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If you ever had to submit a support ticket to Valve, you may understand why the company is constantly under fire for their terrible customer support. In speaking with Kotaku, Valve's Erik Johnson has said that their customer support is still as bad as ever and may even be worse than it was at the start of the year.“I think it’s technically gotten a little worse on the user side of things [since the last time we talked]—at least, overall in terms of current ticket times,” he said. “That peaked a few weeks ago, and it’s starting to get better now.”
Johnson states that there is progress being made, but it's not all visible to the end user. He notes that some of the first steps to fixing their support came about with things like fast Steam refunds.
“We started by realizing we had a lot of software to write to build a new support system,” Johnson explained. “The first feature that came of that was the ability to get refunds of purchases made on Steam. That made the most sense to start with. If a customer buys something they don’t like, they can get their money back in a pretty transparent way. We think that’s a good feature, but we don’t think it was the fix for support. It had a lot more work behind it that was long-term thinking than just refunds.”
So what then is Valve doing to fix their long standing issue with terrible support?
“We’ve hired a couple different companies [to help with support],” said Johnson. “The thing that’s interesting is, you go out to third-party support providers, and—at least in our experience—most of them wanted to sell you ways to reduce the number of people currently waiting in support, but they weren’t very good at selling you ways to solve customer support issues. I think we’ve all had that experience of, ‘I get it. You’re trying to get me off the line.’ We’re not super interested in providing crappy support in volume.”
Valve has hopes that they'll have "the support wait time down to an acceptable point by Christmas time." Christmas is just a couple of short months away now, it will be very interesting to see if Valve can pull it off.
To be fair though, both Steam's and Origin's customer support are run by customer service representative who don't read what the customer explains. I've seen someone post on the Steam forums showing the entire conversation, where the customer has already diagnosed the problem correctly and VALVe is the only one who can fix it, only to end up with a copy and paste answer that is nowhere near related to what the customer said.
And as for Origin? My experience consisted of a moron who asked me if I wanted help in enabling two-step authentication for my newly created account. I told him (for the fourth time at that point) that I created this FAKE account in order to talk to him, because two-step authentication is broken, and it's impossible to contact EA customer support without logging into Origin. Almost missed out on the Black Friday sale.
... I THINK Steam has an outside line of communication? E-mail right? I forgot.