Valve on Customer Service: “We Need to Do Better”

Valve received an “F” rank from the Better Business Bureau due to it’s appalling customer service.

Anyone who has ever had to contact Valve for any kind of customer service should know that the process is… not great. This fact is reflected in the Better Business Bureau’s (BBB) recent “F” ranking of the company, citing “poor customer service” as the biggest culprit. The good news is that Valve is rather ashamed of this, and assures us that it wants to change for the better.

“We don’t feel like our customer service support is where it needs to be right now,” Valve’s Erik Johnson told Kotaku. “We think customers are right. When they say our support’s bad, our initial reaction isn’t to say, ‘No, it’s actually good. Look at all of this.’ It’s to say that, no, they’re probably right, because they usually are when it comes to this kind of thing. We hear those complaints, and that’s gonna be a big focus for us throughout the year. We have a lot of work to do there. We have to do better.”

The BBB claims that customers have filed over 700 complaints with the company, which has failed to respond to at least 500 of. The majority of complaints stem from “problems with a product/service.” To elaborate:

“Consumers allege the games they purchase from Valve Corporation or Steam malfunction, do not work or have an invalid CD key. Consumers also claim the company blocks users from accessing their library of games. Consumers further allege they attempt to contact the company for assistance, but Valve Corporation fails to correct the gaming issues, does not correct credit card charges or issue a refund, or does not respond at all.”

The “does not respond at all” phrase rings particularly true for most people I know, (including myself), who have had their complaints fall on deaf ears whenever there’s a problem with Steam.

While Johnson did acknowledge the problem, he lamented that the BBB is not a particularly useful metric. “The BBB is a far less useful proxy for customer issues than Reddit,” he claimed. “We don’t use them for much. They don’t provide us as useful of data as customers emailing us, posting on Reddit, posting on Twitter, and so on.”

Source: Kotaku