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Create free accountforeign [Music] [Applause] so up next we have a lovely panel uh I would like to welcome our panelists uh Ed Jamieson Eric vermillan Peter Gerson Dominic Kelly and Jessica May they're going to be talking about increasing the value of games through better player support okay hello everyone and now Welcome to our session I'm Ed Jamison I work for help shift now part of keyword Studios we're going to talk to you today
about player support and the impact it can have on your game and with me we've got one of our great customers Jessica and we're going to all introduce ourselves we're going to ask this team here to talk quickly about their role in the company and also mention their favorite game so Jessica welcome and thanks for joining us thank you for having me it's nice to see people in real life and not through a screen um so my name is Jessica I'm the player support lead at Lockwood publishing and our product is African life for those who haven't heard of it it's a 3D virtual world very social based um and I I'm the team lead in the support team so I run on these or ground floor operations and my favorite game I'm big on RPGs at the moment so I'm playing Witcher 3 at the moment with the Next Gen update and I'm really enjoying that so yeah thanks Jessica Eric Eric Vermillion is
CEO at help shift yeah hi everyone thanks for joining us today I'm Eric Vermilion I'm the CEO of help shift which as Ed mentioned is now part of keywords Studios we're part of the player support group within keywords so I lead a team of about 150 people at help shift globally that work hard to rid the world of bad customer service my my favorite game I'm a pretty simple guy is is still Candy Crush I mean I just I can't get enough of it I don't know if Wordle counts too but I then don't miss the word on any in any day but those are my Peter thanks Ed um just a quick word Dominic couldn't be here and he sends his regards shame he got covert and wasn't allowed to fly so he uh I'm being Peter and Dominic today he's on my Solutions team and and focuses on the Canton machine translation my name's Peter um head of global CX solutions for
keywords very happy that the help shift family is with us and one of our customers which is great because we do the support with Jess as well and our role is just to look at how can we put the very best solution together across the tech platforms as well as the human interface for the lavops customer support environment Community Management trust and safety and of course player support so be great to talk to you guys and hopefully we answer your questions great I failed to mention my my favorite game um I'm kind of a retro person I love Madden 95 and then of course I I like the mobile version of uh Madden 2023 or 2022 that is my kids love Roblox so I'm also a fan of that and Subway Surfers our next uh customer and we have our our sibo folks right back there we see our huge folks hi Lucas how are you uh good to see everybody here
um we're going to start I want to remind everybody please scan your badge that way you can prove to your boss and your other co-workers after tonight's big party that you actually attended a few sessions so scan your badge if you haven't do it on the way out um we're going to start with Jessica Jessica talk to us about the impact of players support um and how it impacts the game and the success of your game from launching to scaling and everything in between well that's a loaded question I'll do my best um so player sentiment and community and player support is at the core of what we do at Lockwood publishing um so because African life is a virtual world essentially it's really really important that we keep the players immersed for us you know as much of the experience as possible and that includes contacting Us in player support and if they stay immersed if we're
successful at doing that and we keep them engaged and you know we fulfill all of the problems that they have we help solve all our issues then that really really helps with player retention both in the short term and and the long term um yeah we've had we've got players that have been around for years and years and years now and you know they regularly comment about how quick we are to preserve their issues and how much that affects them coming back like the next day because they're actually enjoying talking to us when we get players contacting us all the time not just with issues but with hey how are you I'm just like Oh I'm great thanks and you know that's really really important um for our team um but yeah and equally important is the partners that we work with um especially keywords um and I think that you know I can't understand the importance of our keywords team who
contact us every day about the things that they hear from our players the positive feedback that they get and I just think it's super important to have awesome relationships with other support mentors that you work with thanks Jessica um yeah I think one of the things that you're alluding to is keeping players in the game and you know it's interesting uh in the mobile World some companies will will provide a support channel that is outside of the game that may take 24 48 hours to to even address or to resolve and one of the things that we focus on at help shift is keeping players in the game with that said Eric um talk about scaling and some of the pitfalls um that can happen um or or some of the upside that can happen if you provide a great player support experience or on the contrary if
