Customer Service is TERRIBLE

Of all the MMORPG's I have played(F2P and P2P), I have never experienced customer service this terrible. In my career, if a paying client had to wait 2 weeks for something to be resolved(which it still has not been), we would lose their business and I would surely be fired for neglect.

If I had not stupidly purchased the 60 day time card, I would end my sub ASAP and never look back. However, I put faith in this game and Square Enix to give me a good return on that 60 day investment. I was also planning on purchasing the Stormblood expansion after I leveled my character up enough to begin that story line. Definitely not happening now.

I don't even care if you all ever resolve my issue. I'm done. This type of customer service in the massive service industry today is embarrassing, and Square Enix should be embarrassed.

I will be reporting this to the Better Business Bureau. Hopefully one day you all will make changes, but knowing squenix, that is very doubtful.

You should probably mention said issue in a post, so we can direct you to the proper area to put said issue.

That name though...both of them lol.
What was the problem though?
Sometimes us players can help you.

What was the problem exactly? And why is it terrible. No one can help you if you don't point out the issue.

Unfortunately, Square Enix is infamous for having the absolute worst customer service. Have a quick look at /r/ffxiv on reddit, you'll see dozens of stories about it :( Everyone seems to have to jump through hoops on fire to get anything done.

The general consensus is do not rely on email or live online chat, the only way to get any help is by phone. Which sucks for those of us out of the country.

Good luck

Thank you for liking my names.

The issue was my main not receiving the Phial of Fantasia veteran reward while both my alts did. I have had to recreate my ticket/issue twice. I've used ingame support and called customer service(which they were surprised at the time it was taking to resolve the issue).

I'm not posting this to get it resolved quicker or at all. I don't care anymore. I just want to publicly make known this customer service issue, which a quick google search can show you how terrible they are in general, so hopefully they can get their act together and other players can receive better service from now on.

Especially from a subscription based game, it's just mind boggling to me.

Make sure you don't have mail that's blocking from the Fantasia to come in.
(It'll show red if the thing is full.) You can also try and press the Mail button
that tries to find the missing mail again. Names escape me right now lol.
It's on the top corner on the Moogle Mail.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Jybril

Make sure you don't have mail that's blocking from the Fantasia to come in.
(It'll show red if the thing is full.) You can also try and press the Mail button
that tries to find the missing mail again. Names escape me right now lol.
It's on the top corner on the Moogle Mail.

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Yeah I've done all of that. I've been around the ring on this one, it's completely in their hands now. Or I guess somewhere in the squenix office, no one is definitely touching it atm.

Thank you for your help tho!

Quote:

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Originally Posted by THOT

Yeah I've done all of that. I've been around the ring on this one, it's completely in their hands now. Or I guess somewhere in the squenix office, no one is definitely touching it atm.

Thank you for your help tho!

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Are you sure your main hasn't already received the reward?

I respect your passion. I have a hard time getting this worked up about things.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by THOT

Yeah I've done all of that. I've been around the ring on this one, it's completely in their hands now. Or I guess somewhere in the squenix office, no one is definitely touching it atm.

Thank you for your help tho!

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:(
Well, make sure you double check everything I suppose...
but I mean, the Fantasia is $10 so I would not quit the game over something
like this. The Vet rewards are just "Thank you for subbing!" items anyway.
If you like the game a lot, you should let this one slide and keep playing.
Sorry it has happened to you OP. I know this is unrelated but I once had my best friend
buy me the $80 thing of Type-0 for PS4 they bought from SE...I never received it, they made me work around
everything and did NOTHING for me, didn't even contact the mailmen or fix the addresses since it was incorrect.
(Literally, the only thing that was wrong was the state, the address could of easily been found.)
So thanks SE!

It could be worse, but I would not let this get to you that much. Good luck. :eek:

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Valkyrie_Lenneth

Are you sure your main hasn't already received the reward?

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Yes, my guy is the same guy I created day 1. other than the random haircuts and makeup ive given him throughout. i've never used a phial on him nor my alts (they both have theirs in their inventory)

I promise you all i have already done everything in my power.

Don't forget to delete received mail after you've taken things out. Those can also keep you from getting new things I believe.

Thanks everyone for your help. I am not upset nor mad, just very very disappointed. When you pay $15 a month to play a game, that breaks down into roughly $0.50 a day. We are actively paying Square Enix to support the game and the functions within it. When they fail to support an action as simple as sending me a phial (or hell, just move it from one of my alts!) within 2 weeks (14 days x $0.50 per day = $7.00 of my money) it should be called into question publicly. If this was a F2P game I wouldn't give a damn, but it isn't, and should be held to a higher standard.

Elder scrolls online is F2P with an optional sub and cash shop, and their customer service is LIGHTYEARS ahead of FFXIV's. Maybe if more people openly complained like I did it would create a path for better customer service. That is my only intention of this post.

SE has been listed as one of the Greatest customer service support companies since good old ps1 days. Complaining won't help they have to many fanatics to worry. They literally have to be on the brink of bankruptcy before they question their decision making. Best way to play their games is if you have a problem live with it or move on. Support in and out of game for whatever reason can't help.

Your subscription entitles you to play the game at your leisure, but does not entitle you to instantaneous gratification. If there is a bug, Square is free to look into it and take the time needed to understand the whole situation. Most other companies would sooner toss you a free Fantasia than look into it, but what about if the issue happens again? Square ties to focus on what happened to cause the issue before taking action. I would say its a difference in culture. A company like Blizzard would just toss you a freebie and probably do so if it happened again. A company like Square wants to improve your experience by making sure it never happens again, and so needs to collect data to see exactly what happened.

