Long the bugbear (or outright menace) of many a Steam user, Valve's approach to customer support has long been criticised. The company is making strides to improve its reputation though, and its laid out some of the ways it has improved in a new blog post, which offers some startling statistics. It also rolls out a new support-oriented stats page, which will live permanently on the site and provide ongoing data on how the company is dealing with its support workload.
Some of the stats are fascinating. For example, did you know Valve receives "around" 75,000 help requests a day, and that there's usually "around" 8,000 pending requests at any given point in time? As you'll see in the graph below (or in the blogpost itself), Valve has managed to whittle that pending requests figure down from 50,000 since February, mostly thanks to expanded staffing and improvement of support processes.
At the time of writing, Steam has received 48,268 support requests on Refunds; 12,246 requests on Account Security and Recovery; 2,144 on Game and Steam Technical Support, and 1,989 on Purchase and Billing Support (these are official categories internally at Steam).
Why is Valve publishing this info? Transparency, mainly. "We believe that increasing transparency will both help users understand how we are doing and will help make sure we keep improving over time." The page will operate full time over here.
