Well, folks, it’s been a month! Obviously the Ongoing Shirt Debacle and the New York Trip and the Fandom Acquisition have been taking up a lot of my time lately so I haven’t had much of a breather to sit down and update the Fireside Chat but, well, here you go.
To give you a timeline on the shirt stuff, we launched the new shirts in late July. By early August it was clear that something majorly wrong had occurred and we’d need to fix it. For some reason our store partners promised everyone replacements that would ship in mid-August and opened up orders again. Those replacements have not shipped yet, and people who ordered in the second wave started getting shirts that were screwed up in an entirely different way. I’m usually a pretty levelheaded guy but at this point my emails to our store partners started taking on a pretty frank tone of “what the fuck is going on over there, have you all forgotten how to make shirts????”
Wow, what a fuckup!
Anyway, if you missed the news, please do email our store partners at support@giantbombstores.zendesk.com and email me at support@giantbomb.com and I can remake your store code.
But that’s not what I wanted to talk to you all about today. I wanted to talk about support and support tickets. (very smooth segue.) Most of you probably know that I have been running the support email address for Giant Bomb for most of the last nine years. (I think Ryan would be answering them before that but it also might’ve been an intern back in the intern days?) Ever since the days I was writing stuff for GameFAQs I always enjoyed the simplicity of one-on-one communication with people who were interested in what I was doing, so I’ve generally had a good time figuring out people’s problems and trying to solve them, and there have been plenty of those over the years.
Technologically (and very roughly) speaking, the site has evolved from a startup-ish “move fast and break things” attitude in the early days to a more sound base of fundamental engineering that we enjoy today. There are good and bad aspects to both approaches, of course; back in the day I could run over to Dave or Will and see if they could fix a bug quickly and they’d usually be able to deliver. The downside of that was that things would not always be tested thoroughly and might cause more problems; if you’ve been around long enough you’ll probably remember the Hype Meter crashing chat during E3 one year. (Not Dave or Will’s fault!) But overall the site is generally more stable and less buggy now than it was before we merged our codebase between GameSpot, Giant Bomb, and ComicVine a few years back, which in turn leads to fewer support tickets for me to deal with.
That said, it was always something I kind of enjoyed doing (aside from the hundreds of tickets that would pour in every sale when I had to cancel store codes and refund people down to the sale price, which is a whole other story), so I was pretty mad at the suggestion a few years back that we start outsourcing our support tickets to a third party company. I like being hands-on with support and I think it’s important that people who are paying money to keep this dumb website going get, if not “concierge treatment” exactly, then at least something a bit more personal than what you might get if you email your internet provider or whatever. I had what could fairly accurately be described as a screaming match with my supervisor at the time over the notion, especially after the guy who was shifting CBS to external support told me - to my face! - that he had let go of the CNET support people after shifting our support tickets to the third-party company. That really made me feel like it was a great idea!
That turned into a conversation about where my time was best allocated; should I be spending more time on things that would reach thousands of Giant Bombers like our newsletter (which I need to write one of these about) versus trying to solve problems one on one with people via support channels. I thought at the time that a balance could be struck, and that I would have preferred to keep tickets in my purview, but alas, CBS decided to proceed with outsourcing. I was still involved in the ticketing process as there’s plenty of stuff that has to be escalated to me anyway, but most of the day to day password reset/name change kind of stuff was handled with macro responses. Worst of all, I couldn’t even see the tickets as they came in; I had no access to the raw emails but would have to wait until something was escalated to see them at all. I’m not a controlling person in general but it was pretty odd to all of a sudden not be able to see what was coming in; I’ve grown to trust our support team more over the years but obviously there’s a fair amount of oddball stuff going on on this website and I wasn’t sure if the support team would close tickets out or escalate them to me appropriately if they weren’t sure what part of the site they were referring to.
Anyway, a couple of years ago we switched to a new ticketing system (Zendesk) and I finally had access to the raw tickets as they come in. Most of the emails we get to support are pretty simple (password resets and username changes, as mentioned above), but some are a bit more complicated, and since MOST of the other people at CBS were getting tickets escalated to them in JIRA, I was working in a bit of a different mode where I could see the raw tickets and whether they were getting closed or sent to the spam folder or whatnot. When I did, I started seeing an odd number of tickets that were being “escalated to staff for review” but which were just being sent to the “closed” folder in Zendesk, meaning that I never saw them and thus never had the chance to respond to them. That led to me having to ask the agents to basically never close something outside of obvious spam, but even so I had to get our Zendesk engineer to bake me a new view of all tickets that had been “closed” so I could double-check them and see if they were something I should’ve responded to. So if you ever had something “escalated for review” and never got a response from me, it probably never reached me at all! Frustrating!
I feel a lot better about having access to the raw tickets obviously but now I basically have to check my incoming ticket folder as well as a Suspended folder (mostly spam but sometimes now) and a Deleted folder (in case an agent marked something as spam but it wasn’t) and a Closed ticket view (in case an agent responds with a macro to close out a ticket that I could actually help with). Obviously that’s a bit more complicated than when all the tickets just came straight to me without any intermediaries, but it’s still mostly worth it, especially when someone wants the sale price on a full-price Yearly Premium renewal. The agents can access our Shopify instance and delete the store codes before sending those tickets along to me which makes it a lot easier for me to just process a refund.
So here we are! I have no idea if any of the above will continue into the Fandom era of Giant Bomb. They might have their own ticketing/support system that they want us to use! I might wind up having the same arguments that I had a few years ago about all this! I really hope not. There is enough ins and outs of Giant Bomb between the wiki, the forums, the Discord, video players, downloads, RSS feeds, etc etc etc that it’d be difficult for a new team to come on board and work as effectively as the system we have right now, but if that does happen we’ll deal with it.
Anyway, I gotta run! I am…behind on tickets. It’s been a tough couple of weeks between New York and the new onboarding stuff for Fandom, but I’ll try to clear out what I have this weekend. As always if you don’t get a prompt reply to a support ticket, feel free to reach out via PM or on Twitter and I’ll try to track it down.
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