you don't provide a great player support experience especially when a game launches or scales or blows up and gets big yeah sure thanks for the question I um I one of the things that we see very often is that it's it's not considered as part of the game launch or as part of the planning process it becomes an afterthought to think about player Sport and yeah you want to you want to create the best game you want to create a product that people love but you know sometimes there's problems sometimes they're technical challenges with the game other times they're just you know levels are too hard to get past or they're they're you know things that are just inherent to any game that's that's uh that's launched and when you fail to anticipate and think about the need for a good player support environment as you're planning the launch of that game you get put in a very uncomfortable uh position you're trying to respond sometimes if the game is a wild success you're trying to respond to just a mountain of queries from customers who
are trying to play the game and trying to ask for help and when they can't get a hold of someone or they can't find the answer that they need sometimes they leave you bad reviews sometimes they just choose not to play the game many more they tell their friends that they liked your game but they they got stuck and they couldn't get help and they they had to move on none of those things are good uh good things they obviously uh lead to to poorer csat scores but also you know lost Revenue that's associated with it and these are things that are very easy to anticipate and build in to your plan and you know an opportunity that exists you think carefully through that as part of the new launch process Peter talked to us a little bit from your perspective about that concept of being able to scale at the right time so the one thing that differentiates gaming from probably any other type of
setup would it be insurance or contact centers for for yeah health care and mobile phones and stuff is that they're much more consistent over time with the same kind of problems that customers are having every game is unique the game you create and the game you publish out there is unique it's going to a specific audience it's going to generate a community and yes they'll play other games but they'll be specifically focused on your environment and you don't really know coming into it day one how many people are going to pitch up play the game and maybe reach out to ask questions so the key is flexibility and creating a system or designing as early as you can what are you going to do to talk to players and obviously an in-game support setup does always Trump having to send them somewhere else to get some kind of response and so the key around scaling is how do you partner with a team you build yourself in-house perhaps as well as perhaps looking at how you scale outside and those are the areas that you've got to look at do I need one
do I need 10 do I need 15 what kind of system how can we create efficiencies so it really is a combination of a platform a ticketing system that will help you create an efficient way for your regions the keys the agent expense the more efficient and the happier the agents are whoever they are in the house team or an outsourced team to respond to the players the more happy the players will be and of course happy players are the ambassadors for your game they play more they spend more time in the game and they bring other players to the game so the key around scaling has to be around your flexibility but to have flexibility much earlier in the design stage of the game there should be discussions around when we go live into a live op suggestion what outcomes do we want for our players what what is it and if you're transparent about that and from day one when you're going live you're telling your players this is how you speak to us that's kind of going to give you the platform to create that scalability
then you've got to obviously decide how much is are we going to keep in-house geographically based it's quite odd to find tons of Agents very quickly and which are the kind of Partners we want to use around the world in your game being Global that if we need to scale how can we scale up quickly those are the considerations around scale and then the opposite is true add a wire game has a life cycle it may drop off you don't want to be tied into long-term commitment so you have far too many people in support with nothing to do so you also have to be able to scale down and that all comes in that planning phase and talking to Partners around how do you do that with the platform with the technology and with the people you need to employ hopefully that answers that question sure and scaling can be cost efficient it can be very costly we have a recent customer at help shift they came to us they saw a 20-minute demo um and and they bought our platform on that day their situation was they launched a game um it it blew up pretty fast they had to try to
find 10 player support agents to manage the volume of their game not a great position to be in what you're hearing from this team here is that blend of blend of technology for automation to manage a lot of the the simple support things and then of course on Peter's side you'd have the player support agents in any language um Peter I'm going to come back to you because we're talking I want to talk a little bit about language and launching game in different markets different geographies and different languages you have some experience there if you can provide some advice so similar a similar approach worldwide you're seeing the volume of support in English and then you have a range of languages and while you see us all in the market all of us as partners come out supporting games in 40 plus languages the reality is there are
