Retaining players and providing support faster | Samantha Pang from Helpshift

[Music] we now joined by Samantha Pang who is part of help shift which itself is part of keyword Studios how are you doing today good James thank you how are you very very well I understand you've done a talk or panel earlier this today yes it was with roio oh okay yes the big dogs or the big birds I suppose you should call it but if we have spoken to you before but if people haven't encountered the likes of you what is it that you folks do yeah so uh I'm the vice president of customer success at H shift which is now a part of keyword Studios uh keyword Studios provides Outsourcing Services um to gaming companies across the entire game development cycle so we're part of kind of the postlaunch engagement uh service line that helps uh players kind of stay in the game and uh Provide support to them Community Trust and safety and kind of help shift is now part of that service line understood

Okay so we've had a bit of kind of bad news within the industry over the last 12 months really it's things have been contracting we've had a lot of layoffs and we understand that VC spend will likely be down this year which means fewer gains getting made probably fewer IND starting up for a service like yourselves who relies on the fact that you know game developers are going to be coming to you how do you see that affecting business in future and what do you do to react to it I think um what we're saying is obviously less startups right cuz VCS are being more cautious about where they invest their money at the same time a lot more consolidation and I think consolidation will continue to happen across the gaming industry right whether it's kind of crossplatform uh PC console getting into Mobile and then mobile trying to kind of look at ways to uh monetize by launching on Console PC finding the right Partners um so I think you know there's going to be less kind of like gains and uh startup

companies but probably focused on higher quality and actually providing a better experience to the players to retain them well I imagine that while UA is a part of what you're engaged in when a new user comes in they come and they require help they require assistance part of that is what you deal with but also Imagine a lot of what you deal with is retention is making sure that the people who are playing have their questions answered and are able to navigate through the game and and you assist with that so is that a thing that you then have to step up even more if there are fewer games you want to make sure the people who are playing Stay absolutely I think kind of with where the trend is going right now where you know less data can be collected about the players right you really have to focus on retaining them and providing support faster because ultimately players just want to get back to playing the game if you're going to delay that then you increase the chances of losing them um so our focus is continuing to keep the players in the game no matter no matter which

channel they're reaching out to you from and you're not sending them out to like a email or browser because then they're going to find another game that actually cares about giving them the answers faster especially mobile right you're competing with uh you know other entertainment that's right there right Netflix or eating something right that's kind of what we hear a lot from our clients so you really want to focus on providing that experience where they get the help when they need it so keeping them in app and not kind of pushing them outside is important so we've seen a lot of talk about AI both positive and negative I know people are blaming AI for some of the layoffs that have happened recently and things like that I imagine some kind of ml or AI plays a part in What you do at least maybe the initial you know I have a question and then the help box pops up is that the case and and how much of it is human assisted or human control yes so help shift is about providing uh for Mob boards providing kind of the experience out of the box with an SD K that starts

with a help center and then we use AI to understand the player's problem once you can accurately Define the player's problem then you can kind of have them talk to a bot or human and you can segment and personalize The Experience based on the type of player they are right and based on the type of problem it is um and that allows us to kind of create very defined workflows that ultimately get them to the right place at the right time and get their answers very quickly so AI is definitely uh kind of an area we've invested in since 2017 and it continues to be uh a focus especially because keywords is a huge proponent of AI um there's a number of technologies that keywords has also acquired over the years and we're kind of looking at how do you then bring more AI into help shift so that we can constantly look at the right areas to invest in uh continue to improve that player experience with more AI right because I know we've all had experiences in the past where you try and you know

phone up a line for assistance and it inevitably is some kind of AI bot or assistance and people are kind of in their head going just let me talk to a person and I know that must be a reaction you get from some people how do you ensure that the that first Contact experience does actually feel frictionless and doesn't make them Despair and kind of bounce off of the whole process so right now what we're seeing especially in the last year is ging companies a lot more focused on self-service not necessarily deflection but self-service which is providing targeted content to through AI or allowing them to actually start the conversation in an FAQ so that they feel like they're getting help and then from there if the uh help center isn't going to solve their problem entirely we send them down a very defined workflow that allows them to tell us what their problem is so at least we can then kind of help them and guide them down providing that information then to be able to provide them a resolution faster than a human can on

