The Secrets of Community Management & Customer Service PG Connects Digital #2

Ameena from ruining aids in finland and we're gonna basically start talking about the secret of community management and customer service so really doubling down on this whole area around you know loving the user loving the player media great see and thank you for stepping in i know we we've got you two coming in relatively late notice so really appreciate you being here i will hand over to you thank you hi everyone my name is amelia Machuca like yeah i was just decided to yesterday that i was able to fill in on a short notice so cut me some slack i currently I'm the co-founder and vice

president of women in games Finland and I work at pocket and it's not recruiting app for games people so I don't directly interact anymore on a daily basis with gamers but I've been doing for community management for the past five years so I've gotten a lot of experience I'm gonna show you my presentation just a sec I'm hoping you can see it it's just going through now it's not quite come through yet not too sure why yes that's it perfect got it right yes so I have a few topics that I

wanted to touch down on and talk you a bit more about days since community management sometimes my experience is not is undervalued in a sense that sometimes I need to explain not just what I do but why the whole concept of community management when while it's needed why it exists but yeah I'm gonna talk about four things today about how what about that community management is all about listening and how quite transparency is so important and then some of the mistakes you should avoid since all of us anyway one day you will all make mistakes we all do I've made mistakes not a big one yet but let's see when that day comes then the value for the company for the game studio that's not

always so clear in everyone's mind and then since we're dealing with gamers and we all know what type of community that is on the internet how to keep your community and your ancients safe yeah let's dive in listening and transparency you should always you should never forget that you can't have a community without trust and when you have that you can build on it and then you can it will also give you three hands and you also give you a lot of power towards the users and something I would like to so you should always tell them what's going on and what's coming but you should never reveal dates because real know that something will something will

happen something they'll probably go wrong and in my experience the benefits of the hype will never balance the crash so even though you manage to build a lot of hype that you say there's this huge update coming next week on Tuesday and then something happens you have the coroner virus and you don't have you can't do it on Tuesday the players will not accept it and it will be hard for you to explain even though it makes sense but since it doesn't really matter if it makes any sense so that's why you need to have a balance between being open but not revealing too much and then something up top with colleagues and some of us have an imaginary friend like

when we have player support I know I might say that even though I'm doing both I might say that my colleague here John or Eve she will from player support she will take care of it sometimes easier for the user when they see that this is being taken seriously like two people are actually handling his even though that's not the case but this is just from my personal experience that this is working you could try this maybe it will work for you too or it won't but at least make sure that the tone of voice is coherent when you have two personalities then something about the trust your trustworthiness when you choose your nickname or the player

handle be coherent also and make sure that I make mine to be sort of personal but so that they don't reveal that much about myself I I used them based on my name but I twist them around so that you might know it's me but you might not know that it's actually actually me who's behind it but anyway you have to be your authentic self when you do this because they will sniff you when if you're faking it they will always know and then you've lost their trust and then another thing my background is in communications and in crisis communications and as you know everyone

has always always taking a screenshot so beware and don't delete stuff because someone will always be able to prove that you did that once so beware of spread shots then more about the mistakes I sort of touched upon them already um but since gamers can be one of the most toxic the best community and the worst community online I would say do not be too harsh at first on a user whose behavior is toxic because you might not know what's going on are they trolling you and then it's harder for you to help them to solve the crisis if you not that you need to take any crap I

mean that's that's different but don't lower yourself on their level that's a battle you will never never win and it's your job to be the adult here and when you have built your community based on trust and they trust you and you've been open at some point your community members will start to take care of this for you so if someone who behaves badly they will shut them down they will report them and it will make your job so much easier and also you should remember to attack them because they did your job for you and then if something passes you by that you didn't

notice or you didn't hear about it or you weren't aware because you need to listen and you need to listen when it's going on like right away is easy if the moment acid passes already you might have lost your touch and then smarter for you to solve what already went wrong so you have to be you don't have to be present all the time but you need to know what's going on next I'm going to talk about a bit about the value for the company and why well this is something I'm very passionate about of course this is my job but uh sometimes it's hard to show especially for investors if they only care about the numbers that how do you make your job as important in their eyes

as another team members remember that you have but if you start community management when the game already has a community and it has a life of its own then it's too late then you can't manage it or and you're sort of an outsider even though the community is yours so you should do this from day one and then the social features and communities impact the retention in a way that is sometimes very hard to measure but it doesn't mean that it would be less important you need to find a way to measure this you can have all these amazing analytics tools and maybe this

way it would be easier for you to make your job value it more if there's a problem in the team that they don't find you because your numbers are harder to understand and then there's also the other the other side that it's free marketing for you the social sharing in especially games but in other apps also the its importance grows every year a lot and you should never lose touch of that because it's then all of your great work if it's all for nothing if no one knows about your game and if your gamers don't talk about your game to other players then it's only your marketing that they hear from it another and this is it a good game then it doesn't have

