customer service
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Google brings a version of Pixel's 'Hold for Me' tool to more phones and desktop via Search
Google Search is testing a feature called Talk to a Live Representative that’s eerily similar to the Pixel phone’s Hold for Me tool. The algorithm will place the call and wait for a service rep before handing it over to you.
Amazon won't have to offer a phone helpline in the European Union
Don't go looking for a customer support phone number for Amazon in Europe -- you probably won't find one. The Court of Justice of the European Union has ruled that Amazon isn't obligated to provide a phone helpline to customers in the region, rejecting Germain claims that the company's site violated national consumer protection laws by failing to clearly display a support phone number. An online shopping platform like Amazon is "not obliged in all cases" to make a phone number available, according to the judges.
Google's CallJoy is an AI phone operator for small businesses
Around a year ago, Google unveiled Duplex, an AI-powered feature that can call businesses and book appointments for you. Ahead of this year's I/O, Google revealed the other half of the equation, a virtual customer service agent that can automatically handle inbound calls for small businesses.
Sprint expands in-home sales and support to New York and L.A.
Since not everybody loves going to a phone store, Sprint recently launched Direct 2 You to help you buy or update a handset from pretty much anywhere you want. It must have been on to something, as it just expanded it to four new cities: New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Denver. In addition, the service is now available to anybody, rather than just existing Sprint clients as before. Essentially, it lets you buy a new device, upgrade from an old one or get customer service from any location you want -- like your home or a ball field -- for free.
Turbine's customer support department spreads holiday cheer
Working customer support for an MMO means that even the best times of your job are still spent dealing with upset players. Sure, the player might recognize that whatever went wrong was just an accident or a bug, but you've still got player issues to manage. It's the sort of work that can make you bitter or cynical, but not so with the customer support team at Turbine Entertainment, which decided to reach out to fans in a slightly happier fashion with holiday cards. Seriously. Real ones. Players on the Lord of the Rings Online forums have reported receiving physical holiday cards from the game's customer service department with hand-written messages and gift cards for 500 Turbine points inside. The community team has stated that this is exactly what it seems to be: a random gesture of kindness and appreciation for the game's playerbase. That message also reminded players to keep their mailing addresses up to date, as this is unlikely to be the only such event. [Thanks to Fredelas for the tip!]
Comcast wants customers to track and rate its technicians
When it comes to offering great customer service, Comcast's reputation on the matter is far from being healthy. Every now and then, the company gets put on the map for making its subscribers go through rather tedious experiences -- to get an idea, just listen to the recording of this call. But Comcast knows it can do better, so it's taking some necessary steps to get to where it wants to be. As such, it is now testing a feature that lets its customers track and rate technicians whenever they have a scheduled appointment.
RuneScape customer service helps 500K players in a year
To coincide with National Customer Service Week in the United Kingdom, RuneScape is preparing a series of posts and meetups about and with the customer service team. To kick it off, the team put together an infographic about its previous year's efforts with players. Probably the most stunning figure is that the 28-member team assisted 500,000 players over the course of a year. A majority of those service requests were for account issues. Response time was decent but not astounding, with 25% of calls answered within an hour and a "vast majority" addressed within 24 hours. The team was happy that 75% of those helped rated the help as eight or above out of 10. You can view the full infographic after the break.