around nine languages you need to support given the volume of how players will reach out to you and there are the the normal European languages which we call the e-fix that's English French Italian German Spanish and then there's Latin for the Latin Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese then there's usually Chinese simplified or or or formal traditional thank you very much and then you'll have Korean and Japanese and then there's be odd languages around that Turkish Arabic and so those are the key areas that you have to focus on and there are a couple of ways you can do this there is the machine translation piece which if you're very transparent to your players you can put in place and everything in in support if you're a customer yourself think of yourselves as a customer what do you want you want a very Speedy response with an answer that solves your problem so you can get on with your life and so if you're transparent machine translation these days is pretty accurate but it's still not the same as a fluent native so if you're really
picky and you get a response that's not a hundred percent translated you're not going to be happy but most players don't care they want the right answer in an understandable format it doesn't have to be perfect so they can get on with their lives so that's an option that helps you scale dramatically but there are times when you still around quality once so we look at always putting a combination together it makes the most sense for the game what kind of players are coming in what's the community and are there certain segments where night night of translations in the highest time you get tickets mentioning when your tickets come in you need to have a native speaker to also provide the support so it's that combination and flexibility that gives you your options and again you can scale pretty worldwide with with having the locations it's easy to scale follow the sun to to plan ramping up and ramping down with that kind of setup thanks Peter I think um we'll go to Jessica because she has experience as a customer using help shift using keyword
Studios player support do you use the cantan uh translation um not me personally right I'm not involved in the sort of that side of things it's just mainly just player support and the Agents okay well tell us about your experience in using kind of the blend of the human touch from keyword Studios and the automation from helpshift um so we started using custom bots um about a year ago now um and it's been hugely hugely successful for us especially in times of high growth with the team um uh you know like a lot of game studios our player base is quite it can be quite seasonal um it gets really busy around Christmas and then quietens down uh just afterwards and so it's really really important for us to leverage that you know all of the Automation and the AI and to make sure that we have coverage in those times of you know high traffic
um and it's also important as well that we work with keywords and important that we use the flexibility that they offer in if we need a lesser amount of Agents during a specific time then they offer us the flexibility to do that and likewise when it gets busy if we want to say oh you know we've got a big event coming up or it's Christmas it's getting really busy it's not a problem just to have a few more agents during that time which is really really important to us um yeah I'm really excited about the the merger because we've actually been working with both help shift and keywords for many years now uh probably more than five years actually um so that you know when we the emerger got announced we're actually really excited about the possibilities for us and you know how we can work together in the future even better than we already are so yeah thanks Jessica you talked a little bit about the agility I'm gonna I'm supposed to go to Eric but I'm gonna go to Peter because it plays off and I'm going to come back to Eric it plays on something
that you just said you know many bpos in the world um you know require companies to you know to sign up for 10 agents or 20 agents or that sort of thing and and what's unique about keywords is they're very focused on gaming and they provide a lot of flexibility in in the way um uh that they work with their vendors Peter can you comment on that because Jessica mentioned the nights and the weekends and scaling uh for for Spike spikes and and valleys can you comment on how you serve the community there yeah so that's a it's a good question and the audience and anybody at the show what we always say is that at these kinds of things there's 40 minutes you can only go high level and and it's very difficult to really get to the new degree and often it's a bit frustrating I think audience because you want answers to your questions the best is come find us at the booth and really ask your specific question and let us help you with that but in this instance it's pretty straightforward um we've taken the view that games go through very very steep Cycles compared
