How to delight players with amazing customer service

hi everyone take ups sorry are you hear me well alright thanks for coming to recession I'm Nicholas this is Philip we're from manic you back we're here to tell you about how we run customer service we're first gonna go I'm first going to go through a quick introduction of ourselves then the process and the mindset which is really important that we've put in place at mana cube and then a Philip will introduce you to a tool that we've developed that allows us to be extremely productive and extremely efficient why delivering great service how do you all right okay so Philip both Philip and I have a background in

triple-a games originally we started of over 10 years ago Philip was then the co-founder of Cobo Joe a leading social gaming company in France and as for myself my latest job was general manager of Europe for gumi japanese company that launched the hit game by frontier record team of four people and we've put customer service and at the heart of our business and customer service is meant to be extremely difficult to scale so how do you do that when you have a small team is what I want to tackle but first a bit of another bit of background just so you know our first game dungeon monsters whereas released in March it's doing recent is doing reasonably well and we've been able to run customer service every single day since since it launched so what's customer service a definition I found online is all interactions between a customer and a product provider customer service adds

value to a product and builds and during relationships first we think about the player experience like the entire experience of playing a game and how do you make that great and it has to do with you exit yes to it has to do with community management but for us customer service is how do you do that on a one to one level on a personal level it's not just answering tickets either it's also although it is a big part of the job but it's also outreaching to our players speaking to them on the phone sending surveys to see what they think about the game now you may ask yourself why is it important well a lot of businesses other than gaming have long understood that poor customer service can lose you customers while great customer service can really make a difference yet in games we make the most engaging products in the world but we don't really seem to

pay much attention to our customers in the 2014 temkin customer service ratings in the US out of 200 companies only one company only one gaming company was part of the ranking Activision what that means is that Americans preferred their grocery store their insurance company or dirt bank they get better customer service from those companies and they preferred them and I don't think that's right I think it's also part of the reason why another example I mean is why EA was voted the worst company in America several times he is not the worst company in America and it doesn't really have to do with customer service but how they treat their players and it also shows that we address we as game developers and publishers address a group of people who are extremely passionate which i think is awesome and they can really help sway our business one way or another so for us it starts with a mindset I like saying that nobody

likes talking to robot nobody likes speaking either by email or phone to a person who only pushes back at the issue asking you to perform like a series of checks or like all sorts of thing without help actually trying to understand the issue and helping you for us an incoming customer service inquiry or a ticket it's not something we have to deal with for us it's almost like marketing it's an opportunity it's an opportunity to make someone's day to build a rapport to bring that personal touch and ultimately retain that customer retained that player to achieve that we've put a set of best practices in place and I'm going to list them I'm gonna list a few of them here nothing groundbreaking a lot of good common sense but you just have to do it so first our customer service reps are called player happiness agents I want I wanted that to be part of their

job description so we have one internally right now out of only four people but also every employee spends a bit of time in the customer service department it's a tip I found online and it really helps you understand feel the pulse of the players but also improve the tools improve the process we respond to every single email and every single Google Play review within 24 hours even an email that just says hi or your game sucks we reply it nicely we get personal we use our own first names we we start and we end our emails with our first then if we know the players first name through maybe a facebook connect or something like that we will use his first name so we really try to get personal again nobody likes talking to robot we speak the game's language or game is about fantasy and orcs and elves and fighting and dragons and wizards so we use that language and or copy in our

emails to immerse her players in the game experience but also like I bet a bunch of you are free to play game developers today and we're in the really lucky position if you think about it because we sell virtual goods which is really cool so you have items that have a lot of value have great value for your players but yet don't cost us anything so it's really it's a really good thing to give gifts through your players so every time we have in every conversation with our players again just even just a feedback email anything we will give gifts we will give a virtual good so we have a back-end to do that payment issues we will look into them but we always end up fully recreating the the player and some more a lot more in fact for their trouble there's also I took a few pages from the restaurants industry as well they do what they call resetting the players clock so when you're waiting for your meal at the restaurant and you're waiting for too

long sometimes they'll bring a small free appetizer and that resets your clock where you wait so we do that too when when when when something is taking too long to address typically a technical bug will kind of send a gift and like look we're looking into it here's here's a gift while you wait and it works really efficiently this does are the kind of things you can do to turn a problem into an actually really positive experience and actually benefit from it we also have a VIP program for paying players so we take extra special care of them so this is those are those are the things you can do the mindset but really to be efficient at doing this to be fast and to be great you have to rely on data and end tools and so I'm not gonna I'm not gonna let Phillips tell you about that sorry Thank You Nicholas hi everyone so I'm going to tell you a little bit about the way we

do things and yeah because we are a very small company we had to be a bit creative about how we deal with a customer support and we pretty much had to hack it I would say are so our infrastructure is built on top of App Engine we have a server that communicates to a client which is a unity developed in c-sharp it sends JSON over HTTP this is fairly standard I bet a lot of people are doing that as well but what is in common is that we built a customer support tool as a desktop app and it's a deliberate choice that we made it also in c-sharp so that it basically shares a lot of the code of the tool whether it's networks protocol or our data structures and that makes it very easy to to maintain that tool and

to make it very integrated into the into the game and vice versa this tool connects to the the game through a secure on point but it's basically like it behaves a bit like a modified version of the game it has special access of course but but it's a there's a lot of common technology between those two things and this also allowed us to hack control monitors that's running on the Raspberry Pi in a corner of our office is very basically copy paste code from the from the game and it wants us when something important happens in the game whether it's a player spending money or a player sending us an issue we are aware what's going on they have a face they are in front of us and there are real people and that we need to take care of that that makes you the customer support experience very human to basically have them in the room oh and

