This article was originally published on The PX Hub, my personal blog specializing in content on Player Experience in game development. Find insights, best practices and handy tips to help you ensure your players stay happy and engaged. If you want to stay updated on more Player Experience content, consider subscribing to the newsletter.
One of the more common questions I receive from people in newly-formed studios is how would I set up Player Support (PS) Operations for success. More often than not my answer ends up being “it depends”, as there are so many different factors to keep in consideration. No game or studio is ever the same. This means that there is no clear-cut answer, no secret formula for certain success.
Yet, there are a couple of components you should add to your proverbial toolbox to increase the probability of succeeding. This blog post will touch on a set of key building blocks for creating killer Player Support Operations at your studio:
CRM software that suits the needs of your audience and your PS team
a PS administration portal to manipulate player profile data
a full analytics overview and KPI dashboards
a PS Playbook that contains guidelines, policies and describes your voice
a public localised knowledge base with FAQs
Automations and/or Bots to help you with menial tasks
a closed player feedback loop
For the sake of simplicity, this series of blog posts will not cover team-building. How to build and grow efficient Player Support teams merits its own series of posts, which I will tackle at a later point. To make sure you do not miss out on these future blog posts, sign up to The PX Newsletter.
1) CRM Software
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software allows you to receive, categorise and respond to player messages. Recent CRM software is often powered with automated features, segmentation capabilities, workflow management, machine learning and analytics features, to name a few. Many also offer in-app support solutions (integration via SDK), which seem to be best suited for mobile game studios, and integrate with many popular channels. While most promise a plug-and-play concept, integration, new features and regular maintenance require technical expertise.
When shopping for CRM software, you need to keep a couple of things in mind. Without a doubt, the most important points are:
Ease-of-use by the end-user (both player and PS specialist)
Ease-of-integration and customisation
A fit for your need and that of your audience
The three points above are by no means the only criteria but will get you a better bang for your buck.
2) A PS Administration Portal
Communicating with your players is likely the most important thing. Being able to help them out is even better.
Administration portals or consoles allow Player Support specialists to manipulate and/or search for player profile data to solve support requests. You do not want to call on a developer each time a request requires more support than a simple reply. Most consoles are a visual representation of profile data with a layer of functionalities added on top. These will allow your specialists to link accounts with identifiers, manage scores or in-game resources, reset player progress, etc. Do not resort to support agents making changes straight into a JSON file! Ever!
New game features often need new administrative functions or changes to existing ones, so plan adequate resources to update your portal or console.
The most common actions PS specialists need to perform:
Search for player profiles
Adjust basic player profile data
Recover player profiles
Gift in-game resources
Depending on feature-depth, the number of functionalities required differs from game to game.
Image by Brandon Serna Correa from Pixabay
Image by Brandon Serna Correa from Pixabay
3) Analytics and KPI Dashboards
Collecting data on player behaviour is key to improving your game. This is especially true in both the mobile and free-to-play space. Make sure you track the performance of your PS operations. But, measure what matters. Often, companies get too granular about the type of data they collect and look at. Yet, without data, you will not be able to figure out what goes on under the hood. You will not figure out which specialists need help or which topic is driving your contact rate up.
Ensure you have dashboards that show agent performance and high-level operational metrics. Measure at the very least:
Contact rate
Time to first reply
