“Customer Care”: Increasing User Loyalty in Cloud Gaming
Russian gaming portal Cubiq.ru has published a detailed article about Playkey’s Customer Care service. We are proud of our hard work and achievements, so we are publishing an English translation of the publication in our blog.
Maksim Kulikov, lead customer support at Playkey shares some of his observations regarding the impact of the pandemic on users’ behaviour.
The COVID-19 pandemic has had a great impact on consumer behaviour. The brands customers got to know during the pre-pandemic period got hit the worst. According to McKinsey & Company’s research, 75% of people deviated from their consumer habits and opted for different brands of goods during the pandemic.
This trend has had an impact on both the offline market players and digital companies, as the latter also had to adapt in order to keep their customers.
Playkey cloud gaming service representative shares some of the insights and experience of gaining customer loyalty and managing customer care service.
PREVENTING NEGATIVITY: ALWAYS IN TOUCH
Long lasting interaction with customers is the key to increasing LTV, one of the key metrics of any business. However, there are many instances when problems are caused by technical complexity of the product. For instance, the quality of Playkey service depends on the connection speed on the end user’s side. In fact, it is quite normal for users who are unaware of that to put the blame on Playkey. More than a third of all support issues are linked with the internet connection speed issues.
The number one factor of efficient customer care is that you need to understand your product. Use your product regularly, know how it works. Here at Playkey all of our employees are experienced gamers, so they understand the product and know how to prevent a variety of issues. Below you can find a few of the ideas that help us solve even the most complicated of cases.
Quick responses and personalization
Our care team works 24/7. Each of the tickets has its unique characteristics that need to be investigated. Our team analyzes everything from the bandwidth to hardware specifications, and this has to be done quickly.
The average time for solving a problem is 9 minutes. For comparison, 4 years ago that time was 8 hours. According to our analytics, 38% of users keep using the service if the issue is resolved within an hour.
More than just handling the incoming negativity
Our team doesn’t just respond to the feedback, we also monitor user sessions in real time and report to the developers if something goes wrong.
As soon as we solve the problem we contact the affected users, openly explain to them what went wrong and apologize. If users get disconnected for a period of time, we offer them a promo code with some extra gameplay time as a compensation.
Individualized approach
We use community-management to respond to customers in all communication channels: emails, messengers, social media. However, we do not use voice calls. Most of the inquiries require some form of logs or screenshots, discussing this via a voice call is impossible.
HOW OUR CUSTOMER CARE TEAM BUILDS LOYALTY
Approximately 10% of all incoming user contacts have some negativity. We take these cases especially seriously, we have a team member with a sole task of handling them. It is up to him to find out all the details of a problem, discuss it with the team and return with a response and compensation. Afterwards, about 50% of the users leave positive feedback and sometimes even go back to change their negative reviews.
It is also important to maintain informal language during communication with the customers. Oftentimes formal responses may appear automated to the user. Our representatives, on the other hand, are familiar with the gaming scene and can even share their own opinion on gameplay.
Building a customer profile to understand them and offer solutions to possible pain points is detrimental. There is a dedicated person in our team who finds out more about a user, their fears and preferences. This person finds out why a user chooses our service and whether they plan to play more. Here is a list of things our team member does:
- Monitors for users whose play time has decreased
We are actively looking for decline in average game time in individual users. There is a special script that monitors it 24/7. Once a decrease in activity is noticed we send a push notification or an email and offer a chat with our customer care representative.
- Communicates with users and solves problems
Our manager approaches users informally and finds out the reason why users spend less time gaming. In cases when there are issues on the technical side, the manager helps fix the issue and offers some free time to test the solution. If the issue is the cost, then the manager can even offer a personalized discount. This has proven to be a very effective approach as a significant part of such users has come back and even started gaming more.
- Sends the user feedback to product-managers
Direct communication with product managers is one of the tasks of a customer care representative. They structure and organize feedback and send it to the product managers. This is one of the ways of assuring the quality of service.
Numbers speak louder than words. Average Order Value of users who have spoken to customer care managers has gone almost 20% and the total of all purchases has gone 15% up.
TURNING TRADITIONAL CUSTOMER SUPPORT INTO A CUSTOMER CARE SERVICE
Productivity of the employees is being monitored by a higher up in the customer care team. Each month every representative has 10 of their answers reviewed with feedback given on how well they did and what can be improved. We also have a knowledge base, where we write down non standard cases and discuss them later during team meetings.
In addition to that we have our own news sources with the news from the gaming industry. This means that our team is always aware of all the latest and even upcoming news, which enables us to analyze and predict ways of improving user experience.
HOW TO INCREASE CUSTOMER LOYALTY
- Use your own product. Your team should have a clear understanding of the product and its user experience.
- Stick to informal writing. Keep it reasonable, but be approachable. Same corporate language responses and bots are stressing people out.
- Act proactively. Think about monitoring the uptime and performance of your products online. Preventing issues is way easier than dealing with the consequences. And if something does go wrong, it helps if you offer compensation to all the users who got affected, even if they did not contact the support team.