Apple has a "War Room" to monitor iOS 8 problems as they emerge on social media
A Reddit user yesterday described an interesting experience he recently had with Apple customer service. After downloading iOS 8 this week, Reddit user Kiggsworthy and his wife set up Family Sharing and discovered that they could not download content purchased by the other -- which is effectively the entire point of Family Sharing in the first place. So Kiggsworthy took to Twitter where he tweeted about the problem whereupon an Apple employee asked him for a DM so he could help figure out what was going wrong and how to fix it. Via DM, he then worked with me to isolate the problem. I discovered that not all content was giving me that error, only a subset. He got excited saying this is something they've been trying to track down but were not able to reproduce. Apparently I gave them the reproduction scenario he needed. Turns out it was some subset of iTunes content that was uploaded over 8 years ago in a bad format that Family Sharing wasn't playing nice with. They now know what bad content to look for and are going about putting re-encoded versions of all this media on their servers so that people will not get this error going forward. With the problem fixed, the two got to talkin'. The Apple employee explained that Apple has a "war room" set up where they scour through various social media platforms looking for iOS 8 bugs and problems being reported by users. I was telling him how surprised and impressed I was with this service, given how busy a day Apple was having, for them to just see something I tweeted (I don't even have 300 followers) and follow up with me so quickly. He said that they had a "War Room" at Apple trawling through social media and everything they could find looking for anyone having issues (particularly with Family Sharing) so they could address them ASAP. In a similar vein, Apple also has a crack team of engineers who stay on high alert on iPhone launch day, keeping a close eye on any problems that might arise so that they can quickly enact fixes at the manufacturing level. BloombergBusinessweek profiled the group two weeks ago: Within hours of a new phone's release, couriers start bringing defective returns from Apple's retail stores to the company's headquarters in Cupertino, Calif. In a testing room, the same engineers who built the iPhone try to figure out the problem, say former employees who have participated in the program and don't want to anger their former employer. "They take them apart to diagnose what's happening right then and there," says Mark Wilhelm, who helped lead Apple's returns program. The program, created in the late 1990s, is called early field failure analysis, or EFFA, and it's about as fun as it sounds. The idea is to keep easily resolved problems from becoming punch lines for late-night comics. Often, they jury-rig a hardware fix, then coordinate a solution across Apple's global supply chain.
Slices of Apple episode 3: Customer Service
In episodes one and two of Slices of Apple, we looked at where Apple came from. We toured the crucible of design and engineering that forged Silicon Valley, and examined the fall of a titan in the 1990s when Apple devalued its brand before Steve Jobs returned. In this episode we'll look at the front line of Apple's brand: customer service. As Apple sought to rebuild itself, it wasn't satisfied with the retail options available. "Mini-stores" in Circuit City were abysmally run, so the company decided to open its own retail stores. This was in line with the Jobs mantra of controlling all aspects of a customer's experience. In episode three we'll talk to Shawn "Doc Rock" Boyd, a TUAW contributor and former Apple Genius who trained at the Palo Alto store, a location frequented by Apple executives. He discusses how important the relationship with customers was, and how this was stressed in training. We'll also talk to TUAW editor Steve Sande, who worked as an Apple consultant for clients before Apple Stores existed. He'll talk about the quality of Apple products and how important this is for customers (and why businesses should care). And we'll talk to Moisés Chiullan, who now runs the Electric Shadow Network of podcasts. Chiullan was manning the phones the day Jobs cut the original iPhone price live on stage, and tells us a bit about how Apple deals with unhappy customers. Stay tuned on Monday (Labor Day in the USA): we'll launch episode four, as we learn how a former Apple retail employee turned his passion for quality into a great app.
EE lets queue-jumpers pay 50p for faster customer service
If it didn't already feel like mobile operators were squeezing you for every penny, EE's new customer service charge could certainly help drive that notion home. BBC News reports that the carrier has introduced a new option on its support lines, allowing you to pay 50 pence to jump to the front. Think of it as the opposite of net neutrality, but for support centres.
The Daily Grind: What MMO company has given you good customer service?
