For several years I had the good fortune to work for one of the greatest comic book and gaming chains in the country,
The Fantasy Shop. Seriously, if you're ever in the St. Louis area, do yourself a favor and check them out. Any of their stores are great, but the St. Charles one does have a nice wow-factor going for it. Anyway, during my time there I was taught a lot about customer service. That might seem odd, since the comic and gaming industry is one renowned for it's snobbishness and antisocial behavior. Pretty much every other comic shop I walk into ends in the same way, me wandering around, ignored by staff, and walking out emptyhanded. But Dave and Tim at the Fantasy Shop saw customer service as a way to build and grow a business in a tough industry. Since my time there I have developed an ideal of professionalism in general, and how customers should be treated in particular.
Another industry not well known for how it treats it's clients is the MMO industry. Just check the message boards of any of the major MMOs on the market, and you'll see a ton of posts complaining about service. Yes, a ton of these posts are QQ, but it just shows what a challenge customer service is, and that these companies sometimes struggle with it. Since I'm writing a post about customer service and Blizzard, you might think this is just another QQ post. Let me assure you it's not. My interaction with their customer service is completely a result of my own actions. And in the end, Blizzard did come through. It just took some time, and unfortunately might've cost us both my desire to Warcraft again.
I love my iPhone. I'm a total geek over it, and any time I find a new app to add to it, I geek even harder for it. When Blizzard announced a mobile authenticator app for the iPhone, at the cost of nadda, I was really excited. I downloaded it, and had been using it since it's release without any problems.
Cut to June 19th when the new iPhones came out. Of course I have to get the new one. I had been rolling with the 2G for nearly a year and a half. Got my wife one, too and we were going to give my old one to her father. In my excitement to jump into the 3GS world and fully divest myself of the 2G, I started transferring all of my content to the new phone, and reformatting the old one. For whatever reason, I completely forgot about the authenticator. Call it a brain fart, or what you will, but I knew right away that when I tried to log in, the new phone would not have the old authenticator linked to it.
So I was locked out of my account. I couldn't get in game, couldn't log into battle.net. Nothing. So I called customer service. I explained the situation to the customer service guy. He asked me the security questions, asked me to try the new authenticator to see if it had the same serial. But of course it didn't. Then he asked for my original game key I used to create my account. This is where it started to get frustrating. I have in my apartment three different copies of World of Warcraft, but none of them are the original. I made my account when I was in Iraq, and passed the discs on to at least two people so they could try it out for the 10 day trial. So the rep couldn't remove the authenticator from my account. While this was a frustrating requirement, this is why I had the authenticator. It shouldn't be easy to get into the account without it. The rep said what he could do was send me an email that would tell me how I could remove the authenticator from my account and that it should take about 10 minutes.
Hours later I still haven't received the email. I'm still locked out. I do find another WoW box though, so I call up Blizzard to see if this was the original. I go through the entire story again with another rep, and same result. He'll send me an email, I should get it in 10 minutes.
Monday I still haven't received an email. But I did get two surveys about my customer service experience. I'm getting frustrated. I spend some time working on other stuff and start downloading Age of Conan. My buddy Dr. Heitnutts left WoW and is playing it, and I've heard that the game is a lot more stable now. I decide to send an email to Blizzard's customer service detailing all that's happened.
By the next Friday I've been getting a lot done offline, playing some Conan, which has been improved. I still want to get into my Warcraft account, at least to turn off the billing, but I still haven't heard anything from their customer service. I give them another call, this time I'm talking to a rep called Nahm. This guy turns off my billing, sends emails to two of my email accounts, and waits until I've received them. When it didn't look like I was getting them, he sent them again. He then gave me his contact info so that I could get credit for the time I missed playing. In short, he did everything a customer rep should. I felt like he, and by proxy Blizzard, cared about my problem. And he took care of it. I followed the instructions in the email, and my account was unlocked in less than 30 minutes.
Sadly, or maybe not, now that I have my account back, I don't feel much like playing. A lot of info has been put out about the next patch, and even though I only missed a week or so, I feel a bit behind. I've been really digging Age of Conan, and WoW definitely shows it's age after playing Conan. Plus, there are so many interesting games coming (Aion, APB, Champions, SWKOTR, etc). Which is why this blog isn't WoW-centric.
Of course, Blizzard won't miss me. But it took me three customer service reps to get a good one. Even after getting a good one, I'm still not sure if I want to keep playing. One has to wonder, even with millions of customers, can a game getting long in the tooth afford to have 2/3 of their customer service experiences end poorly.