to product art in the market like an insurance or a healthcare and so we've got to be able to ramp up and ramp down at very very short notice or sometimes just extend a team or extend the team for an event or a play test or a launch so we're able to scale up or scale down pretty quick in most languages then I spoke about the nine or tenet or the key languages at very short notice we prefer not to you the more you can spend time preparing your system and the more you can train the agents and work with them to be more familiar with your environment in the game the better a result but if it's unexpected and you need to spike think of us as an extension of the team so we're an extension of the voice and the brand and you literally start with what we call half an FTD and I always make a joke like which off do you want the top or the bottom but it literally means 80 hours a month you start with 80 hours a month just maybe doing certain key times when your team has gaps or can't work and then we build out there from there depending on how you want to grow and then it can scale quite quickly a launch
we once had where there were zero agents they said they didn't need support the game blew up and the weekend it launched I asked for help we put 17 agents in within 24 hours and a week later there were 24 agents and that team grew to 60 agents but then the game settled down and then the team became City agents so that's kind of our our how it works it's it's a reality of Gaming thank you Eric we've talked about providing a great experience but can you comment a little bit about efficiencies and costs costs obviously we're we're in a slight Global recession we're not sure where that goes from here but cost is always on the mind of our customers it's usually one of the first things they ask when we have a meeting and they're considering different options talk about efficiency and costs from from your perspective and where that plays in yeah sure um you know we we hear from players that they want a very fast response they want
an accurate response um you know we hear from you know from our customers we hear from you know folks like those of you in this room that you want uh to be able to provide these things to your customer at the lowest possible uh cost that just takes planning and it's you know what what Peter just described with you know scaling up 17 agents in the world is is is is really good but that's like a diving save and it doesn't have to be that hard if you take the time to actually thoughtfully plan this um while you're in the planning process of the game or as you're starting to scale the game you've got an opportunity to be uh you've got a an opportunity to dictate the rules and there's a lot of cool technology out there um available to all of us to really help understand the you know the leveraging AI to help understand the the questions that your your players are asking and
taking them down a logical self-service Journey that enables and equips that speed that you know that a player demands and wants to get the right answer but also bringing in that kind of bespoke individual attention that they need that human interaction that they need you know we see you know we see some um some companies that will you know that'll fully automate as much as you know 90 plus percent of their customer interactions and we see others that do a much lower percentage by Design because they want to actually leverage the technology to take away kind of some of those robotic tasks that are often asked of Agents which by the way is not the agent's favorite thing to do either and uh and equip the agents to really be more uh concierge like or more personal assistant like in in their experience with you you know if you do that that's what I just described there is not a hard thing
and I think sometimes people are intimidated buy that well that's probably going to take just you know a lot of money and a lot of time and a lot of people that we don't have um no not really this is something that you know we see companies Implement everything that I just described to you in a matter of days uh or weeks uh with with not a real heavy lift and certainly we have people to help with that but many of our customers actually do that equip what I just described on their own so I would say don't be intimidated uh by the technology think about it as you're planning your launch and then you've really got the ability to kind of scale up and scale down as your needs and control the costs where you're going to have the single largest cost impact is where you wait until you have a problem and then you're trying to scramble and and figure it out later thanks Eric um we have about 150 inquiries a month
uh on help shift and usually one of the first two or three questions is what does it cost um while it's even though most of the cost is on our website I think you know the question that we ask is how do you calculate costs because it's not just the cost of of a subscription to a service but you got to consider things like the return on investment from the Automation and and and many other things so it's just something that I think that we always try to to explain to our customers is how do you calculate that cost and there's a lot of different ways that you can do that I'm going to move to um I'm going to move to Jessica right now you have a very popular avatar game and talk to us a little bit about what support looks like in that environment
[Music] shooting basic generic questions and then we have a smaller internal team based in Nottingham and we have one guy in Portugal and we handle more of the complex cases and we also handle some of the um cases from the high-paying players um so yeah that works really well but we also have a lot of stuff going on in the background in terms of AI and Bots and self-serving FAQs and we also use a lot of the feedback the Netherlands smart forms that have been introduced in them to help shift recently we've been integrating them into all of our FAQs um so if we want if we're requesting feedback for a specific topic they'll go to a specific FAQ and then they'll put in all of their feedback within a smart FAQ there um and then they'll contact us
