Valve Receives an F in Customer Service

Valve holds a tight grip on the PC game market, but that doesn't mean the company's customer service follows suit. In fact, the Better Business Bureau graded the company with an F because of its customer service.

According to the BBB page on Valve, the company has failed to respond to 503 of 717 total complaints. In addition, the BBB highlights Valve's inability "to resolve underlying cause(s) of a pattern of complaints."

In a response to Kotaku, Erik Johnson, one of Valve's business development authorities, pointed out other avenues of customer feedback and how they hold more importance than the BBB.

"The BBB is a far less useful proxy for customer issues than Reddit," he said. "We don't use them for much. They don't provide us as useful of data as customers emailing us, posting on Reddit, posting on Twitter, and so on."

Nevertheless, Johnson agrees that Valve's customer service has to make some noticeable improvements.

The more important thing is that we don't feel like our customer service support is where it needs to be right now. We think customers are right. When they say our support's bad, our initial reaction isn't to say, 'No, it's actually good. Look at all of this.' It's to say that, no, they're probably right, because they usually are when it comes to this kind of thing. We hear those complaints, and that's gonna be a big focus for us throughout the year. We have a lot of work to do there. We have to do better.

Clearly Valve recognizes its customer service issues. Now it's a matter of whether or not the company takes meaningful steps to correct those issues.

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