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Customer Service 101
Tips on getting your email read and responded to quickly by Simutronics
Read the documentation first
Between the official site and player
websites, there is a ton of information out there. It may already answer
your question, so that you might not need to send email at all!
Keep your letter under 250 words
Keeping your letter short will speed the time that it takes for
a customer service representative to read and respond to your letter.
A long letter may be good in terms of thoroughness, but it will
take much longer for our representative to read it, plus you run
the risk that they may respond to the wrong part of your letter!
Include only one subject or idea per letter
We receive hundreds of emails each day. To help us in sorting through
them so that they can be answered quickly, we use some filters in
our software that check for certain keywords in your letter to make
sure that it gets routed to the correct person in our customer service
department. The best way to get your email sorted into the right
area for quickest handling, is to have one letter for each question.
That way, your letter will probably go straight to the correct box,
and get responded to as quickly as possible. If you include 40 different
items in one letter, it will take some time to wade through all
of the items, determine who is responsible for those items, and
then route the letter to them. This could result in our response
to you being delayed, or in some of your questions remaining unanswered.
Make sure to include your play.net account name, the game you're
referring to, and your character name
Simutronics runs several different games that have many many thousands
of accounts, customers, and characters. But you would be amazed
how often we get letters that say things like, "Please sign
me up for premium so I can go to that merchant tonight", but
include absolutely no other information (like which game is being
talked about, or what the customer's account name is!). We do have
some ways of searching through our database to try and learn your
account name from the "From" address on your email, but
if you have multiple accounts or have recently changed your ISP
or email address, or are writing to us from a friend's email address,
we might guess wrong entirely. To ensure that we deal with the right
account or character on the first try, please tell us exactly which
account that you are referring to (even if you only have one!),
which game you play, and what your character's name is.
Make sure that your email address is current
Make sure the email account you supplied us is current. You can check this in
the "My Account" area of the
site, under "Email Address".
Also, if you use AOL, please make sure that your AOL account is set up to receive
email from our address. Otherwise when we try writing to you we'll get our reply
bounced back with a message like, "This AOL user is not accepting emails
from your domain name!"
Include your previous letters
When having an email conversation, it is helpful to know what has
already been discussed. You may have gotten lucky and have access
to email software which automatically quotes the letter that you're
responding to, but some email software packages don't, such as the
one on AOL. So if your program doesn't include the text of the last
message when you reply to a letter, use the Forward function instead,
which will always include the original text. That way, the person
getting your letter can easily review the previous correspondence,
rather than having to re-research anything.
Be polite
We realize that if you're taking the time to write to us, it may
be about something that went wrong in the game or with your character.
We do care about your feelings. But please, if you're feeling angry
when you're writing the letter, we would like to remind you that
we are human too. The best way to get your message heard is to be
polite, courteous, and constructive. Just like when posting in the
boards, if you're angry when you start writing a letter or post,
stop yourself, take a deep breath and count to 10. We will do our
best to respond to your letter as quickly as possible, but if your
letter is telling us that our fathers were hamsters and our mothers
smelled of elderberries (or worse), we may have to get up and take
a walk around the block to calm down, which means that our response
to you may not be as quick as it could be!
Be constructive, include suggestions
If you see a system design that you don't like, it is much more
helpful to us if you can provide an idea as to how it could be improved,
rather than just saying, "I don't like this." The world
isn't perfect, and we are striving at all times to make it better.
We do read all of the suggestions that come in though, and some
of the best suggestions on improvement have either come directly
from players, or were sparked by something that a player said that
took us off on another tack.
When making a suggestion, consider the forums
first
The best place to put ideas about changes is in our forums,
where other players have the opportunity to comment and discuss the ideas that
you propose, and all of our staff members have equal access to the information.
If you send a suggestion to customer service, we'll try to forward it to the
most appropriate destination, but it might have a better chance of being seen
if it's posted in the message boards instead.
Pros and Cons of including a log file
Sometimes it is helpful to include log files….but it's overkill to send
an entire 8 hours or thousands of lines of information from the time that
you were last logged in. If it's necessary to send a log file, please try
to cut out all of the stuff that isn't important, and send in only the part
that has to do with your letter! And remember, while logs can be useful, we
can't always take them as gospel since they are very prone to modifications.
Next time you come to SimuCon, ask some of our customer
service representatives for their "war stories"...for example, the
time that four different customers sent in log files about the same incident,
but not one log file matched any of the others!
Helpful list of Customer service email addresses
gs4feedback@simutronics.com - GemStone IV Feedback
custserv@simutronics.com - Customer
Service Supervisor
lockout@simutronics.com - Lockout Department
techhelp@simutronics.com - Technical Help Department
access@simutronics.com - Access Department
billing@simutronics.com - Billing Department
quests@simutronics.com - Paid Quests/Events Department
restore@simutronics.com - Paid Character Restorals
transfer@simutronics.com - Character Transfer Department
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