um and our agents will respond really really quickly so yeah sorry I'm coughing that's okay let's get Jessica a glass of water we'll give her a break and we'll be really poorly and I'm hoping I was a bit better you're doing great um we'll get you a glass of water and we'll come back to you in a second to talk about the synergies between help shift uh and and keywords but I'll go to Eric um let's talk about that uh help shift and and keywords have been partners for quite some time but now we're one company as of I believe December 15th and what did you see in this partnership in this marriage Eric of of Health shift and keywords and what do you think the synergies are as we bring these Services together yeah I've I've had plenty of time to
think about that as as uh we were going through the recording process all the due diligence uh leading up to becoming part of keywords just about a month ago um you know the saying as the CEO of helpshift which you know it's all month ago was a very independent uh organization um that really excites me is you know I if I try to put myself in you know all of all of your shoes trying to launch the best game create the best uh customer experience and you get an event like this and yeah the next two floors above us are filled with a whole bunch of stands with people telling you that their technology is the absolute single most important thing for the successful launch of your game and uh well I I don't doubt uh that they're very sincere that they believe genuinely that their piece of technology is the single most important thing uh for you to launch your game uh I am not going to sit here and tell you that
helps you it's the single most important piece of technology for you to launch your game what I'd like you to take away from this session is that thinking about player support more holistically as you're preparing for the launch of your game is something that's really really important and you know when we started talking keywords I got really excited about the idea of uh more of an authoritative figure in the gaming industry being formed to help Brands think about the entire end-to-end process from development to launch to you know post launch engagement and player support and it's something that frankly I think our industry lacks a bit you know I hear player support leaders kind of squeamishly saying well we're not sure if we're really cutting edge we're really doing things great well I you know I have I've spedic as part of my career you know in the world of of software technology and I've talked to
the likes of Barclays and City and Toyota and Mercedes and some of these other companies and and what they're doing in support I can tell you is far behind what many of you are doing today for your players leveraging you know mobile apps leveraging really you know leveraging uh technology that some of these bigger Brands you know can't even get out of their way to think about and so I really like the fact that we have uh you know we've we've created uh you know I I think a really good thought leadership uh Consortium and conglomerate uh with you know within keywords and I think we'll continue to see more of that uh from the broader keywords organization in terms of really being an authority and helping Brands understand how to leverage not only the technology but the people the best practices that are out there to make yourself successful and I think that's a lot easier scenario you know
when you Embrace that you embrace the hard work and the financial investments that keywords has made uh to you know to really make it make them a thoughtful part of your your launch and planning process the Dividends are huge rather than you know trying to try to sort through 100 different Technologies thank you Eric um Peter you've been our go-to person as a partner for five or six years now we've worked with you to implement kind of our technology with your people now we're one company um talk to us from your perspective about the synergies uh between help shift and keywords the the three key areas I see um in terms of um Breaking Down the Walls of the silos so traditionally platforms went into some kind of I.T Department maybe associated with marketing and customer support was in a customer support setup Associated perhaps by marketing or otherwise product and they didn't often
speak to each other or plan an example is that if an update came through and better technology was available in the app no one spoke to customer support about actually implementing or how that could work or actually getting the feedback of does this make sense or doesn't it they just implemented or changed something in the SDK and now the agents are presented with a new screen that they've never seen before and don't know how to work so for us it's breaking down these silos into one homogeneous piece of really understanding that the human part or the agent experience is critically important to the success of your customer setup so that your players get the experience they want the speed they want and the answer they want and the more that that's integrated and one seamless process the more you can be flexible and we've already discussed earlier how much flexibility in gaming is a game changer so if from day one our agents are really an understanding of the system know how to implement know how to fix the workflow no on much more deeply integrated into the platform and