For this and other reasons I've personally found Square to be a more professional company. Its patches tend to have fewer bugs than Blizzard's do. I don't think Blizzard has launched a single patch all of Legion that didn't have some kind of major bug that interfered in gameplay. Sadly SE had a terrible time with Stormblood's launch due largely to DDOS attacks, but discounting them, the game was fairly smooth.

They do have the worse customer service out on in company. They don't replace items lost when there servers disconnect you for no reason. They don't give back leve's you loose from server disconnecting you. See GM replying to forums on EU database but never here offering any answers. I hope one of these days another gaming company buys them out. Maybe then will get good customer service. Out of 5 for customer service I would give them a -5 for a rating. I pay them with my retainers about 30 dollars a month to only be able to play maybe a hour a day with all the disconnects. Thinking giving my money to another company where can play there game and not be disconnected every 15 to 20 minutes then spend 7 minutes trying to login again. The Elder Scrolls Online never had one problem ever being disconnected or lag issues in it and it a F2P MMO.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by hynaku

They do have the worse customer service out on in company. They don't replace items lost when there servers disconnect you for no reason. They don't give back leve's you loose from server disconnecting you. See GM replying to forums on EU database but never here offering any answers. I hope one of these days another gaming company buys them out. Maybe then will get good customer service. Out of 5 for customer service I would give them a -5 for a rating. I pay them with my retainers about 30 dollars a month to only be able to play maybe a hour a day with all the disconnects. Thinking giving my money to another company where can play there game and not be disconnected every 15 to 20 minutes then spend 7 minutes trying to login again. The Elder Scrolls Online never had one problem ever being disconnected or lag issues in it and it a F2P MMO.

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If I had your experience with this game I would have quit immediately.

Idk about emails, but if you call SE up they give you excellent customer service. I´ve had no bad experiences with them and time and time again my issues were resolved in a quick and efficient manner.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Vexander

A company like Square wants to improve your experience by making sure it never happens again, and so needs to collect data to see exactly what happened.

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The correct response would be to give the user the fantasia and then deal with the data and such that likely doesn't involve interacting further with the user. You retain a paying customer, good word-of-mouth about support/the game and still have the opportunity to fix the issue. Just because other companies may placate the customer, it does not mean they're not also looking into the problem. They're not exclusive.

As a question, are you saying you didn't receive the mail at all?

Because with Vet items, the time I had en error, the mail had a potion that I couldn't grab instead of the item it meant to be. Are you sure you maybe just opened it up and didn't grab the item, and is just sitting in the open tab of your inventory?

Also, Nexon's much worse. Their report system doesn't even work, and that's intentional.

Welp, inb4 thread lock....

It's definitely a subpar experience, but it's still not the worst I've seen as far as customer service goes. First time I've ever had an issue with billing though, but after sending in the email to the SE customer support desk about how they wouldn't take my card to pay for Stormblood back in May or early June but still left a debit on it, I never really got a response, which is REALLY unusual for any gaming company given the typical response of "A billing issue? We'll be right on it!". Fortunately I got kinda lucky when the card finally went through....about a day after I ordered it from Amazon instead, which wasn't all that bad since that extra code went to someone who needed it.

The worst customer support I've seen for an MMO though is SWTOR since it dealt with an old account that was not only locked, but attached to an email that no longer existed so there was no way of getting the recovery email. What made it worse was that their customer service was exclusively phone-based--no email, no outside ticket system, just phone--and I didn't have one at the time (yay anxiety problems). I looked around for an email address to what I think was their tech support section, and sent a complaint explaining the problem and stating that I had no access to a phone to contact customer support but I would gladly provide any information they required of the account. Their response was basically "please call this number"....at first I thought these people just don't know how to properly read, but tried not to make much of an ordeal about it and made a new account a couple weeks later. When I realized all the names I like using for games were taken and most likely on the old account, I sent another email explaining the original issue, offered to send whatever information they needed and repeatedly stated in both normal and all-caps that I don't have any access to a phone to call customer support. The response I got was that they knew I had messaged them before about the matter and to call the customer support number.

I learned my lesson when I had this same problem with an NCSOFT account, explaining the problem and circumstances while involving the intent of purchasing something. They solved that problem in maybe an hour....

It kind of irks me that they're not required to respond to inquiries pertaining to cheaters, because it makes it impossible to know whether or not they're even getting or reading the reports.

The one time I did get a chance to directly ask a GM why all these extremely obvious bot farmers weren't getting banned, he suggested that I use the report form on the official website, because the team the in-game reports are sent to lacks the tools needed to investigate cheaters. I decided to humor him and the results were exactly what I expected; that is, the same bots I had already reported several times in the past were still left untouched, and are still at it even as I type this...

I had fairly good experiences with the EU SE support. When I changed my phone and forgot to write down my token's emergency number, it gor resolved in like half hour. When I forgot to update my CC, it got resolved in like 2 days as I needed to send them a picture of my ID, but couldn't during the day, and they don't work in the night. When I had any questions, the live chat was always really helpful.

Maybe the NA support is bad, people who mostly complain about it are from there. Also, people who have good experiences, don't usually write about it and just go back to playing, so what you read on reddit is not really a realistic depiction.

They need to invest into a proper training and more reliable customer service approach. I have had a bad experience in the past too.