this sort of inner hive and also in my view more and more people also play for our sense of belonging they are looking for communities they are looking for people that they have something in common it might be just this one game that they have in common they might still find people that they want to talk to and they want to play together so and I think that's really amazing and all so there are a lot of big game companies here that have had success success stories with new features in their games and the ideas came from the community and the players and they have this huge it's like this huge resource that you should never under value and when they care about your game they want you to

help develop it further and that's pretty cool and then for for the other side of the communities this is super super important and the whole team and the leadership needs to acknowledge the importance and they need to support community managers and people who work on in player support sometimes the amount of stuff that we have to listen to is overwhelming and sometimes it's when on its worst days it can be dangerous and so that's what this might be serious business so do not take this lightly and and your team should always

understand why you do this and why it's equally important as any other roles on your game team and then some practical tips always make sure that your personal information cannot be fine found online if you don't want it to be and a friend of mine who's a community manager in the game company here she had this case that her mother tagged her in a picture on Facebook and some of the toxic players found her that way so that was less than fun so make sure throw that before you start this all of your profiles are as locked as you can have them just to be on the safe side and then since my background is using crisis communications you need to have the processes ready before your mouth in

case something goes wrong because when and as you know all of these they always happen during a weekend or a holiday or you're somewhere on a boat and then everything blows up and if you don't have a plan fixing it will not be easy and then share your experiences with other community managers there are a lot of cool ways that you can do this we have here in Finland we have you have Facebook groups on informal gatherings and formal gatherings and we share experiences and and tips because we're all in this together and we all want to help our players and we all want to promote our cool games and this amazing industry where we all work in yeah I guess that's all of my what I wanted to

say and then I guess right yeah yeah so yeah you're doing perfectly fine and yeah and obviously I want to hopefully to ask questions I will myself and yeah so there's a I mean there's so much stuff you could unpack over some of this stuff I think particularly for me is the protecting your community team I think that's something that people often forget I mean I remember being involved in in the very early days in back in 98 would you believe we had a team we had to set up a process for example to deal with you know risks of grooming and adult material whatever it might be because in the UK I think it is the same lots of places possession of of inappropriate material is itself a criminal offence so if you had a machine which had the offensive material on it

if there was such a thing you know somebody shared that person is responsible so we had to set up an arrangement with the Metropolitan Police Authority in order to know what was the way our team could deal with situations like that as it happened it never happened thank goodness but if we hadn't thought about it and there was an if incident I don't want my community manager going to jail for something they didn't they weren't responsible for exactly and do you think people understand how important this out I mean just genuinely you know profoundly important some of this stuff is now they don't to be honest they don't - how do we how do we educate them sharing the experiences and telling examples I mean I've heard so many horror stories of course people only tell you the horror stories otherwise

it's not always that they also every horror story is too much exactly yeah I mean there's so many you know obviously there's issues about kind of there are very negative areas we can go into and I think even just the experience of dealing with the toxicity on some communities can be you know quite profoundly damaging to you know people's mental health and I think you know even the day to day grind of seeing arguments and messages that happen between people on a normal everyday basis can be quite debilitating if you're not looking after those that team I think yeah I think it's really it's a really tricky thing to get right as well and I think maybe it's to do with some things that table was saying you know tape it's empowering people to feel like they what

their actions and what they do is meaningful and empowering them to make decisions I think it is part of the solution and they need to be a part of the leadership and this is making process because they are very aligned exactly exactly and giving people that awareness you know because we've got a we've got a an interesting you know most of the time we're painting a back black picture the moment most of the time I think being part of a games community is a thoroughly delightful wonderful experience yes yeah and having great community managers who love the game and who appreciate the you know love the audience too and appreciate the value that the audience are getting from that game I think that's an incredibly rewarding thing for many people how do you make sure you can't do this if you don't want the game and if you don't

love your players otherwise this is not the job for you no exactly so we have a question here again from the the very prolific anonymous who's saying regarding the message along the lines of even when you reasonably explain unfortunate events to players they still won't accept it it is the ability to reason to players to take things away to break bad news etc getting easier or is it getting harder I think it's harder and the more you have features and the bigger the game gets the more invested in the game your players are yeah then again you don't want them to be not invested I mean if they don't care then there's something wrong with your game exactly but I think it's again that's a bit similar to what we've just said about me sure that you know the the community

feel like they rolls a meaningful under there they have the ability to but it feels to me like you know the more that we engage and reach out and explain ourselves in a positive way at least engage the audience in our decisions and and I think by setting boundaries that say look actually it's still the game we're making and these we have our own vision for this game but we're listening and we're appreciating what you want and we're using data to check that so I think that's to me that's really critical and we had an issue with back in the playstation home days we had a real issue because there were some features that were promised back in 2007 we launched in 2000 a and we never had them live by 2011 because they were impractical they were stupid no weren't stupid that's not fair it was more that we could only have done them if Sony had said they were going to enforce certain things with developers which they didn't and so it was a

