Valve Promotes Transparency With the Steam Support Update and Stats Page

[cageymaru]

Valve has rolled out their Steam support update and a new stats page, to give transparency to the experience that users get when using Steam support. The stats that Valve tossed around in this blog post detail the average number of various functions fulfilled by the Steam support staff in a day.

• 75,000 help requests per day
• 8,000 requests waiting for responses
• 90% of refund requests are fulfilled in a few hours
• Account Security & Recovery requests wait time went from over one week to 98% fulfilled in under 24 hours
• Peak waiting for response tickets was 58,452 in the past 90 days.

Transparency is always appreciated and this is a bold move for Valve to publish these results. By the same token it will be interesting to see how the Steam support stats change when confronted with the Steam Summer Sale for example. Will account requests go up when the next popular website's game portal is hacked? 49,119 refund requests were sent to Steam support in the past 24 hours and it only took them 1.35 hours to 1.53 days to fulfill them as of the writing of this article. Imagine if we had the same transparency and similar stats for AMD or Nvidia video card driver requests.

We’ve been hearing from users for several years about the need for us to keep working on improving Steam Support. As always, our goal with Steam is to be continuously improving and creating better user experiences across the board.

We hope that most of you never need to contact support because your experience with Steam is issue free to begin with. However, we know that there are times when something just goes wrong and when you need to get help from an actual person. Improving Steam Support to make that experience as smooth as possible has been a big focus for us over the last couple years. We overhauled our support site, we’ve built better integrated tools, we no longer require a separate account to contact support, and we’ve increased our support staffing. We’ve also fixed as many bugs as possible and have provided new self-service options where they make sense. Today we are launching our Steam Support Stats page and seeking to improve transparency around users’ experiences getting support from us. We believe that increasing transparency will both help users understand how we are doing and will help make sure we keep improving over time.

 

[polonyc2]

I've always heard nothing but bad things about Steam support...mainly in relation to them taking days or longer to respond to a support ticket...you would think with all their success that they would hire a telephone support staff

 

[-=SOF=-WID99]

yea an every one says uplay support = bad ..lol never had a problem

try steam support = always = a problem


try origin .. never had an issue

steam = always a 3 to 4 day wait ..and you better not play for more then 2 hrs ...

 

[Krenum]

There's that word again....."Transparency". The only word/s we want to hear from Valve is Half Life 3.

 

[Ragenrok]

yea an every one says uplay support = bad ..lol never had a problem

try steam support = always = a problem


try origin .. never had an issue

steam = always a 3 to 4 day wait ..and you better not play for more then 2 hrs ...

yup, in the last 5 years I've had to use EA support twice and both times they were awesome to deal with and actually tried very hard to help me out (one time being completely my fault and they gave me a 15% off code for BF1 when it was still in pre-order lol). Compared to steam who only works through email and took 16 days to help me out. Mind you this was way before the refund policy but I had purchased a game that just refused to work online, took little over two weeks but steam gave me in-store credit as a refund lol

 

[BulletDust]

I've always heard nothing but bad things about Steam support...mainly in relation to them taking days or longer to respond to a support ticket...you would think with all their success that they would hire a telephone support staff

Really? I returned No Man's Sky 2 weeks after I bought it thinking I stood no chance at a refund and got all my money back no questions asked!

Mind you...It was 'No Mans Sky'....

 

[ZLoth]

you would think with all their success that they would hire a telephone support staff

I understand where you are coming from, but you would be surprised at the number of HowDoI calls received in a day. Since Steam is a digital storefront, they probably get support cases for software that legitimately goes to the publisher.

Now, if they had Support Links to PC Gaming Wiki on the product pages, that would help.

Of course, there are things that I would like to see them fix with the Backup/Restore games in the Steam client also.

 

[striker444]

I have only had to use Steam support once, but it was in 2006, took a day to resolve my issue.

 

[Ragenrok]

Really? I returned No Man's Sky 2 weeks after I bought it thinking I stood no chance at a refund and got all my money back no questions asked!

Mind you...It was 'No Mans Sky'....

I bought it on the ps4 and was happy I did since I got to play it for 2-3 weeks and get as much enjoyment as I could from it then sold it for a good price locally. Bought it for $80 (CAD) and sold it for $60 and that was a good deal for me, game was good enough for $20.

 

[BloodyIron]

I've actually had really good results from steam support. Even recently they helped me out a bunch.

The recent example...

The devs for ticket to Ride decided they were no longer going to support Linux. But they didn't inform anyone so far as I could tell. So how did this impact me? Suddenly I stopped being able to play the game, which I paid for. I game on Linux. The game was already installed, with Linux files and everything. Just suddenly, can't hit play.

So I went through some back and forth with steam support, a discussion post I made and a review I left on the store Page. It took some time, sure, but AFAIK this is new territory.

There were a few misunderstandings with the support team. Namely, they refunded me quickly, but what I wanted was their help getting it playable. They never once said that isn't possible, but as I explained throughout our discussion they worked towards making that happen. Not only that but the devs hopped into the discussion thread and also helped me get back to a playable State with the game.

Sure, it was a situation that shouldn't have happened to begin with. But I never was told "no". I feel like the devs and steam support busted a nut to make me happy, and this isn't the first time.

Give me steam or give me death. I don't like the alternatives.