anyone done customer support for a large game company?

[papillon]

Pondering a job application that sort of opened up in my close vicinity and wondering what horrors would await me, other than demands that their character be made level 50 RIGHT NOW. :)

[cliffski]

in my experience most large game companies. dont bother with customer service. especially sony.
or at least it seems that way...

[kerchen]

I knew a number of CS guys at Maxis (back before EA swaggered in). From what they told me, it was very dull and repetitive. Most of the calls were from the same pool of common problems: installation issues, compatibility issues, etc. In general, I've read that the turnover is pretty high in CS because there isn't much variety and it's relentless. Go for it! :)

[GameStudioD]

I had a friend that did customer service for Sony, specifically the Playstation (1).

A guy called in and said is PS didnt work. After 10 minutes of questions and troubleshooting, the guy says: " I dropped it in the fish tank a few days ago, does that have anything to do with it?"

If you can put up with people like this, you will have no problem doing CS.

[Cartman]

I have a friend who did support for Sierra many years ago. He said he had a call once from a guy who was racing along in their Nascar game along with the race going on on TV. He was irritated that the game crashed after three hours of racing and it had ruined his day.

Other than that, my friend actually loved support. Of course that was when Al Lowe and Roberta were there so he had some great stories of talking with them. And when you had to configure the persons autoexec.bat. Sigh, those days sucked.

I've done cs for MS for 2.5 years(back in the 90's) and its OK for a stepping stone into other things, but I don't know many people that make a career out of it.

Good luck.

[papillon]

Heh. I'm not much of a career person. Just hoping to find something to cover some bills for a while until various legal statuses change and we can move on. :)

[Sunshine]

in my experience most large game companies. dont bother with customer service. especially sony.

I just quit a job doing customer service for Cingular wireless, and I'm afraid to say that large companies view it just as a numbers game.

Try to atleast answer 94% of the phone calls that come in.
Try to solve 33% of the problems on the first call.
Try to solve 75% of the problems total [ after several phone calls, sometimes several weeks, or months]

unfortunatly it becomes obvious quickly that about 1 out of 4 people fall through the cracks. Thus if you get one of those people and you see that 10 attempts to solve have failed, best just to hang up on them because their one of the lucky 25% that just don't get a solution :D

of course if the company decides to x-fer your call to india, just subtract 50% off all those numbers! :eek:

[Gmicek]

I just quit a job doing customer service for Cingular wireless, and I'm afraid to say that large companies view it just as a numbers game.

That's pretty funny, I work for Verizon Wireless doing customer, rep, and technical support. I know that in our case we used to be completely numbers focused, such as your average call time needing to be less than 5 minutes. Now they've tossed most of those metrics out of the window, and we're free to take as long as needed on calls.

The problem with customer service is that it's a complete money hole, you're not going to make the money back in any tangible way. Sure, giving good customer service makes customers happy, but the reason people call customer service is because something has gone wrong in the first place. It's very rare that I get a customer that calls just to say "You guys are doing a great job!" The biggest stress we have is call quality, and making sure that all the problems are solved the first time a customer calls. You'll get absolutely destroyed on your performance reviews if it turns out the customer might have to call back for some reason (even if it's unrelated to the original reason they called). Do poorly for two or three months and you're out of a job (we have about a 10% turn over rate if you can believe that). But if your stats arent up to snuff (such as availability, or number of calls taken) they'll let that slide (hell, mine haven't been up to snuff for over 4 years, ha!).

Anyways, my point is that not all large companies have poor customer service. Microsoft customer service is absolutely amazing for example. I've had them call me back a week after my original call just to check in and make sure everything was still ok. EA's support is good from a quality standpoint, but their excellent reps seem to be hamstrung when it comes to certain things. My electric company (SMUD) is really great, and I enjoy calling them when the need arises. On the other hand, Sprint, AT&T, and SBC have godawful customer care, but that's because such a horribly hostile work environment has been created for their employees.