Customer Support Confidential

Author: by William Kinnikin

Hello, and welcome to Customer Support at [a major casual games portal]. This is a difficult job, and not everyone is cut out for the unique stresses. You’ll be disoriented, abused, blamed, and threatened, but if you can learn to roll with the punches, you’ll find a job rich with unique rewards. The rewards will come in the form of a very reasonable paycheck, and free soda.

You already know sh*t rolls downhill. In casual games, customer support is at the bottom of that hill. Actually, it’s in a valley, nestled between the company and the consumer. When anyone on either side makes a mistake, it rolls down the hill, and the support team deals with it. When marketing forgets to note an expiration date, it’s your problem. When a customer accidentally orders a game six times, it’s your problem. When QA misses a level design error that makes it impossible to beat the game, it’s your problem. When a functionally illiterate seventy-eight year old doesn’t understand the difference between the right and left mouse buttons, it’s your problem.

Support is different from other jobs you may have had in one very important way. While any type of employment will sometimes put you in the position of scrambling to find a solution for someone else’s mistake, in support you will do that exclusively. There is never a moment of relief where you’ve cleaned everything up, and are now able to get back to doing productive work. When you’ve solved all the problems, you get to start working on more problems.

Replying To Emails

Most of your day will still be fairly straightforward. You’ll have people who have moved to a new computer and need help retrieving their software, people who are having problems running the game they downloaded, people who have questions about a specific game, and billing errors make up the bulk of the issues you’ll respond to. However, a good 10% of these people will not be writing to you in a way that appreciably resembles English.

This email is actually not so bad. You know they’re talking about a game, which they’ve either downloaded or attempted to download. You at least know which questions to ask. For questions less coherent than this, we have a form response that, in very polite terms, lets the customer know that you have no idea what they’ve said, and gives a list of information that would be helpful.

You are going to be cursed at. People are going to call you a liar. They are going to accuse you of stealing from them. They are going to call your ancestry and sexual orientation into question. They will refer to you giving them simple instructions, such as a request that they reinstall, as “the runaround”. We’re going to look at a few examples, and discuss the appropriate response to these special case emails.

I think it’s important to note that this is not a paying customer. He had only used free web based games. It’s also worth mentioning that this same customer sent a number of emails to us, most containing graphic sexual imagery and a distinctive use of the phrase “your crooks”. The appropriate response here is actually to delete the email and move on. There’s nothing to be done for this poor soul.

Then there are the emails that involve some sort of inappropriate disclosure.

Treat this email as if it was totally normal. They’ve lost their copy of the game. Just find their purchase, and send them the information they need to get the game downloaded. Do not mention the suicide threat or the alcoholism. They might have been joking, they might not. The only safe thing to do is pretend you’re a robot that answers these emails based on keywords.

Threats are similar. Pretend they aren’t there. People will drop any name they can think of. The Better Business Bureau, the Attorney General, the police, Crocodile Dundee, God, the Television, the credit card company and private lawyers have all been invoked as agents for justice should the customer’s needs not be met. Keep in mind that out of the agencies mentioned, those that might actually contact you are very reasonable, and the records you have showing that you’ve made every effort to resolve the issue with the customer will cause them to rule on your side. So for the above email, ignore the threats, and focus instead on the claim that the developers would have consciously made it impossible to complete the game by changing the behavior from random to fixed.

You are going to be lied to. More painfully, you are going to be lied to by people who are not smart enough to lie. Don’t ever call them on it. Tell them they must have been confused, or act like you don’t understand. For example.

Sure, it’s a little inconsistent that she claims that she didn’t purchase the game, then complains that she can’t get it to register properly, and finally that the game is causing computer problems. The only clear thing is she doesn’t want the game. Despite the number of conflicting elements in her tale, she started by saying it was unauthorized, so it’s best to go with that when documenting the refund. When you tell her the order has been canceled, don’t bother mentioning that she could just have said she changed her mind and you still would have issued a refund. She will accuse you of not trusting her.

Don’t lose hope though. Some people love the services we provide, and occasionally, one of them lets us know.

In this case, you should just thank the customer for her kind words, and thank god that she’s on your side.

Customer Support Orientation Guide: A Conclusion

The theme here is probably pretty clear: Ignore everything but the technical side of the problem. Email Customer Support is often accused of being impersonal or cold, but it’s the only way to deal with emails like these. If you can’t separate the issue from the way it’s delivered, you can’t do this job.

A final warning: Take regular breaks over the course of the day, or your brain will rebel. You will develop a headache, and your eyes will refuse to focus. This is a good time to grab one of those free sodas I mentioned at the beginning.

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