A couple of Lord of the Rings Online's Inn League deeds are broken, which is unfortunate because the main reason I showed up for this year's Summer Festival was to finish the Inn League stuff on my newest character. I submitted a customer service ticket, and after having it closed with no action because I was offline (Turbine CSRs can't email, I guess?), I opened another one and remained online for a couple of hours so that I could be told that there is nothing to be done about broken deeds. All of this is a long-winded way of saying that I find Turbine's customer service off-putting. It's also a prelude to today's Daily Grind question. What MMO company has given you good customer service, and what was the circumstance? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
ZeniMax reduces ESO customer support staff in Ireland
The Connacht Tribune reported earlier this week that ZeniMax, which had established a customer service operation in Galway, Ireland, for The Elder Scrolls Online, has let go "up to 300 workers," apparently temporary, from its Rahoon location. It's not at all uncommon for MMO studios to let go crunch-time staff after a launch (or when a release is delayed, as ESO's console releases have been), but former employees told the publication that many of the staffers, some hired on short-term contracts of two to six weeks on up to six months in duration, were being terminated significantly earlier than anticipated. The Tribune suggests there are currently "just over 100 employees at the European customer services centre in the Rahoon Business Park." We have requested more information from ZeniMax and will update accordingly. [With thanks to tipster Paul!]
The Art of Wushu: Hacking and account security
When people say they get hacked in online games, I always assume it's the user's fault. The one time I was ever hacked, I could trace it directly back to a situation where I knew my username/password was compromised and I used the same set anyway. Ever since then, I've used more secure logins and passwords, and I've never had an issue. Age of Wushu has come under fire recently for a large string of hacks, and I jumped to the same conclusion. These hacks always seem like a big deal to the people who get hacked, and Age of Wushu is the kind of game where people are incentivized to steal other peoples' stuff. It's natural that people would hack forums or other less secure places and use that information to get whatever accounts they could find. But I've started hearing rumors that people are getting hacked in spite of randomized passwords. One player told me of a friend who deliberately posted a valuable commodity in world chat, traded it to an alt, and logged in the original character later to find that the first character had lost all of her money. Is there something going on?
Tips for getting customer support live chat working smoothly
No one likes having to interrupt their game time to contact customer support, but doing an online chat with is at least slightly less painful than waiting on hold to talk on the phone. However, browser snafus can ruin the chat experience which makes your wait even longer. Fortunately, CS rep Araxom has some tips on avoiding chat trouble, which is commonly caused by pop-up blockers. So before you try to start a live chat, here's what you should do: Turn off any pop-up blocking addons you might have. If you're using Google Chrome, it usually blocks pop-ups by default. You can use another browser or check out Google's instructions for allowing pop-ups. Now you're ready to chat! Just head over to the North American or European Support Portal, answer a few questions about the problem you're having, and then select Live Chat. Good luck!
You can now tweet O2 for account information thanks to #Tweetserve
Here's an interesting, if somewhat unusual, approach to helping customers: European mobile service provider O2 is rolling out a "Tweetserve" program to provide assistance to users on Twitter. Once you've followed @O2 and tweeted "#TweetServe" at the company, you'll be followed back and receive a direct message with a verification code. Send that PIN to O2 via SMS, and you're now able to DM the company with nine preset hashtags, including #charges, #minutes and #offers as well as #android, #windows or #ios (for info on software updates). The #charges and #minutes commands, which show your current bill and remaining minutes, respectively, look to be the most helpful. If you have a more complicated query about your account -- such as a billing dispute -- we imagine Tweetserve isn't going to replace a phone call to customer service. The program appears to be available to users in the UK for the time being; click the source link for more info.
RIFT shows off its customer service department
What's it like working a day in customer service? Most of you probably don't have to speculate, since the odds of you having worked retail at some point hover right around almost certainty. But have you worked customer service for a game before? If you have, then you probably don't have any need to look at RIFT's new post about the perils of working in the game's CS team. If you haven't, maybe you'd like to know a bit more about the people you're cursing about as you try to get your character bugs resolved. Aside from showing off some anecdotes and company-wide teamwork for the team, the post also contains the helpful reminder for players of every games that things which seem to be exploits are probably better off reported rather than, well, exploited. If you want a peek behind the curtain to see how the service team operates within games in general and RIFT in particular, take a look at the full article.
