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Does your company
track Customer Satisfaction? If it doesn’t, you are missing out on a
very key metric.
One of the most
common arguments we hear against tracking CSAT in the MMO space is
that because of the nature of MMOs (being,
at their heart, games with specific rulesets),
it can be difficult to leave a customer fully satisfied. More than
other industries that provide customer service, those in the MMO
industry tend to have to say “no” more often than their player base
would like. There also seems to be a trend from the customer side,
where bad customer service (or at least the appearance of bad customer service) is to be expected
from the MMO world.
Why then, you ask,
should we track CSAT, if we know out of the gate that the response
will generally tend toward the negative?
Our argument is, how can you know this,
if you have never tracked CSAT in the first place?
CSAT should be considered one of your primary KPIs,
not something you can ignore. After all, customer support’s primary
responsibility is to retain and keep customers coming back. If you
don’t have a clear indicator of the overall satisfaction of your
customer base, how can you determine whether your department is
succeeding in its purpose?
The honest answer is that you can’t.
And if you can’t, how can you justify
your department’s existence?
Sure, you can get indicators from your forums, but this requires that your
customers take an active interest in expressing the love or hate that
they have for your support department. As is often the case in any
industry, customers are far more inclined to go to great pains to
express their displeasure rather than pleasantries. This will skew
the appearance of your success, and if the forums happen to be the
only place where your president or CEO can gather this information,
your department is likely to suffer from it. If you give customers an
exit interview after every CS interaction, for instance (or after
some predetermined random selection process), you give the customer
an avenue to express their feelings about the interaction
immediately, while the experience is fresh in their mind. This way,
you can capture feedback on experiences that were by the book, above
and beyond, as well as those interactions that were below par, and
are not just depending on the flamefest
that are the forums.
After a month of gathering that data, then you can say whether or
not your CSAT is overwhelmingly negative. And if it is, now you have real data you can use to make it better. Identify the
root causes of the negativity, and you now have the power to fix
them, whether it’s a result of players having too high an expectation
from Customer Service, policies that aren’t clear enough, policies
that may be too strict, or maybe inconsistencies within the CS
decision making process.
Don’t be afraid of that negativity, just
make sure everyone is prepared to hear it, and more importantly, is
ready to *do* something about it.
That’s what retention is all about.
Knowing is Half the Battle – Part I
Tier Zero support can
be a customer service department’s best friend in terms of budget and
satisfaction.
Sadly, all too often,
Tier Zero support is a friend neglected and left to whither all alone
out in the cold.
For MMOs, Tier Zero support generally takes shape as
a Knowledge Base. Oftentimes, it takes the shape of a thin FAQ,
usually difficult to find, lacking in robustness, quickly falling out
of date, and eventually ignored by the player-base, like a year old
strategy guide.
As any friend, a
Knowledge Base will only take a bullet for you if you invest time and
effort in it. And like a friend who would take a bullet for you, will
help you suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune (or the
accounting department)
Players want to help themselves. They
don’t inherently enjoy waiting 15 minutes to 2 hours to get an answer
to a question. Most players just want to get back to their game as soon
as possible.
Take a look at your
queues, just for a minute. How many of these questions are from new
players? How many involve confusion about game-play? How many are
looking for a command that does or does not exist? How many of these
questions in your queue have a ready, simple answer?
The answer should be “None,” or “Very
Few.” If you answered correctly, congratulations! You probably have
an amazing KB. If you answered wrong, it means that your KB is either
difficult to navigate, difficult to find, out of date, not robust
enough, or all of the above.
Unified Front -
Seamless Backend – Part I
Your CSRs are
your front line, the soldiers on the field battling for your company.
It makes sense then, that you’d want to give them the easiest means
to accomplish their mission.
Their tools are invaluable components of
their job. They become even more valuable if they provide a unified
front to the CSR. If a CSR has to open ten tools in order to get
their job done, they’re slowed down considerably moving information
from one place to another, alt-tabbing, keeping track of their
workflow, in addition to simply answering the customer.
It’s best therefore if the tools are
created in tandem with a clear picture of how they are going to work
together, and how they can be integrated into a single UI.
Offshore or Not?
We hear this question all the time;
should I use offshore resources or not? The response we often give is
it’s really based on your short term resources and your overall live
service management strategy. Things to consider when moving a
complicated process off shore like CS are:
Logistics – Do
you have dedicated resources, who understand how to manage large
scale MMO support center operations?
Are they available to stay away from home
for extended periods of time? Even more importantly do they have
international travel experience? If not, seriously consider sending
them with an experienced traveler. From personal experience it’s an
extremely lonely feeling when you arrive at Indhra
Ghandi airport, half-past midnight, dead
tired, guys with machine guns in the corners and not a familiar face
in the crowd. Daunting to say the least. Ensure your vendor has
dedicated someone to meet your employee and usher them through
customs and drive them to their hotel. My first trip years ago took
me on an $80(US)
dollar cab ride to my hotel. Little did I know that it should have
cost around $3. Lesson learned. Sure it was
expensed (sorry EA) but embarrassing all the same.
Have the connectivity and tools configuration
been installed and tested BEFORE your people hit the ground? There is
no worse wasting of time and money than sending an employee half way
around the world to handhold the outsourcers hand to set up tools or
establish basic connectivity. Test it before you get there.
Does everyone making the trip have a
passport and associated work Visas? Are their medical needs taken
care of before hand? Essential medical prescriptions absolutely
include Cipro or other antibiotics along
with some sort of malarial tablets. Without going into too much
detail I have made these trips multitudes of times and end up using
these medications….. every single time.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly,
STAY AWAY FROM ANY AND ALL DAIRY PRODUCTS. Did you get that? Nothing, and I mean nothing is more frightening
than climbing in your spacious as you reflect on your successful trip
and having your stomach do a complete flip flop. Brrrappp!?
“Wait, was that
cheese on my sandwich?”
It’s gonna be a
long flight folks.
Costs: Flying folks to the other side of
the globe is a necessary evil when trying to set up a top notch CRM
implementation. Do you have the budget to make this happen once a
quarter? Typically the International Integration team members,
sometimes more than one, spend upwards of 3 weeks at a time in a
foreign land to kick off the process and get folks indoctrinated into
the process. We usually budget roughly $10K to $15k per person for
everything for a 3 week stay if they fly Business Class and $8K to
$10K for coach. Editors note: Making someone
fly coach half way around the globe has actually been introduced to
the Geneva Convention as cruel and unusual punishment.
ROI - While
the lure of “inexpensive” labor is enticing, be sure to sit down and
really crunch the numbers. Typically ramping a team up to support an
MMO in another culture will take a long time to realize benefits.
After about a year the numbers begin to flatten out but not with out
significant upfront investment. Give us a call and lets us show you
the pros and cons of doing support offshore. We’ve done the number crunching, have assets on the ground already and
all the footwork for you. Avoid reinventing the wheel by contacting
us today.
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Contact:
858-435-0803 