difficult problem because we couldn't deliver these things and the oh we got such grief such grief in the press and in the community the players its community also in the industry and the media exactly yeah that wider that whole range of audiences and I think the only thing that really helped us is just being consistent and saying you know we're doing what we can do this is what we're going to do we're not going to be able to do that right now and just try to explain and we have to be honest yeah they will know immediately when you're not telling everything or they they will know especially if you lie Oh always know exactly you you never recover from that I can't fix that so I mean to me that basically says well you know what we're saying is that the community management team are essentially the the

interface between us and the players so they're basically our voice base and if we don't give them the power the management and the tall to do that in an honest an engaging and passionate way we it's as bad as if we screw up the design of the game arguably the reality is that community managers don't have enough executed power as they should have yes II think we should be prettier because they tell you without them you will not know if the features you have in the game do they actually work is the UX working or not exactly I totally agree and actually should we not be putting them at the heart of the decision-making process yeah or genu anything that we

haven't got our community management team in the middle going what was that hang on I don't know no that's not what they want on this no no it doesn't mean that we have to do everything the community say they are but as long as they are passionate you should listen to them then it's a different thing if you want to act upon it or you just want to leave as it is yeah you don't always hear what they have in mind because then it's a resource that you might lose even though it's perceived it I think even especially the idea that they have is a bad one yeah but I think if you communicate why it doesn't work yeah then generally they'll understand it but even if they don't agree you have to explain why it's not feasible yeah I think one of the things I found really

interesting you know the very pressure is is being able to say that's a lovely idea but often it's not an idea that has any commercial sense to it you know and often they but actually compromise gameplay because you know I think it's very rare that you have players who absolutely understand game design when everybody thinks they can make design games I think so yeah it's one of my biggest bugbears but but actually understand the implications of the design I think is something which takes a certain takes skill takes experience take the insight takes a certain type of brain I think hmm yes Owen have you had situations like that where you've had to sort of like steer audiences to help them understand why we're making different decisions than they want some of the decisions that you

will make are going to be unpopular ones and that's where I think your personal needs to kick in that's the way you communicate best that the message is clear and you keep it coherent and you have and you take the energy to explain it time and time and again because they will keep asking and then you just have to explain to them again why this didn't work or why we decided to go do it like this and ultimately it's the small minority that is making the noise but that's why you need to stay clear-headed they're like mostly look at the data the most of the players actually use this feature or is it that the ones who are complaining about it do you see them in

the numbers yeah and I think it's an interesting one because sometimes you get the most noisy players and they will be kind of shouting or something and yet behind the thing that they're shouting about is a real problem and I think the trick in difficulty is getting making sure that the team are listening properly what their what their meaning not necessarily what they're saying and it's I think it's one of those of you you know it when you hear it moments and it's um that's why you should share in your experience is with other community managers from other companies because it's invaluable I mean if you lose that info and you don't and you don't have the opportunity to vent to someone who actually understands what you do for a living and maybe they manage to solve this they

had the same issue a year ago so or then you figure it out together I mean that's for at least for me I couldn't do my job without the community of other community managers here and it sort of also we can test things within our community that's an interesting thing there because I think that sort of resonates generally for me which is you know the openness that you talked about earlier on the transparency I think that's a really key part of what you're saying here is we don't just transparency to the players and in internally it's actually transparency between us and other people because our community needs and wants are that different from the people's well but they are the same either there's there are parallels there are sort of elements that are consistent but

we can learn from each other much more effectively if we spend time talking yes and also you can build trust that way and maybe it's uh I think especially here in Finland we've sort of well it's the cornerstone the success of the industry here yeah okay one last quick question for you again from that anonymous guy are there any recommended third-party tools we can integrate with our game for Community Managers I think discord has the best plugins and extensions that you can have and you can use so that you don't have to do everything manually this is also something that I asked my colleagues from other companies I what tools and they all said that David for this coil but since my users at pocket hunt they are not gamers they are

industry people so for me this cord is not the right tool since they don't use it but I'm in this case I would say there there are plenty of amazing tools and most of them you can integrate nowadays with your systems it's the system that the company uses so that's that's pretty cool and I think that's one of the biggest changes in tools in the last couple couple of years made my job so much easier no I totally turned to get it I think there's all sorts of different tools I come from the name of the top of my head but there's a few new companies that are doing a lot of work around yeah I think there's a few interesting startups also working on this so you just have to figure out what your issue is what your needs are and then just Google team the

other day who are doing a whole bunch of work around machine learning so they can track key phrases and sentiment analysis but also they look for obvious disparities so for example they were showing me how the machine learning could identify grooming language yes which is like the mood yeah and not just keywords like and the tone the tone exactly the language tone I mean there's a yeah quite a kind of shocking example they gave but the point for me is like it doesn't matter what the tool is as long as you understand how you're going to use it and employ it properly but really think very concrete exactly well again thank you so much for that that's been great and again I think you know again thank you so much for dropping in the last minute are you you're you're a

little perfect it's exactly what we needed I think focusing on community management focusing on your team and delivering an authentic experience it's absolutely what it's all about Thanks my pleasure thank you very much Mitch you