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My Letter to Gabe Newell and Doug Lombardi
I emailed this to Gabe Newell and Doug Lombardi about 5 minutes ago. Hopefully it doesn't fall on deaf ears.
I thought you should know of my recent experience with your company, so I thought I would take a moment and share it with you.
My Steam account was stolen on Monday. You can imagine I was a bit freaked out, as my account contains hundreds, if not thousands of dollars worth of games that I have amassed over the years. Additionally, I also had a credit card linked to my account, making the theft even more concerning.
When I notified Steam Customer Service of the theft, other than the immediate auto-reply stating my request was received by a computer, I did not hear anything else for three days. Three days it took to get a response. When I finally did, it was yet another form letter, this one requesting that I verify that I was the real owner of the account that had been hacked. I did so within two hours of the query. That was two days ago. I have still not heard back from anyone. It has been five days since my account was stolen and, not only can I not access my games, but I have no idea if Customer Service is even doing anything about it or if a human being has even seen the request at all (as, to date, I have only received two form letters).
I have loved Valve and Steam for years. I have advocated, encouraged, and just about proselytized on behalf of the Steam software, largely because of Valve's obvious valuing of its customers. Valve is a company that has always recognized that it exists because of its customers, not in-spite of them. In essence, you have earned my loyalty by treating your customers with the respect that they deserve. But has become clear to me that that respect only goes so far.
To be frank, I find it appalling that any company, let alone Valve, would not respond to a customer service request for three days, and would, furthermore, leave a customer wondering if their issue is being addressed for five (and likely more days after this letter is sent).
Meanwhile, yesterday I bought the wrong version of something on the Google Play store. When I went to look up what to do about it, I saw on Google's Customer Service page that you could put in your phone number and, 24 hours a day 7 days a week, they will call you back. Within 60 seconds a live person had called me back and within 5 minutes he had refunded my money so that I could re-order the right product. THAT is customer service! And that is what you are competing against. And I have the same exact experience when I call Amazon.....every time!
While this is an example of extremely good customer service (and truly what customer service SHOULD be), I understand if not everyone can provide this level of care. But a response and action within 24 hours seems like a more than reasonable expectation, don't you think?
Here's the bottom line: Steam is not the only game in town anymore. Many other digital distribution platforms are emerging, and many with similar sets of features. Customer service is, and will become even more, a big differentiator for companies like yours. That being said, even without the competition, customer service should be one of the pillars of every company. I thought Valve had already figured this out. Turns out I just hadn't had the need to actually contact Steam Customer Service before now to find out that that is clearly not the case.
Either way, all of the fierce loyalty that I have developed for Steam over 8 years has been 100% destroyed in one incident (and it seems from the forums that I am not the only one). It is sad, really, that a company that is so focused on community would disappoint its most fervent supporters, or any of its supporters, when they need them the most.
As I said before, I thought you should know of my experience.
Thank you,
Lorin Baumgarten
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Comment by LordX on November 10, 2012 at 2:54pm -
Hope it gets through to them Lorin. I love Steam, but what they have provided to you to help you out is just not the right kind of Customer Service at all =/
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Comment by Joe Arnone on November 10, 2012 at 3:20pm -
Its actually a little shocking that its Valve your dealing with :-O
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Comment by Talis12 on November 10, 2012 at 3:39pm -
I've had to deal with Steams customer service 2 years or so back. I pre-ordered MoH and the game sucked so bad i wanted a refund and got it within a day. It's sad that your account got hacked and you have poor experience within them so far. It seems to be a real up and down situation with their customer service. Hope you get it sorted Lorin.
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Comment by Thor the Mighty on November 10, 2012 at 4:28pm -
I remember when Linus Sebastian ( NCIX guy) got his youtube account hacked. And his channel has over 200K subscribers. Still it took him a long time for customer service to even contact him back and even longer to resolve his issue. Steam has a massive community and their customer service is dealing with support requests as they receive them. Gabe is too busy with other things to give a fuck.
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Comment by Lorin Baumgarten on November 10, 2012 at 4:49pm -
Yeah - that we're too big to deal with all these issues is just a load of crap. as stated in my letter, Google and Amazon seem to be able to provide customer service...and they are way bigger than Valve.
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Comment by Thor the Mighty on November 10, 2012 at 5:04pm
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Well that probably means that they also have a way bigger customer service than Valve.
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Comment by Equinoxe on November 10, 2012 at 5:20pm -
Size of a company should be irrelevant. More customers just means that your customer support staff has to be bigger. Complaints about a hacked account should be dealt with within hours. This whole story makes me quite uneasy, given the dozends of games in my Steam library.
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Comment by martin_mayhem on November 10, 2012 at 7:20pm -
I really scary thing with PC games nowadays is that when you buy a box-copy from any retailer, I imagine that most people install the game via steam using the CD-key from the box. That CD-key will then be associated with your steam account and if this problem with hackers occurs, they will take that box-copy-key from you. Also a lot of retailed games often requires steam access which make this inevitable.
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Comment by Selcinorhc on November 10, 2012 at 7:25pm -
Sorry to hear you're going through this. Looking forward to seeing what sort of reply you get, if any.
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Comment by RandyMarshBEER on November 10, 2012 at 9:44pm -
try to sue them...oh wait, they made sure you cant do that by not giving you access to your account unless you agreed not to.
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