Yeah, canned responses like that as the first line of defense are pretty common in Customer Support.

Just respond to the mail?

The Autobots, Dwemer automatons or whomever they've contrived to answer the support requests always do what any unsavory corporation does at the first sign of trouble...deny.
Deny there's an issue.
Deflect to other posts or FAQs.
Obfuscate.
It's only when one pushes past this Sheorograthian madness a possible ( but not likely) solution will be offered by a real human being.
In brief- the first email says essentially "hello we see you"...."human or bot?".
The second response from you tells them "hey! I'm real"....for me, my response is usually "Hey, I'm real...angry".

Good luck.

Sheorograth would say "You have been promoted to bug tester, which is only slightly better than a bug."

It's ZOS. What do you expect? The only thing they are good at is screwing their game and customers.

Noerknhar wrote: »

The amount of "ZOS is ***" lately in the forums is emberrassing.

Why don't you guys just quit the game and do something else, if the developer and the game suck so badly? Noone forces you to play, so if you really hate everything that much, do something else and stop spilling your "ZOS sucks, ESO sucks, everything sucks" crap on the forums.

No harm in beating a dead horse. I am going to keep bashing ZOS as this is what they deserve for their lousy work performance.

b92303008rwb17_ESO wrote: »

Noerknhar wrote: »

The amount of "ZOS is ***" lately in the forums is emberrassing.

Why don't you guys just quit the game and do something else, if the developer and the game suck so badly? Noone forces you to play, so if you really hate everything that much, do something else and stop spilling your "ZOS sucks, ESO sucks, everything sucks" crap on the forums.

No harm in beating a dead horse. I am going to keep bashing ZOS as this is what they deserve for their lousy work performance.

And you will likely end up banned for it so you might as well stop being a p***k and move on to something you don't hate because you're not harming anyone but yourself here.

Plus, they laid off a huge amount of people at the Customer Service location... and the PR Rep said it was to 'improve customer service'. Go figure.

I had all the nodes of the WW survery disappear after only picking two of them. (I'd guess they made me swap shard or something.) So I lost ~8 chances at some rare crux.

When I reported this, I was told to quit and retake 'the quest'.

Hmm.

I'm pretty sure they have this one new guy in their team who only knows how to copy paste that message.

Hmmmmm..

Maybe it is time for ZOS to make a whole dedicated team of customer support like Game Masters on WoW? or maybe even Player Moderators who are able to teleport straight to players and help them with issues like bugged loot, or offensive behavior from other players, etc

/shrug

what do you expect them to do, lol like really? they cant be right there for your email and teleport you in magically all they can do is tell you to repair your client. some people want too much

I dont want to bad mouth the customer support, im sure its hard to balance the morons, and lazy people who dont try to resolve the issue with information already out there, and the genuine people that need help.

But you do have to be pushy (but polite!) to get passed the generic response. it took me 2 weeks of contact with ESO CS and alot of self diagnosis troubleshooting, to get my forum invitation because i put my email address "." in the wrong place when entering it on console. I just wanted to play the game so rushed and didnt care if it was wrong. One of the guys even sent my new forum invite and the confirmation to the faulty email. but eventually you get there.

I think they should cut the generic info response, if they are unable to use it correctly. it only enrages the player, causing them to likely be less than polite. Then again i sometimes think CS sometimes like to troll.

willymchilybily wrote: »

I think they should cut the generic info response, if they are unable to use it correctly. it only enrages the player, causing them to likely be less than polite. Then again i sometimes think CS sometimes like to troll.

Edit: Sorry, just realised it's a wall of text. Sorry

The problem with this idea, is that not all customer service people work with the same mentality.

There are a few, who genuinely love what they do and will do all they can to fix the problem that has been addressed. They will bend over backwards to make it happen. These people are absolute assets to any customer service group and almost always provide an excellent service.

The next group are those that are doing it as it's a job. CS Roles do NOT pay good money. You are at the customer facing front end. You take the brunt of a disgruntled customer. The vast majority of customers do not think about this, and just give you crap about something that is really nothing to do with them, they are just there working trying to do they're job to make ends meet. The nicer you are with them, the more they will try to help - but you put their back up, they will stone wall you. I know, it's crazy they are paid so little for such an important role - but management has and always will see customer service as a necessary evil. It's a cost they have to wrap into their product/service as it's expected. And things are getting worse for management. OVer the last 5-6 years with the speed at which information travels and how important peoples feedback direct to their friends/colleagues is, they HAVE to take note. Hell, it's even moved into Enterprise support where companies accept they MUST pay more for better specialists who know how to work with customers - hence the creation of "Customer Success Managers" in the US a few years back - something the UK and EU is now taking on.

Then you have the third category. These are the ones why there is a script in place and everything is effectively robotic and non-helpful. These people are employed simply because they passed a few HR questions and are cheap. Ireland has a problem in terms of economic growth, they gave crazy tax breaks to tech firms setting up CS and support centres over there. Because the economy was so bad, people had to drop their rates/expectations/salaries just to get work to survive. Not pretty, but true. So they end up employing people "Cheap" as it looks good on paper and a spread sheet, with little to no regard that this affects the attitude and demeanour of said employee. If you have a few of these people, who do get disgruntled, with free response/access - then they can cause a LOT of problems to the game.

It's not easy for any company to find the balance. Gaming has always had a challenge putting together a financially sensible, high customer service level, support offering. When you allow for the fact about 60% of any game budget is marketing, I guess it's not surprising. Support is almost an after thought.

Anyhows, out side of all that I typed, I've had to use Customer Support twice in 9 mths. Both times it's been excellent. The second one, was a very complicated and political situation and I probably spent the best part of 2 hours on the phone to a senior support manager in the US.