Discord - Incredibly Versatile and Interesting Platform - Comically Pathetic Customer Support

It has been over a week since our server owner's account was mistakenly disabled, with no reason given to them and no follow-up communication from Discord Support, let alone responses to their support tickets. They created one to deal with the unwarranted and unexplained account ban, and one to transfer ownership of the server to me so that we can maintain our 1500+ person server while things get sorted out.

Knowing our server owner isn't particularly great with technology and has a low threshold for frustration / customer service stupidity I created a support ticket myself within a day or so of it happening, This was six and a half days ago.

Clyde the Discord Support Bot replied fairly quickly with a list of information required. I collected all the information and provided it to the server owner for their ticket. Having read support articles and forum posts identifying that the transfer request would most likely need to be from the server owner (unless they had been inactive for 30 days) I only provided the other support request ticket number and a few pieces of key identifying information on mine, so that the tickets could be linked and dealt with as the single issue they are.

A couple of days pass.

HRonaldH reaches out and responds to my ticket. He is pleasant and well written. I have no real complaints with RonaldH (the only actually person I've been able to speak with at Discord Support), RonaldH correctly identifies that on my support ticket I had not provided all of the information required for a server transfer request. I check to make sure that I had indeed explained why in my previous messages in the thread. Yep. Ok no problem, I had assembled all the info for the server owner to attach anyways, so I copy and paste it into my support ticket and send it.

It has been about 18 minutes since I received the message from RonaldH when I send my reply.

13.5 hours pass

RonaldH responds with another polite message that checks most of the boxes for decent customer service, letting me know that he will be escalating the ticket to a team member for processing, apologizing for the inconvenience, and letting me know that he will keep me updated on the support thread as soon as he hears back.

That was four days ago. I have sent a couple of follow-up messages in the thread since requesting an update, even if it's as simple as 'We're working on it' or 'Our team is very busy right now but will get to your request when we are able'. No response.

I really like Discord, I do. It's grown on me a ton as I've used it, and the versatility and feature set it offers means that it can be the perfect solution for all kinds of communities looking to provide a virtual space and resources (either as an extension of a physical one, or as an alternative). I've been very vocal about these things whenever I get the opportunity because I like to share neat solutions when I find them to people who I think would benefit.

I guess this is just a long-winded venting post to say that it really bums me out to have such a positive experience take such a hard turn for no obvious or apparent reason. Responding to customer support requests in a timely manner is one of the most basic and fundamental things you can do. I can tell that's understood at some level or Clyde the Discord Support Bot wouldn't exist. Chatbots are a great way to ensure that the first response is quick and provide a list of relevant info to speed the rest of the conversation along.

I just don't understand it. Why sabotage your own company while seemingly trying to grow? It just doesn't make sense. I realize I'm unlikely to get any sort of explanation here either, but it is what it is. I hope that this experience has been an anomaly rather than the standard, and I hope that Discord continues to grow and develop and learn from its mistakes.

Thanks for reading

dhr2

October 21, 2021 15:41

I'm really not impressed either. For a full month now I've been dealing with a really stupid user interface bug where the server list becomes unusably laggy, I made lots of support forum posts about it and used the issue report form and messaged discord on twitter, it's still broken.

I can't trust discord to handle it any better if a more serious issue arises like the one you're dealing with, so I'm going to cancel my nitro now.

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