Today I have the privilege to speak on a subject near and dear to my heart: gaming.
As an avid online gamer and consumer I know firsthand just how frustrating it can be to encounter an issue that disrupts your gaming experience. That’s a big part of the reason I’ve enjoyed helping clients like Activision and Kabam implement Service Cloud with Knowledge to provide the best possible support experience for their players.
With the F2P (“free-to-play”) and micro-transaction models becoming a bigger and bigger part of the gaming industry, player retention, and by extension player support, is more critical than ever.
Being thoroughly immersed in both the Service Cloud and Gaming worlds, I’d like to offer my thoughts on three “must dos” when supporting players.
- In-game Support
An integrated and streamlined support experience keeps players in the game and makes the process of getting help much less painful. Force.com Sites and the Salesforce APIs make it incredibly easy to build and maintain support sites that are seamlessly integrated with your game, mobile or otherwise. In-game support also means you can present highly relevant help content since you know the exact context from which the player is coming. The above example is a mobile knowledge base integrated with Mobage games on iOS and Android.
- Know your players
Context is everything and in the social age players/consumers expect you to know who they are and respond accordingly. This may require integration to other billing and/or eCommerce systems (to utilize data such as revenue per user) but I can’t stress how important and useful this is for player retention. The more you know about your customers the better you can support them when they do have issues. Providing premium support options (like live chat) for your top players also becomes possible, but with the right integrations in place every player will be wowed by your support team.
- Knowledge is Power
The takeaways?
In short, all games will have issues. Helping your customers get support quickly, and responding to these issues accurately, is the key to turning a frustrated player into a potential social evangelist. (Look for another post on how to be “Flawsome” soon!) With all the right info and tools at your team’s fingertips they can respond and move on to the next case with confidence. Each of the recommendations above does take time and resources to execute well, but each will also more than pay for itself by increasing customer satisfaction with support, helping you avoid potential PR nightmares and, more importantly, strengthening your brand. Put differently – in today’s “free-to-play” world, if you don’t invest in your support experience, you’ll quickly realize you’re out of lives, your health is at zero, and it’s game over!
