While I'm very happy to see that many of you speak kindly of us GMs and the support we provide, I can also understand many of the concerns raised in this thread. In regards to those, I want to add a few points to the discussion:
First of all, we actually
do have a mixture of new and older GMs working in Customer Support. Even if the employee turnaround within Customer Support is relatively low (as most of us love to work on EVE and for CCP
), there are always some GMs being recruited into other departments of the company and some that leave due to some other reasons. Those are replaced by fresh blood, which are very often EVE veterans and/or former ISD members that have performed well as such. That being said, of course we also need to look at many other skills to determine whether someone is well suited for customer support, such as good language skills and communication strengths. The guy who knows
everything about EVE will not necessarily make the best GM
This we know from experience.
Regarding our response times, we do our best to keep them down as possible, but of course this can vary on the petition category, the current load of incoming petitions at any given time and the issue at hand. But just to give you an idea of what you can usually expect, here are some average first response time numbers for our main petition categories.
All petition categories:
- Last 12 months = 32 hours and 31 minutes
- Last month = 16 hours and 31 minutes
Stuck petition categories:
- Last 12 months = 1 hour and 4 minutes
- Last month = 41 minutes
Billing & Account petition categories:
- Last 12 months = 22 hours and 6 minutes
- Last month = 12 hours and 6 minutes
Technical Support categories:
- Last 12 months =32 hours
- Last month = 11 hours and 52 minutes
Of course these are only averages and some petitions may need to wait for longer. Also these are only first response numbers and there may be more delay in between replies when petitions drag on/are escalated etc.
On reimbursement of losses in EVE, I'm not sure what to say as you have probably heard it all before. The fact remains that EVE is a very, very competitive game and in some aspects on the brink of what is technically possible, so our task is not always that easy. Of course we know that players lose ships and items to bugs and server issues, but we can simply not apply some kind of blanket "The customer is always right" method of deciding when to reimburse and when not to. We believe this would ruin the experience for everyone in the long run and thus we try to set clear policies that are
equally fair to everyone (and
equally unfair in some cases) and stick to them. Usually this means server log verification is required aka our logs show nothing
That being said, we will always keep working with the Dev teams on improving those logs/tools so that we have the verification needed in more cases and getting the bugs we are frequently exposed to through petitions fixed (with the current focus on EVE within the company, good things are happening in this area). Furthermore, we can keep working on finding the right balance between "canned responses" and manually typing up long personal and poetic replies to every petition with detailed explanations of everything and nothing, that would in turn slow the whole service down for everyone.
Finally, remember that if you are not happy with how your petition is handled,
you can always request that a second opinion is given by another GM and/or a Senior GM. And finally (again) ...use the rating tool to rate different aspects of our services after a petition is closed. It really helps us focus on where to improve and tells us how we are doing overall (overall rating for last year was
7.7 of 10 based on 63.731 rated petitions. Not all that bad but can of course be improved).
Winter is coming,
Lead GM Panzer