Session: The Early Agent Gets the Worm, André Mendes, Next Games, a Netflix Game Studio

[Music] I would like to welcome Andre from uh next games who's going to be talking about uh the early agent gets the worm how to prioritize uh player support and game development so take it away Andre thank you okay uh so hello I'm Andre like just was presented uh I'll be so today talking about the early Asian cat the worm uh how to prioritize player support in game development so I will start in a different way so I will start with metrics and achievements we have achieved so far in two different games I'll jump this side so you can see the text um so 6 months after for two

different games we have got a cat of 4.43 out of five stars and then we have also a couple of goals when it comes to isue automation so we have reach at 51% fully automated that means where we use custom bots or AI powered Bots to reply to the players anything that's related to Common topics or what we will call it later filtering out the noise then we have 48% uh partially automated and here we use custom bots to gather all the data said to is the player support agents when resolving these tickets and then we have 1% fully manual uh it's actually a bit less than 1% but these are cases where our automation our custom bots our API Bots cannot handle without actually going straight to a human um and then we have a fq deflection of 91% that means that 91% of our players that open our El Center they find an answer and they do not actually open a tickets to reach out supports but

when we think about uh PX let's think a bit outside the box so it's not just TX the responsibility of the player experien team so the community managers and the player support there's actually key teams involved when we look into this so we have quality assurance business intelligence live operations Productions and development and together we PR make a pretty good team and we'll take into account later during the presentation how do we actually collaborate so the important part is that every single one of these teams plays a vital role in ensuring seamless and satisfying player experience but let's go more into what everybody likes what are the benefits of doing this well we have cost savings we have reduced the operational cost through optimation we efficient allocate our resources we have faster issue resolution which means reduced weight times for the players and quicker resolution of player issues so that can get back to the game as soon as possible and we have eisy if increasing

efficiency where we have streamlined processes enhanced productivity and a really important one is like better player experience we have higher player satisfaction and retention positive word of mouth and Community Building as these players happy with the help they gets and getting back to the game very very quickly um allows them to become advocates for the game and allow Community growth so we see it's working but we still have challenges like any other team so we have high volume diverse player needs every player is different limit limited resources and time and we have to keep up with game updates and bugs as we know the gaming industry is always changing the games always have new updates new features we need to make sure we can keep up with it and also impact on play player experience so delays or any efficiencies in any area can negatively affect the player experience but we have a plan the way we handle this so we have the first

one prioritization which is really important when it comes to PX so out to prioritize we have set clear goals and kpis for example are you trying to respond to the players quicker are you trying to get a great seat or a firsttime resolution and then use those kpis to measure your goals and then you should identify high impact issues so those that stop the player to get in back to the game and play the game enjoy it um allocate your resources wisely so that anything that's high impact gets the help they need need as soon as possible and then again regular review and just priorities like I said it's a dynamic dynamic environment you should always make sure you have the right resources and the right documentation for your agents to support the players but it's not a one-time task so how we can do do this after the prioritization is like integrating workflows underlying processes don't try to reinvent to Wheel by having a player support and PX team with their own workflow

and completely disconnected from the game studio so make sure that everyone is to working towards the same goal and can effectively collaborate to resolve issues a couple of examples on when integrating workflows we have cross functional collaboration here for example when you have something really big make sure you have like uh Strike Force teams that can help handle this issue quicker um clear communication channels so that everybody as the same information as access to the same information can handle and understand everybody's point of view then share tools and platforms don't try to block access from the rest of the team make sure everybody can contribute for it uh then we have regular sink and updates to make sure like if anything is coming up as a blocker everybody's aware and everybody can update on it and share the point of view or we could actually fix it but like this is a lot right so like how it looks like right what is the real world example here so let's go with an example uh so a player support or a

player reports an issue which will reach out to Player supports which will do the initial triage categorization data collection the DAT collection could actually be for example step to replicate a bug or context about it or for example a know device is affected number of players affected how many reports all these kind of things which is going to be helpful for keyway so the team we are collaborating with make sure you you have the enough information for them on the go so they will acknowledge and Report the issue they will try to replicate with information you have shared and then we have bi so they will provide Data Insights how to priortize the fix how many players are affected this is something very critical this is going to help the game team leadership to prioritize and timeline the fix and then we will have developers making that magic implementing the fix so that we close the loop and we get back the player as soon as possible to the game but when we look back to the PX setting up a px for a game how does it look like so you should is should in

my opinion looping the embedded Community manager and players SP early on because it will help you to brainstorm potential contact drivers uh design B flows and B replies with a tone of voice and what the community might actually be asking and they should always reiterate based ontical volume don't is not just again one time thing and they should similar to the example capture relevant information with cashm issue fields and tax to e and complement the work of kiway which is one of your biggest Partners in PX then provide the basis of analysis for ongoing issues so that the team knows what's going on with the live game how can we make it better how can we get okay yes Alicia Alicia's got one thank you hi again Andre so thank you so much for the presentation uh so when is the right time to start thinking about all of this stuff when you're developing a game you've got a million things going on you know basically at all times putting out many fires but when should you be thinking about player support and

flows and all of these things I will say preproduction just so that you have time when the game is still building up you have the time to learn the game L uh learn what the team is focusing on and what they really want to have out there and that will allow you to be you know in the goto Market time when these discussions are happening the either for community of player support or marketing itself so be very early on so that you have time to learn the game because you need to understand the game you need to understand the goal of the team and and from there you'll think outside the box of what is needed to have for the player support side and Community side of the game thank you cool anyone else got any questions no no I have one that's not related to the presentation well I mean it kind of is uh who who's your favorite Cobra Kai character come on sorry who's your favorite Cobra Kai character go on I love I love I love I love the I love the gifts so I'm massive fan of the show yeah I would like say like now I can't

remember his name now you put me on the spot so him I love Johnny he's very you know badass he's very silly and um yeah you got to have him in the presentation amazing brilliant yeah he's brilliant cool uh there's one over over there yeah um thank you very much for the presentation um so we been kind of talking about like the how to improve the player experience from the development side of view how how about like communication with the players how transparent we have to be while we're in this process what's your thought on that what the players has to be informed throughout this process that hey you're the issue that you ticketed is high prioritize we have to fix this issue ASAP versus please wait for us how transparency uh would you recommend in um in this type of situations well there's certain things you can't answer to the play which is basically when the

fix is going to be implemented um we do try to fix this as soon as possible but the transfer comes to the point where we acknowledge we appreciate the player uh bringing it up we try to fix as soon as possible either if it's something within the count we can have a support command for and just run it or then we try to see how many players are affected try to get that uh prioritized for the next release um but we always tend to compensate the player with the time they were affected so that we appreciate they bring it up we explain the situation of you know we understand this is happening and this affecting you this way and we'll compensate based on the feature that you have lost access to so for example we added someone that couldn't play Club boss uh in one of the games we G the reward for every week he missed it out because it's not on player's fault and it doesn't really hurt the economy if you think how can we compensate the player in a way that they will rewarded

if they will be accessible to the to the Game feature [Music] [Applause] [Music]