Thursday, March 19, 2009

The Thing About Big Companies

Been a while since I've rant about something here. No surprise there since everything have been fine so far... till tonight. I think the problem lies in big companies in general. I will get back to that after I've explained the situation. So basically I am avid gamer specifically in Warhammer Online at the moment accessing using Streamyx broadband and those two combos really annoying sometimes. It has its ups and downs but most of the time it just plain piss me off.


So here is the situation. I woke up in the middle of the night thinking I could probably play an hour or two before going back to bad, ASSUMING the connection on Streamyx broadband would be much better around late in the night. Boy, was I wrong. I couldn't even go through the auto patcher (this is the part of the online game experience where you wait for your game to check if there is any updated files or what not before letting you start the game). Constant timeouts.


After a few attempts, I restarted my modem and basically retried. For those who don't know that's the routine of most Streamyx users I know, you have to restart your modems to get "good IPs" which has smoother connection and less lost packets. But when I tried to go into my game server it just timeouts. So what is a customer to do after having this two problems alternately after a few tries? I go for the Customer Support I guess since the funny thing is, I could access other servers. I thought hey maybe it's the game.


Now comes the main part of my rant, Customer Support. Rule of thumb for big companies who want to provide Customer Support; provide them only if you are going to do well with them else don't provide it at all cause people would be so pissed that they wouldn't even be using it at all. Applies for both Streamyx and Warhammer Online.


Streamyx users already knows the usual response from the CS people. First they will ask you to restart modem, yadda yadda yadda and after half an hour nothing was right still and you've wasted a large sum of money calling their 1 300 number which is not free. Warhammer Online being under EA is no better either. Famous for having crappy Customer Support from day 1. I have experience their poor service numerous times in the past.


The thing is, there is one question that keeps popping up in my mind. Why provide the service in the first place? Why? Seriously why get people's attention on the product if you're not going to be providing a good product in the first place.


Customer Support and also complains are almost impossible to reach to the correct people in Malaysia I have to sadly say. There are only three things that will happen when you are using some sort of Customer Complain/Support. It's either a) it's so troublesome that you stop halfway into your effort and you end up not reporting anything b) you've successfully reported something but it just doesn't reach the proper people c) they don't give a crap about your complains cause what is 1 - 2% of complains out of their full range of customers to them? The infamous "You don't like don't use" attitude.


I know this is not reaching out to anything really and this is just nothing more than ranting my frustration to myself. But I really wish there is something that can be done.