have increased the size of our support team. Many of the GMs have also been working extra hours to help clear the ticket backlog. It will still take time to get completely caught up, but we have made a lot of progress in the last couple weeks.
What is the current response time?
Currently, the response time for new tickets is about 5 days. For more urgent issues such as launcher errors and stuck characters, the response time is closer to 2-3 days.
What to expect going forward
Although we have made a lot of progress, we are working hard to improve response times even further. Our goal is to get back to response times of 24-48 hours (or less) for all issue types.
Thank you for your patience and understanding
14
Comments
My opinion, though.
Oh, and thanks for the post.
Thanks for your comment. I think there is definitely more we can do to prepare for major updates. Having temporary personnel is one option, but even that has its pros and cons.
The volume of support tickets fluctuates based on a lot of different factors which makes it difficult to always have the ideal number of GMs answering tickets. It's a bit of a balancing act, but we are always looking for ways to improve our process.
Indeed. I suppose having a sort of research exercise based on current and past events could also help in determining when will something is more likely to happen. Like an increase in volume of a certain thing. Like tickets. If it wasn't done before, it can be started now. It's never late for such a thing in the end. Sure, we all know tickets increase when a patch comes. That's natural. But by how much(and very important, what kinds of tickets), that's what's to find, since I suppose a company's goal is to meet the task with the required resources. Not more(because it's wasted money), not less(because it would be inadequate).
Anyway. Good luck with your endeavors.
Unfortunately the time to train on subjects might cost more than it will reward
Maybe, just maybe, we could do a player support channel for common questions that may not need direct intervention from the staff at EME. The way this might work is have a handful of staff to direct the tickets. If it requires the attention of a staff member it can be forward to their area, if it doesn't need support from staff it could be passed along to volunteer players. I know there are more than a handful of tickets that are just simple questions that are taking up more than their fair share of room in the backlog.
On that post I was mostly referring to hiring people to run menial stuff that other trained staff are doing right now but do not require such staff to do. Just so that trained staff can devote full time to the task they are actually trained to do. Sure. Assuming staff is currently forced to to other things not related to catching up on tickets. Your idea could work if there was a very fast and efficient way to see what tickets require which approach. But in the end, each ticket must be opened and read by authorized staff. And there could be cases of tickets that maybe someone of the community could solve, but since they contain sensitive info or simply overall info that non staff members are not supposed to see, it'd still take time for a staff member to read and decide where the ticket would go where it could be just easier for the ticket itself to have that staff member read and answer on the spot. My views, though.
While the amount of support tickets you receive fluctuate a lot we all know by now the heaviest influx of tickets comes, without fail, every major patch that is released, this is, mostly, when brand new dungeons or classes are released, since most of the time I've been around that's the only guaranteed reason tickets start to rain on you going from the "usual" 1-3 days response time to 5-7 to the very least (I think that was the estimated response time for reaper and gunner patches), Ninja patch being very special in that sense since for the very first time since I started playing in October 2013 it went higher than 10 days.
I'm not sure how you can prepare for it more efficiently other than keeping an eye on just how fast and what kind of tickets you're getting (and allocating more resources to it as soon as possible instead of letting them build further, assuming said resources are available) but hopefully getting a thread on forums as it has been done in the past related to bug reports and the like would alleviate some of the tickets going your way; when people know you're aware of certain specific things and ask them NOT to continue to report those same things you reduce the load a little, I'd ask you to correct me if I'm mistaken but you might not be able to since it's probably giving information that you're not supposed to, but I'd be willing to bet Balder's Eye a whole lot of tickets you got on Ninja patch were due to things like certain dungeon mechanics not working correctly (SSHM Safe zones NOT being safe, DFNM Lasers not showing up 100% of the time....), issues with specific skills like some of the Ninja skills not working correctly (the i-frame on Thousand Cuts, some people having the I-frame effect of smoke bomb not applying, the charging skills that move a character like headlong rush going straight through Verno...) and some others regarding issues with updating or game crashes after updates (wouldn't be surprised if player reports also spike during new patches due to PvP servers and people just thoroughly ganking leveling players).
Sevlon, I think the primary issue with giving player support is a lot of the tickets received do need CS attention since they directly involve things a regular player can't do, if you check support page when submitting a ticket under "Issue type" most of them require a GM to check, things like game performance issues (and only to an extent and by very few people in forums); trouble patching (same as before); questions regarding events, items, quests or achievements... that's pretty much all that could be "possibly" addressed by fellow players providing support, since most of the other options when submitting a ticket directly need GMs to get anywhere and granting special privileges to certain people that just "volunteer" to help ease the burden is just not going to be accepted by anyone, starting with the company, since there's a real chance of all he.ll breaking loose sooner rather than later.
If it was possible to help EME by volunteering during specially heavy ticket influx I'd gladly do it since I have enough free time to do so and I have yet to find a single game where CS has been this good, friendly and respectful so far (over 7 years of online gaming and more than 40 games by different companies and most of them treat you like you're not worth their time... why the heck do they even work in CS to begin with?! there might be few exceptions but having to pray to get one of those every time you need support gets very frustrating very fast) and I'd gladly do anything to help them out just as a way of saying "thank you" for their great job.
You bring up some great points. Most content updates result in around a 30% increase in ticket volume. Historically, only Fate of Arun and Gunner + Steam were much higher than that. We were expecting around a 50% increase in volume for the Ninja release.
In reality, it was closer to a 100% increase in volume for the first few weeks after the update. That created a backlog of around 2000 tickets and resulted in long response times.
The problem with a backlog is that it isn't addressed by just keeping up with incoming tickets. We need to do better than break even to fix the problem which may require more GMs. Even then, there is a delay for hiring/training before we can start making progress.
I will also say that most of the tickets we receive require some action on our part through the use of tools that only we can access. I like the idea of players helping, and we definitely appreciate the players who frequently help others on the forums or in game. However, if someone needs an item restored or an order refunded, that is something that only we can do.
I don't want to make excuses, because I know we can do better. I just want to be transparent since there is obviously some interest in what is happening behind the scenes.
No idea if that's something EME can do locally. It looks like something for BHS as it involves a direct piece of gameplay mechanics. I and a few others brought this up some time ago. Not sure if staff read those posts/threads but for the sake of reporting, they are around this forum.
Now in a more general sense, I assume item returning/fixing is one big part of the ticket volume. Deleted story quest items I assume are a daily seen ticket subject. If BHS made a rule that if a quest cannot be deleted from the player's journal, the items associated with it cannot be deleted, we'd be seeing a lot of the ticket volume come down. Well. I think. Similar for riding skills. Adding an confirmation would be great. But again, I suspect that's BHS's job.
This is no doubt due to the horrific number of problems introduced with the last patch. I would advise a test server, and more attention by coders and engineers, and less hand-holders, which are ultimately unable to do anything for most of the bugs, etc anyway.
What is the system, or do all GMs cover all types?
I see that being a partial issue if they cover all types, because cases that should be looked into and put first might not be put first or looked into properly. And cases with quests/achievements are, usually, super quick and done.
I understand we won't get live support back (during those days... I had, maybe, only put 2-3 tickets in all together since I started playing at release), but maybe a bit more order for who covers what type of reports would help.
And if you do use the system I stated above, ignore me.
Keep up the good work
I think I am the only guy who is never in a hurry to get a response lol.
mine didnt reset but my dungeon runs did.
now i gotta wait 2-3 days for support