I feel a little weird jumpstarting this blog again with a rant, but at least something’s going on, right? Right.
Last night, I emailed Xbox Support with a question about my account – namely, how to downgrade from Xbox LIVE Gold to Silver because I’m poor, but is that labeled clearly anywhere? No, of course not. Why give people the option to stop giving you money? I see what you did there, Xbox.
When I checked my email today, I got an obvious form letter personalized by someone called Joyce. (The name is important, because it makes the following even worse.) The form letter didn’t bug me. Their roundabout answer with a simple link to billing online didn’t bother me (even though I wanted my credit card completely out of their system). Oh, no. This is what bothered me:
Hello Chantaal,
Thank you for using XBOX Customer Support online! I am Joyce and I will be helping you today with this issue.
As I understand, when your son tries to sign in to Xbox LIVE, [redacted]
I know how disappointing it is when your son cannot enjoy the Xbox Live service due to this matter.
Really, Xbox? REALLY?
For the record, I said nothing about having a son (because I don’t) or about this being a boyfriend’s account (cause he has his own). I simply put in a request about my account, and I get a form letter assuming I’m doing this for my son. When I mentioned this on twitter, I got a friend saying she’d gotten the exact same assumption in her responses. I know why Xbox would make the assumption, but I can’t imagine why they’d go ahead and say it so blatantly in their response when no indicators were given. It’s horrible PR.
I would love to cancel my account outright, but I kind of like not losing all my achievement points. No more money for you, Xbox LIVE.
Heh, achievement points > indignation, every time.
LOL yeah, that’s exactly the case.
Btw, the Twitter profile you link to from your other site does not exist.
Right! Thanks for the reminder, I’ve been meaning to change that, I’ve just been, you know, lazy.
Very one sided. Could we at least see the e-mail you sent them to verify there was nothing that may have mislead them to think it wasn’t for you?
“Very one-sided”?
Dude, what a dick you are.
Wow, Paul. You come of as a very privileged, misogynistic white male jerk. Have you ever been assumed to be a woman for something you have done? Or a kid… or to have a daughter and have your actions be construed as being taken on her behalf? No? Then obviously your narrow view of the world is the only one.
“Very one sided”? She’s already said that there was no mention of a son or boyfriend, what else are you looking for here?
Lemme guess, you work for Xbox?
I suspect there’s a good chance that they weren’t making assumptions about you at all, but rather copied and pasted from a letter they’d sent someone about a similar issue previously … and forgot to modify.
Possibly but MS is supposed to be better about things like that. They do use canned responses but they are also supposed to catch whether or not they are replying to a male or female customer.
Then again, MS has been outsourcing a lot of what it does to China and India so this? This doesn’t surprise me in the least anymore.
http://myfaultimfemale.wordpress.com/
Your blog entry 100% belongs there.
Hi there!
I’m Stephen Toulouse, Director of Policy and Enforcement for the Xbox LIVE service.
I’m familiar with that letter and it’s not used for account cancellation (note the letter is in the “can’t connect to Xbox LIVE” troubleshooting catagory from its text.)
I can almost guarentee it was a simple mistake on which email was sent out, we certainly do not assume female customers are calling in for their sons! In addition to being a silly assumption, given how large the population of female customers of the Xbox LIVE service we’d have a lot more people mad at us for making it if it was an actual policy!
Please feel free to email me and we’ll look into what happened.
S.
http://twitter.com/stepto
That’s kind of messed up. On a positive note, you should be able to cancel the auto-renewal of your XBL Gold Membership by visiting the “My Account” section on xbox.com ( https://live.xbox.com/en-US/accounts/MyAccount.aspx should take you directly there)
(Arrived here via The Consumerist)
MS uses vendors and contractors (outsourcing) to do a lot of this type of work. These folks only work 12 months and then are let go. They make a lot of mistakes in their first few months. It’s entirely possible you got someone else’s response especially if it was somewhat generic (most are).
MS also offshores a lot of work and then diverts it back to the vendors and contractors to be communicated back to the customers (and hiding what they are doing) causing more confusion.
Not making excuses here. If anything, I’m disgusted with MS’s behavior. Just pointing out how it is.
[...] Look no further. Chantaal describes a customer service letter that was sent to her by Microsoft that assumed she was writing about an issue her nonexistent son was having, instead of making the correct inference that she was the gamer in question: Hello Chantaal, [...]
The same thing happened to me. The weird thing is, I *do* have a son who also has an Xbox LIVE account, but my email didn’t mention it since my question had nothing to do with him. At the time I thought Microsoft must be outsourcing support jobs to Psi Corps; otherwise how could they know so much about my family? Odder still were the 3 full paragraphs of boilerplate response that hat had absolutely nothing to do with the question I asked. Way to go, Microsoft! ;P
Wtf?? Wow.
I should send them a test message just to see if they’ll do this to me too.
For Xbox support you should use http://twitter.com/xboxsupport. They reply to every tweet and have won awards for best support service.
Hahaha, that is so typical. This isn’t really discrimination or anything, it’s just a lazy mistake and a single individual error made by an individual, it’s not MS’s company policy to assume that all women are mothers.
They’re probably right 98% of the time whenever a woman calls anyway.
It’s not newsworthy before they assume that all black people are calling to order chicken
“…it’s not MS’s company policy to assume that all women are mothers.
They’re probably right 98% of the time whenever a woman calls anyway.”
No. They are probably not right 98% of the time. The majority of women I know that game don’t currently have children. And even if they do, they have their own accounts separate from their kids.
And not only that, but what if it’s my -daughter- playing the Xbox. Is that so hard to believe?
Assumptions and made up statistics are a bad way to go about defending something that was pretty obviously either a) a proofreading error or (and just as likely) b) a bad assumption on the sender’s part.
I’ve had a similar thing happen to me when I contacted EA Support about some game I had issues with (can’t remember which game). I explained the problems, asked my questions, made sure not to sound like a dick, and emailed away.
First I had the automated reply and then the first “real” one (from “Josh” or something), who replied to something completely different and not my questions. A bit puzzled, I figured that something must have gone wrong somewhere and emailed them again. I received a new reply from “Mary” this time. I hoped Mary would know her stuff, but alas, she replied to a new set of questions that I had never asked.
Then I nerd raged and the whole “don’t be a dick” thing went out the window. I wrote an angry email and in it I cursed EA Support to the back of beyond. This time I actually received a reply from what appearantly was a real human being, who apologized for the previous “errors” and helped me with my issues.
My theory is that at least part of EA Support is manned by bots who pick up on key words in emails they receive and then send out replies that has been prepared in advance. When things don’t work out like they should, an actual person has to step in and set things straight.