Valve has shared some new insight into the speed with which it handles Steam support requests, even launching a new tracker to let you see how things are going.
A new blog post from Valve discusses the ongoing efforts to improve Steam's support operations. And while it didn't provide much new information about specifically how it continues to evolve its customer support, it does highlight just how big the task is. Valve currently sees an average of about 75,000 help requests every day, and recently it's averaged just under 10,000 requests per day that were left awaiting a response. That's a big decline from the 50,000-plus that fell in that category in January and February.
"Our goal going forward is to keep the backlog of requests shrinking and to be able to respond to all requests as quickly as possible," Valve explained.
Coinciding with this blog post, Valve has launched a stats page for support requests. This shows both the number of submitted requests on any given day and the number that are waiting for a response from Valve.
The page also breaks requests down into specific categories. This reveals how many refund requests or account security questions have been submitted over the past 24 hours, along with the typical response time. As of this writing, the last day has seen just over 48,000 refund requests, which were typically answered in 1.35 to 1.99 hours.
Support is just one area of Steam that Valve has worked to overhaul in recent years. As with all online stores, discoverability is major problem due to the massive number of games released on it. A store redesign launched late last year, though, like all of Steam, it remains a work-in-progress.