last but not least our server is capable of sending and receiving emails so the way it works is basically like an email robot that processes email and the way it works is when when the player is trying to get in touch with us uses either an in-game form or sending directly an email to an address support DM at mana cube com and it's our game server that will receive that email and process it and try to figure out who that player is find his accounts and pack in an email that will be sent to all our players a penis agent metadata such as their account their level there the weather they are spender and format this email in a way that's very easy to see if it's a blocking issue or or like just a feedback and this decimal listen

to all the player happiness agent Nicholas and I are also in that group and basically we can quickly see what's going on with the player and respond to that email so any of us can can can be the first responders what will happen then is that the marriage redirected to the email robot that will strip out all the metadata and send a clean response to the player through an animal that is not a private email but our work email but through the support GM at menachem email and it will also bounced back all the updated case to all the other player a penis agents so anyone can pick the conversation in or we can say ok maybe you're more you can help this person more efficiently and we pass cases around when needed there are a lot of of

the chef solution that can do that and I believe much more but they seemed very complex and hard to integrate that deep into the game as we did it and in in the end this is less than four hundred lines of Python code and it's doing exactly what we needed and it felt like the simplest thing that works so we decided to do that and it's highly customizable customizable as well and what the players end up seeing is in this case the players and the saw a candid message like please help me I can beat this boss it's lacks context totally and what we received and what you will receive is a friendly message of someone giving him relevant information about the situation and a little gift code what happens from our point of view is our dashboards want us that something is

going on we see the players face we can see at a glance where there is a VIP whether it's a blocking issue or not we receive an email that is packed with with metadata we implemented something called custom protocol which enabled us to just click on this on the user ID in the email which will directly open our our custom dash pod we see the player in this case it's relevant that we look at which monsters he plays with and see that made me baby is using the wrong strategy against this boss and we can quickly send him something that will make him a pee and and move on our dashboard is built around different views that basically do that what connects to the game and Riaan gets the player saved so so we have access to

pretty much everything about this player and and we presented in the different way to make it very easily browsable we can search player by any identifier of the player it's very very flexible we have access to the most important aspect of this game at a glance we have access to all the it's payment their payment history and it is very important that this is topmost because most of our issues are related to to payment disputes and we can we have a feature that enable us to just verify the payment and its current state with the platform with just the right click and this comes in handy in a many situation there is a note section that enabled us to write some some specific information about the user which experiences we are if there's something specific that happened with him but this section is

also automatically filled with some events that are generated by the server whether there was maintenance or a technical issue that was detected this is only possible because this tool is directly connected to the game so it knows you know everything about the game and this is gaming information oh and those dashboard are not only read only they you can modify pretty much everything in it and press this button and it's uploaded back to the server and the player is updated with a with a modified save so we can act very quickly on solving the players issue once we understand it we built different views that are generated and that are that we build as the game evolves and we face different different new issues there is a raw JSON you journalist to hack in the save this is the Swiss Army knives enabled us to solve any issue it's a bit

risky and it requires a little bit of skills but this is the solution to every problem if there's not a previously thought solution the previous view show the game as a snapshot vision of the save we have also view that shows us the history of everything that happened in every session whether it's soft currency spend or archaeon articles again purchase this has been built initially to prevent fraud but it proved super helpful to troubleshoot issues that happened in the past of the player or that related to with a usage patterns of the game and and this is something we use a lot to figure out what's going on with a player and then finally if you get the trifecta of intervention tools which are in box gift that enables to directly send value to a player in music in inbox redeemable code that we can send four to one or many player put in

social networks and and then when we want to mass communicate something put notification that can be either sent to one a player or segmentation of the of the whole audience so to something up we've unified the tool and the game technologies out there worked together very efficiently we've constructed a lean and efficient communication flow so that everyone can step in and the player as a needs emailing experience we will do that enable us to understand what's going on with the players very quickly so that we have a lot of context even if the player doesn't give us much and we managed to make it's very easy to step into the player 7 modify things and fix the problem right away but no technology

will change the fact that the key to great customer service is being friendly to the players and that's that's the most important part so finally how far can we take this we intend to take it pretty far games are hit driven business you never know for sure if your next game is going to be so how do you accurate value over time well we think that by building you know the teams and the tools and the processes to be great at customer service we have something that carries over from one title to to another back in the old days people used to make 3d engines to do that but nowadays you have things like unity so you don't need to make a 3d engine so how do you agree that value so here's a couple of ideas of things we'd like to be doing next I'd love to have a phone line for paying players because why not right maybe just a live chat for for non spenders we could have loyalty programs you already have a VIP program when

traveling we could be meeting our top players for coffee I'd only find you once playing dungeon monsters here but happy to share a coffee after the conference but let's take it this is this even further um if you're in the business of a free-to-play games you're probably okay with spending three dollars to $25 to require a new player you can multiply that by 10 or 20 if you're talking about a spender so if you're ready to spend this much money on acquiring our players we want to prove the case that it makes sense to spend a little bit of extra money in retaining that person with sink things such as sending handwritten letters or coupons are actually gifting our actual physical gifts to our players if we get there their physical address we have an internal list with tons of ID's some that are free that we could implement tomorrow and some dollar for when we're bigger and mightier at the end of the day our dream would be that

in a few years half of the money that we should or that we could be spending on user acquisition if half of that money we could actually redirect it towards reinvesting into the player experience we think that would be a great position to be in this is it for us today thank you very much and feel free to ask us any question you may have do we have any questions multiplicity now you clearly covered it all thank you very much you