from the platform from the day you implemented from the ground app you're able to build it to suit the team or the kind of support you want that's a game changer and up until now no BPO and I say this including ourselves up until now have had that capacity because we've been siled separated and it's seen as two separate processes and a small example is if you automate and put more bots in it costs you a little more money because your responses that go through the system go higher so if it was in a separate thing that's oh no no it's costing us too much we're not implementing the Bots but if you look at the overall total cost of ownership if three agents are no longer needed on the front end that saving is way higher than the extra expense with the platform and so see honestly you're starting to get a lot more cost efficiency coming through without giving up on the quality or the player experience and so that's where we see a massive massive Game Changer and an ability for us to do things that we just haven't been able to do before thanks Peter and Jessica and if you have
anything to comment on the synergies you work with our companies before we were one and now we're one but go ahead yeah it's always been great um so one thing that I'd love to comment on is how help shift and keywords are both really sort of hyper focused with gaming and that's really really important for our studio and we've always really enjoyed a good relationship with both um and with the agents one good thing that we like to do is talk to them every single day we their agents reach out to us ask questions um I'm always happy and to actually encourage all of their agents to contact our teams directly and whether that's on slack or on email so they can get a quick response rather than going through like the middlemen of having like you know team leads going through questions and both with help shift as well with our past relationship it's always been a case of us passing on feedback how can we improve help shift to help our players better and because they're
really focused on gaming they understand what we want if we want to ask about how can we integrate the SDK metadata from our African players into the main help shift dashboard they know exactly what we're talking about because they're focused on gaming and they've dealt with this before so and especially with help shift and keywords working together we can all bounce ideas off each other um you know what exactly would help the agents and not directly us but what would actually help the agents on the ground floor and they can talk to us about that and then and then in turn we can talk to help shift about that so yeah I'm really excited in that the collaboration going forward on that side of things yeah as great as technology and automation are going to continue to get um things require Personal Touch the human touch is always going to be part of probably every customer service uh strategy Jessica you've lived through high growth Mau and talk to us a little bit about the
way you plan and manage yeah yeah or manage and in your case as a support person you know this is not something you always anticipate but talk to us about your experience there so our app is very much a live Ops game um it can change daily actually we have content releases twice a week we have events that change every day if anyone's played African life you know exactly what I'm talking about and you never know which of those events is going to have a slight issue which causes all of a sudden thousands of tickets um so it's very hard to plan for that sort of thing um but like I've sort of touched on before what we love about uh keywords is the ability to add more um bodies if we need to um and we also have a really good relationship with our keywords team lead
who actually help us with uh FAQs in the SDK so what we tend to do if there's any major problems we'll write a really thorough FAQ and tell people exactly what's going wrong and how we can help fix it and then they'll put that live and as soon as the player goes to the support section in that app that's the first thing they see which really helps with deflection so we like to make sure that all of our team leads are you know trained on all aspects of help shift so they can help us when we're not necessarily available um you know we're based in the UK but all you know we have agents all over the place um so yeah great thank you speaking of geography uh Peter to you uh why is it important to localize your app talk to us about your experience there and some of the services that you provide yes so one of the key things is players like to be spoken to in their language and if your game is localized and a lot
of games are they're localized into quite a lot of languages and the players are playing in the language then they reach out if they're getting an answer back in English or another language that's not theirs um it's not quite the same experience and the key is to be careful of the culturalization as well as the translation so we're very very sensitive to understanding so gaming slang in Germany around the game in a community in the Discord channels and in the one-to-one relationships is actually quite different to the same game in a French or an Arabic community and you also have to be very careful how words translate from one language to another so what could be a standard word translated into German about please do this could translate into something that could be meaning quite something embarrassing in another language if you're not careful so the key is the quality around how you do that and how you manage that culturalization and that's why you want to have local native Gamers help support
