STOP THE PRESSES! This just in from the "I shit you not" department

I swear I'm not making this up. I opened another support request with steam asking if they would change their support infrastructure for when their new product which includes several highly anticipated games. Transcript follows.

Customer

09/09/2007 03:47 PM

Since you're experiencing a high volume of calls now, what will the support system be like when the orange box comes out? I plan on buying 2 copies if I buy it, one for me, one for my son. But if I have to wait 2 weeks to get a support question answered if I have a problem I'll go mental. quite honestly the current support lag time is quite nearly a deal breaker. I've been waiting 8 years for tf2. But if there isn't some announcement of some sort of reasonable support I'll not be plopping down my money for it. You are a service industry. You chose that when you went to a content delivery system. It's a service. and you aren't servicing the people that have problems in a timely manner. check your own forums, you'll see the disgruntled members. What is the solution? You're the ones providing the product, I'm the one paying the money. So you tell me.

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Response (Ricky)

09/14/2007 11:07 AM

Hello, Thank you for contacting Steam Support. We answer tickets in the order that they are received. We have been experiencing higher ticket volumes recently, but we are doing our best to work through it so that we can answer tickets faster when the Orange Box is released. Ideally we would like to answer tickets within a couple of days, but recently some users have had to wait close to a week for a response. For non account related issues, the FAQs that we have setup can resolve the majority of errors that users encounter with Steam.

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Customer	09/14/2007 11:23 AM
So that is to say that there is no change in the support infrastructure planned for the Orange Box release, is that correct? As my purchase of your upcoming product depends on this I feel I have a right to know.

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Response (Ricky)

09/14/2007 04:11 PM

Thor, Changing the infrastructure of the support system during a time that we are anticipating higher ticket volume could lead to increased response times instead of lower ones. Our goal is to be able to answer tickets within a couple of days by the time the Orange Box is released. This is about the same response time that we have had in the past. Only recently has the response time jumped. Currently, the majority of tickets that we have been working on are 3-5 days old.

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Yes folks, the good people in the "I shit you not department" brought you this story and they want you to know that it does not make more sense to add more support personnel in a time when they expect more support calls.

To quote myself from their forums:

Here's an example:
Let's say you open your own isp. You get customers signing up and the money is rolling in. As it turns out you have, we'll say, 100 gigabits per second available as an aggregate. But you've signed up so many people that nobody can get over 1kb / second. People are complaining. What do you do? Tell them tough luck, maybe they'll get better speed at night? no, you get a bigger pipe. Or people look for another isp.

and yet another example of my ability to make corollaries:

The county fairground might only have one groundskeeper for most of the year. Along comes the week of the fair and guess what? They hire more groundskeepers or sub the work out to the company that is coming in with the attractions.


I know, I know, this isn't a "planned event" as a county fair would be but that's the business they are in. There are going to be unexpected spikes in activity and it's their business to plan for such things.

Sigh. I mentioned idiocracy, right?