I am not a fan of services that do not offer the ability to speak to an actual human when you have an issue while using their platform. Instagram is one such service. I don’t have an Instagram account, and I never will, but my sister has, and her account got hacked a year or so ago.
Because I’m the tech savvy one in the family, she naturally approached me to ask if I would help to recover her Instagram account. I agreed to do so because in my mind I thought it would be a straight forward process, seeing that Instagram has over a billion monthly active users.
The other deciding factor was the fact that the hacker was actually harassing her on WhatsApp (another awful service). So off I went to the Instagram support site to recover my sister’s account, only to find a serious lack of support when I got there.
For a global company with billions of users, their so called support service is shockingly bad. The support site just kept taking me round in a loop, no matter what I clicked on, I always ended up back on the first initial support page. No help whatsoever. There wasn’t an option to call anyone, or even chat to someone over the internet, nothing.
The only reason I was able to recover the account was because the hacker was stupid enough to send my sister a photo of the recovery codes on WhatsApp, while he was taunting her about the account. Dick!
I have a bakery up the road from me, which at a guess must serve about a hundred or so customers a day. They have a website, a phone number, a email address, or I could just walk in if I ever had an issue with anything. Yet, a global company like Instagram, with over a billion monthly suckers, has nothing like this. Nothing.
Which brings me on to another platform whose support service is about as good as Instagram’s, Steam.
You May or May Not Exist on This Server
Recently, I tried to create an account with Steam, the video game digital distribution service by Valve, only to find myself in an infinite support loop of unhelpfulness, much like Instagram’s. Also like Instagram, you absolutely can not speak to an actual human, who, if I could, would probably fix my issue in less than a minute.
Let me walk you through my Steam experience, and see if you can spot the massive issue with their so called support site.
First things first, I navigate to Steam’s website, and I click on the ‘Create an Account’ button:
I am then taken to the ‘Create Your Account’ page, where I enter my email address, country of residence, satisfy the reCaptcha security check, read the subscriber agreement terms, and confirm that I am over 13 years of age:
I then get told that I need to verify my email address to complete my account setup. There is nothing unusual about this, lots of platforms ask you to verify your email address:
Jumping over to my email client of choice, I open the email from Steam and click on the ‘Verify My Email Address’ link within the email:
Once I click on the link, I am then navigated back to the Steam website where there is a screen telling me that my email address has been successfully verified, and that I can safely close this window:
This is where everything starts to fall apart. Once I close the ‘Email Verified’ screen and return to the inital account setup screen, I am greeted with a message that states that my email address is already accociated with another steam account:
I really can not understand this, as I have never played games on Steam, ever, so how my email address is already associated with a Steam account is beyond me.
What is even more baffling (and frustrating), is that if I click on the ‘Recover my account’ link, I am taken to a page where it asks me to enter my email address, but when I do, it tells me that it is unable to find such an email address:
So how can my email address be linked to a existing Steam account, yet, when I search for it, it can not be found? So which one is it? Either my email address exists in your system, or it doesn’t. It can not be both!
Have you any idea how stupid this makes you look?
Like I mentioned above, I am pretty sure this could all be rectified in less than a minute if I could just speak to an actual human, but Steam won’t let you do that.
From what I can see, after searching for hours for a solution to this, is that Steam will only let you open a support ticket only if you are logged into your account. So what do you do if you can not log in, or do not have an account? It is utter madness.
I did manage to find a support email address through my hours of seaching, so as a long shot, I thought I would reach out in the hope that somebody might answer. Who am I kidding, I was simply sent an automated response which basically placed me back into the infinite loop of support unhelpfulness.
But then this got me thinking. Why would I ever want to open an account with a company that makes it this difficult to contact them when you are having an issue with their service or platform.
Quite frankly, I wouldn’t.