My personal Steam customer support 'win' was several years back when I decided to start building a game library for my son. I had purchased Conan and Elite Dangerous while they were on deep discount and gifted them to my son's account. At the time I was unaware that gifts can expire and be refunded. So, at some point the gifts expired and they refunded the purchases, but the game were no longer on that deep discount. I was fairly upset and contacted customer support. The initial customer support agent was unhelpful and I sent a follow-up contact to Gabe that expressed my discontent. I explained that they'd managed to alienate a user that had been on the platform since 2005 and who had a massive library of purchased games at that point. I told them I would no longer be using the platform and would not be using it for my kids either. This email elicited a response from one of the Steam devs and they agreed that my initial interaction was not what they wanted the experience to be. He sent me copies of the games that have been refunded and he sent me to codes for "all present and future Valve titles" for me and my son to be able to play together. In the end he turned it around fully and only increased my appreciation for the company and platform.
Yeah, Steam has always some really impressively dedicated help when somebody escalates. It's probably harder to access now, but I remember one time in college when TF2 came out of beta and performance was awful. Steam Support didn't have anything, so I sent an email to GabeN; he put me in touch with a senior Source dev who had me press some debug buttons and hop in a game with a bunch of Valve folks (I was pretty good but this was definitely an exception to "game devs are worse that their games than players", I got my ticket punched worse than when I was playing in competitive leagues). A few weeks later there was a patch that significantly improved perf on my particular flavor of hardware.
I know I shouldn't engage, but your comment irks me.
This is the email I sent, make of it what you will:
Mr. Newell,
I figured I would email you as a sort of spiritual goodbye to my fandom of Steam.
I have been a customer for as long as I can remember. I'm pretty sure it's longer than the 15 years my profile lists as I had a profile that I lost access to before this one. For this entire time I've been a staunch supporter and advocate of Steam. I've slowly built my collection over the years and would always prefer to buy via Steam vs.another platform or even direct. I would always recount my many positive experiences with the Steam platform when discussions online turned negative. Overall I was a very happy customer and advocate.
My son is now 10 and I had finally decided to start a game library for him. We are a multi-PC family and we frequently want to game together or just want to all play games at the same time, even if they are different ones. As the Steam sharing feature means we cannot all play different games I decided I'd just buy him some of the games he asked for or that we could play together. The last two of those purchases is what triggered my loss of faith in Steam. And to be honest, it was such a trivial thing to trigger it in the end. I purchased a copy of Elite Dangerous: Commander Deluxe Edition and a copy of Conan Exiles - Complete Edition. They were both on sale for a good amount off, 75% for ED and 40% for CE. As I seem unable to just purchase a game and hold it as a later gift to someone and instead I have to specify the recipient right away I went ahead and sent it to my son's email address. That address is simply a group that goes to myself and my wife until he's a little older. Apparently I missed the fact that I needed to go and accept the gift or the gift would be REFUNDED. Eventually the gifts were both refunded and I had missed it until the second gift was refunded. I immediately reached out to support to help un-refund the purchases. They said that they were unable to help me.
That is really where the story ends I'd say. Nothing dramatic, but I told them they'd lost a customer for giving me my money back. Pretty ironic really.
I keep getting emails about deals on items on my wishlist and I keep realizing that I meant what I'd said. You guys lost a customer. I've gone so far as to start buying games I already own on Steam on GOG instead now. I won't walk away from my Steam library and I'm not saying I'll never spend more money on Steam. But I'll never do it as a first choice and I'll never do it as a happy customer.
I just wanted to write to you on the off chance that you might read this so perhaps you can do something for the future to not lose another loyal customer over such a trivial thing.
And this was the response:
Hello Mr. [X],
My name is [Y] and I am a developer on Steam. Thank you for taking the time to email us and bring this issue to our attention.
I have reviewed your help request and I am contacting you to apologize for the responses that you received. Your request was not handled appropriately and we will use it as well as your feedback to improve how we handle cases like yours in the future.
We would like to add free copies of the games that were automatically refunded to your son's account. From your email, it sounded like you were hoping to delay giving him these games until he is a little older. So, I have added giftable copies of Elite Dangerous: Commander Deluxe Edition and Conan Exiles - Complete Edition to your account's inventory. You can access your inventory through the dropdown menus near the top of the Steam Client and gift them to his account at any time.
We also think it is great that you are starting a game library for him and we would like to contribute some games from Valve as well. I am including two CD keys which you can register on both of your accounts so that you can play the included games together. These keys include all present and future Valve titles:
[CODE1]
[CODE2]
Thank you again for bringing this to our attention. Please let me know if I can help with anything else.
How so? If the customer doesn't want their money back and didn't intend to get their money back, that seems completely reasonable. There's no reason someone should expect that a purchase they made got removed without their consent regardless of whether or not a refund was issued.
As a small follow-up to this that exemplifies the continuing good interactions:
I posted the email exchange I had below another comment. In that exchange you'll notice that the dev said they'd added the games under my inventory to gift to my son at a later date (when he was older). That came about 2 years later when he was 12. The problem was, when I tried to use the gifts from my inventory they both failed for unspecified reasons. I reached out to the initial dev again, hoping he was still there. He was and he helped resolve the issue right away.
I know some people have had bad customer service with Steam or have other complaints, some valid and others not so much. In the end, I'm a pretty satisfied Steam customer and will generally speak well of them when the situation arises (like today).
These kinds of cases can be rare enough that finding them is absolutely worth that cost, in terms of fixing a rare but annoying bug, helping customer retention, "word on the street", etc.
I don't do customer support very often, but when I do, it's my default response.
Talking about customer service, the best I've _ever_ experienced has been with Sweetwater, on online music store. I seriously rave about them to anyone that will listen. Someone should do a case study on their CS program.
This is great to know. For some reason, I got the impression that Sweetwater was a terrible company but I can't, for the life of me, remember if that's based on a personal purchase I made from them (and I made several) or if it was based on someone else's experience that was related to me. It's just something that I had stored away in my memory as a "Well, I'm never buying from them again".
