Weve been hearing from users for several years about the need for us to keep working on improving Steam Support. As always, our goal with Steam is to be continuously improving and creating better user experiences across the board.
We hope that most of you never need to contact support because your experience with Steam is issue free to begin with. However, we know that there are times when something just goes wrong and when you need to get help from an actual person. Improving Steam Support to make that experience as smooth as possible has been a big focus for us over the last couple years. We overhauled our support site, weve built better integrated tools, we no longer require a separate account to contact support, and weve increased our support staffing. Weve also fixed as many bugs as possible and have provided new self-service options where they make sense. Today we are launching our Steam Support Stats page and seeking to improve transparency around users experiences getting support from us. We believe that increasing transparency will both help users understand how we are doing and will help make sure we keep improving over time.
HELP REQUESTS AND BACKLOG
The first thing youll see on our stats page is a graph of the volume of submitted help requests that are waiting for a response alongside a graph of the backlog of waiting requests that our support staff has yet to respond to over time. As of today you can see that we receive somewhere around 75,000 help requests per day. We currently end up with around 8,000 requests waiting for responses at most times. Weve worked hard to expand our staffing and to improve our support processes to get to this point. You can see on our graph that earlier this year we had more than 50,000 requests as our backlog which meant that we had nearly a full day worth of requests waiting for answers at any given point in time. Our goal going forward is to keep the backlog of requests shrinking and to be able to respond to all requests as quickly as possible.
HELP REQUEST CATEGORIES AND RESPONSE TIMES
75,000 requests each day is still a big number. Most of these requests are resolved within a few hours. Weve broken down some of the categories of request types we receive as well as their typical wait times below the graph on the stats page. These typical wait time numbers shown tell you the timeframe that 90% or more of the requests submitted receive a response. Were still working on further improving wait times and also quality of responses in all categories.
A large number of our help requests are actually related to our refund policy. Were proud to be able to offer users refunds when appropriate. We think our refund policy is good for users and good for the platform and were happy that we are able to respond to more than 90% of refund requests in just a few hours.
The next largest category of support issues is Account Security & Recovery requests. These requests include users who have simply forgotten their password all the way through users who have been phished or hijacked by someone targeting their account. Weve been working to improve self-service for some account recovery cases and weve also continued to push forward adoption of security features like Steam Guard and the Steam Mobile Authenticator. The cases we still receive requests for can be more complicated to handle and wait times can sometimes be a little longer as a result. However, were happy to say that weve reduced wait times on these requests from once being over a week in many cases to now under 24 hours for more than 98% of requests.
ONGOING IMPROVEMENT
We hope youll find the new support stats page interesting and that youll keep letting us know what your experiences with Steam Support are. We know that reducing wait times and backlogs is not enough on its own, and were also committed to continuing to improve the quality of each interaction. Weve been continuously investing in staffing, training, and process improvements to that end and while we believe weve made progress we know there is always more work to be done. Let us know how we are doing.