Behind the scenes as a [REDACTED] Game Master
Once upon a time, I worked as a game master for a very popular MMORPG. My duties were relatively simple: help players out of sticky situations and enforce the rules of the game when it came to cheating, harassment, and general player behavior. A game master's role is to protect the player from any and all potential game dangers, up to and including the player himself. In my work as a GM, I saw many amazing things. I saw guild members contact support staff because they were worried about another player's real-life wellbeing. I saw incredibly complex scams across multiple players and accounts that, while infuriating and exceptionally against the rules, were astonishing in their genius. And of course, I saw lots and lots of cybering.
The Mog Log: Error 3102, please try to read this FFXIV column at a later time
I'm writing this column on Tuesday morning, with the last Final Fantasy XIV beta test a happy memory for me and many other people. Specifically, all of the people for whom the last beta test did not amount to strings of numerical errors over and over. On the podcast I mentioned that this affected a substantial number of people, something like 10% of the playerbase. I have no way of knowing how accurate that number is, and none of us does; someone estimated 20,000 people, which I suspect to be far fewer than 10% of the players, but the fact is that we don't know. Exact numbers aren't important; what does matter is that this was a pretty big problem for an event that for all intents and purposes was not a beta. I've gone back and forth debating this with some people, but the fact is that the fourth testing period wasn't a test. And these sorts of problems cannot be cropping up today, the early access day and practical launch for a lot of hopeful players.
Live chat Customer Support Q&A this Thursday
Ever had a burning question about the customer service side of World of Warcraft, or other Blizzard games? This Thursday, you'll have your chance to ask. Blizzard is hosting its first-ever CoveritLive chat featuring customer support representatives from all of Blizzard's games. The chat will be focused primarily on World of Warcraft, but the panelists can field some questions regarding Diablo III and StarCraft II support as well. Keep in mind, this is not a development Q&A -- so keep your questions about whether or not Atiesh will return to the game's loot tables along with Alleria and Turalyon for another time. However, if you have any questions regarding the policies and the customer service side of Blizzard, this is an excellent time to get those questions cleared up. The Q&A will be this Thursday, December 13, from 5-6pm PST. Unlike previous Q&A chat sessions, this one will be taking place directly on Blizzard's website. And if you need an email reminder, you can sign up for one directly through the official blog post.
An interview with PayPal president David Marcus: as offline / retail prominence grows, a renewed focus on customer service
One doesn't have to look far to find my true feelings on just about any company. PayPal, in particular, has been on the wrong end of many examples of customer service gone horribly wrong. After lambasting the payments outfit once more following a gaffe I discovered while interviewing Infinitec co-founder Ahmad Zahran, I did something I rarely do: I reached out to the company's president on Twitter. A few hours later, the 39-year old David Marcus responded. At the time, I was floored to get anything more than a passing sigh, but after visiting his new home - a nondescript office at PayPal's headquarters in San Jose, Calif. - I learned that my experience wasn't a unique one. Marcus, a tall, handsome chap who was absorbed into eBay after a $240 million acquisition of mobile-payments provider Zong, was bestowed with the herculean task of running PayPal not long after Scott Thompson departed for Yahoo. Upon walking up to his office, it becomes immediately clear that he's aware of it -- his room is labeled "GSD," which the clever among us would recognize as "Get Sh*t Done." Outside of a few tall windows, there's little more here than a desk, a striking Nixie clock and a personal coffee machine -- seemingly, the bare essentials needed to achieve the three-lettered goal he sees each time he enters. Under Thompson's guidance, PayPal had grown at a rate seen by only a handful of other companies in the world, notching double-digit profit increases like clockwork. As it turns out, Thompson had little choice but to focus almost entirely on risk management and investor relations during his tenure - with millions in transactions pouring in by the hour, and new nations and currencies being added by the month - it simply had to be all about the numbers. Now, PayPal finds itself thrust into a new era. It's an era led by a startup junkie, tasked with getting a 13,000-plus-member team to buy into an entirely new culture. It's a culture that realizes how sensitive consumers are to financial taboos, how vital it is to iterate before rivals can even plan and how irreparably damaged PayPal's brand could become if customer service isn't a top priority as it soldiers into the world of offline payments. %Gallery-172861%