the game in the localization when most of those gamers are playing should you choose to do that or be very very transparent as I said around the machine translation and then players are accepting of the speed of which they get the response but understanding that the quality may not quite be there just yet those are the two things to watch out for and we find that the more you do that the the higher the customer satisfaction is of the process um so this was many years ago bear in mind uh before we started using uh professional localization um So within our app Avatar um you can select which sex you are male and female this was back in the day um and back in the day we used like a basic Google translate um and unbeknownst to us um for about a year we were asking players if they wanted sex rather than
which sex they were so yes I kind of tested them I can yes and we had I was like why are these parents really angry but yeah so lesson like we learned the hard way that's what I would call going above and beyond the customer support we had to issue a big apology yes but the players found it hilarious as they would but parents less so okay we have two minutes so this has been great and it's good to end on a lighter note I'm gonna I'm gonna finish with Jessica what are some of the key takeaways you want the audience to hear and now we have new audience coming in perfect time for them to hear somewhat of a summary of the session um one suggestion I'd like to make if anyone here has any um you know if anyone's looking for any tips um I would advise everyone to let their customer support agents you know give them time to play the actual games that they're supporting like every week I
think we allowed you know a few hours every week for all of the agents to actually play the app and play the games um you know the more they get involved in the community and the more they get involved in the game you know the more they can relate to the players when they when they're in contact with them and you know it's really important to make sure that you have fun with it you know especially especially the agents who are answering tickets on a daily basis and you know if you know the app thoroughly you know all the memes you know all the jokes and you can have a laugh at the players and it you know makes for much better experience great we've got uh one more minute Eric Vermillion any final thoughts uh or or final message you want to share with the audience here uh yeah it's consistent with the same thing I've been saying think about this ahead take the time to plan uh before you launch your game because Player supports so much easier if you've thought through it before you launched then you're trying to scramble and solve a three-month queue of customer issues that are pilot on
Peter there isn't time to go through everything so come visit us on the stand um we've got a great Oculus to give away if you come and scan and talk to us but besides the prize we're just there can pick our brains let us help you solve the problems no strings attached that's what we're passionate about we want to talk to you about how to improve the customer support setup you've got with 19 seconds I'll say one last thing um you know now the keywords and cantan translation Ai and help shifter one company you know we're hyper focused on gaming and we're hyper focused on the player support experience um it makes sense for those who are serious about gaming to work with a company that is that focused uh on on those specific things in my hand I have invitations to happy hour tomorrow night at Flight Club
London I think it starts at 5 30 pm we also are in Booth G4 g 14 or 13 G14 and that's up on the highest floor so come see us then and I want to thank Jessica our great customer um Eric Vermillion our CEO and Peter my new colleague as of a month ago thanks everyone for coming thank you thank you [Applause] [Music] [Applause]
Effective player support serves as a foundational pillar for long-term player retention and overall commercial success, yet it is frequently relegated to an afterthought during the initial development cycle. By shifting support from a reactive cost center to a strategic asset, studios can significantly mitigate revenue loss and maintain player immersion. Integrating support solutions early in the development process allows for seamless scalability, ensuring that studios remain prepared for the inherent volatility of game launches and seasonal events.
The most efficient operational models utilize a hybrid approach, blending AI-driven automation with flexible, human-led support. Automated self-service tools effectively manage high volumes of routine inquiries, which reduces operational costs and frees human agents to address complex, high-value interactions. This tiered strategy is essential for maintaining service quality during peak periods, as it allows teams to scale rapidly without sacrificing the personal touch that fosters community loyalty.
Success in this domain requires breaking down operational silos by integrating support teams directly with technical platforms and development staff. Proactive planning before a title launches is critical, as is the use of native-speaking gamers who provide culturally sensitive localization. Furthermore, encouraging support agents to actively engage with the games they represent creates a deeper connection with the player base. By prioritizing these holistic strategies, studios can transform player support into a competitive advantage that drives sustained engagement and long-term profitability across the global gaming market.
PocketGamer.biz · 2026
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