their own uh recently we also introduced machine translation into help shift using another keywords technology uh called Cen and uh that's the same technology we're using for localization so the quality is already being validated and what we're seeing is cant goes up when you use machine translation in help shift because you're providing native language support that you weren't able to with humans before and you're now able to provide native language support 247 so players are finding that to be a better experience than waiting 8 hours for the next business day or conversing with someone in English because they can't afford to staff for that language gotcha now everything changes incredibly fast in this industry more than most and we've had lots of Regulation changes as you mentioned earlier with the way that Apple has kind of locked down user data Google doing it a little bit and then we have the the situation in China where they started restricting payment systems and you can't get login bonus is every day and again it just turns on a dime

and suddenly everyone has to react how do you stay Nimble when you're dealing with something like this especially with things like AI models which require learning there has to be a period of learning at least so and if users are maybe starting to talk about their own personal data does it become problematic where it's like you you can't say that we're not allowed to collect this information how do you make sure that no one's giving you something they should be so we have our own uh infos team and uh we also kind of uh make sure that we're following apple and Google's regulations at any given time to remain compliant um because gdpr is definitely top of Mind Copa right CCPA now you've got these additional data privacy um information collection uh regulations that are kind of now becoming more and more strict uh globally so what we try to do is make sure we're very transparent about what data we're collecting and uh this adheres to Apple or Google's policy so that our clients already feel that okay we we we've got our bases covered with they've already

gone through infosec um and then we make sure that uh we with that our clients understand that they own the data we don't as long as they're using help shift uh they own the data and as long as they're providing a way for the players to request account deletion or copy of the data so we continue to use Ai and automation to provide them those tools to create processes internally that cater to how they want to organize those um opportunities for players to tell them what they want them to do with their data so that's how we try to stay ahead and every quarter uh every Q3 of um each fiscal year we have a new update to the SDK because we're looking at Google and Apple's policies for mobile and we're making sure our SDK is refreshed and we have uh the breaking changes addressed if we can't collect this data or that data but at the end of the day our client owns the data and we want to make that very clear to them it's good to know you did do that panel

earlier today what was the topic of that one it was about Romeo's uh journey to Ai and transformation uh coming off of the email based uh support tool and moving on to help shift and starting their experiment with AI and Automation and machine translation I see that's quite a high-profile client as far as they go yeah I think um that's what we're starting to see is uh clients that are in gaming are trying to really now um get with the the market trends which is AI machine translation is what we've been hearing uh all throughout 2023 so the market is ready for it our clients are ready for it gaming is always being ahead of the market in terms of adopting new technology and testing it right so I think roio uh with the number of games 23 games and multiple languages I think they had to think about new way of supporting their players and keeping them inside the game with the focus on retention so that's why they made that

mov makes sense well you're at the show today you've done your talking us out of the way uh what do you have planned for the rest of the the time here what are you going to shows like this for uh I mean it's always great to come out here and uh see a lot of our clients in Europe we have a very strong client base in Europe and so does keywords right even before acquisition so it's great to be able to see them together and uh you know trying to understand are we doing the right things are they seeing value because now they're using m multile keyword services so it's great to be able to kind of meet them and and get feedback and understand how we can do better CU at the end of the day we just want clients to be happy right like I mean they're happy we're happy it's great uh and just kind of seeing what's out there in the industry right you always want to try to see what's the next thing that's coming in gaming and everyone kind of tries to prepare for or at least be informed about what's coming um but right now we're just kind of uh enjoying the show there's a lot of client Science and Industry people

around a lot of my former co-workers um you know co-workers in the in the UK are definitely here as well so a lot of energy um po game ala is one of my favorite shows in Europe so it's been great to be here again second year well it's good to have you back thank you thank you so much for talking to me today thank you very much [Music] James