Steam support is now displaying the typical wait time for different types of tickets on its support page.
Steam support is slow. That’s a compliant that anyone who uses Steam has heard. Apparently Valve has heard it as well, as the company has begun to offer much more information and transparency about the support ticket system, how many people are using it, and what the typical wait times are.
The new service was announced in a Steam community post yesterday. The new Steam Support Stats Page is now live, and Valve says that it is “seeking to improve transparency around users’ experiences getting support from us.”
Perusing the stats page yields some interesting info. Steam support apparently receives between 50,000 and 100,000 support requests daily, broken down into four categories. Here’s what the site says has come in over the last 24 hours as of this writing:
- Refund requests: 48,258
- Account Security & Recovery: 12,246
- Game & Steam Technical Support: 2,163
- Purchase & Billing Support: 1,979
When those tickets come in, the time required to address them can vary widely. Refund requests can take anywhere from 1.35 to 1.99 hours, but the other types of tickets have a lot more variance. Account Security and Recovery requests can take anywhere from 2.43 hours to 10.84 hours. The wait for Game and Steam Technical Support can be as brief as 1.65 hours or as long as 15.76 hours. The widest variance, though, comes from Purchase and Billing Support, which can run from 2.52 hours to 1.85 days.
Obviously, Valve wants to improve those times as much as it can, and says that its “goal going forward is to keep the backlog of requests shrinking and to be able to respond to all requests as quickly as possible.” The company also says that it has “been continuously investing in staffing, training, and process improvements to that end and while we believe we’ve made progress we know there is always more work to be done.”
