5 Tips for Keeping Players in the Game
We recently held a Game Changers Circle with over a dozen support experts from leading brands in gaming like Melsoft, Playdemic, Gram Games, Hutch Games, and Wooga. Our goal for this round table was to learn from the smart people in the gaming support trenches around the world.
We tackled strategies for supporting players, how to get more out of FAQs, pairing bots with agents, optimizing games, and using data to be more proactive. Here’s a roundup of the best tips from these player support pros:
1. Focus on the experience, not the tickets.
Chris at Playdemic, the makers of Golf Clash, kicked off the conversation by stressing that customer support is not a race to reduce the number of tickets. The real goal is to create a frictionless player experience and to increase engagement. Because, every second spent in-game has a direct impact on revenue: the more they play, the more they spend.
One of the best ways for game designers and support teams to stay in touch with player needs is to monitor conversations in gaming communities. This can provide an authentic source of player feedback and reveal the real issues plaguing players. If you rely on tickets to surface and prioritize problems, you might be one ticket too late.
2. Don’t set and forget your FAQs.
The creators of a popular zombie game brought up the critical importance of FAQ hygiene. It’s not enough to make FAQs available. They should also be regularly updated to address new issues. To stay on top of FAQ improvements, it’s a good practice to identify the words most often searched by players, within the app, that are not yet covered in the FAQs. Then, ensure answers to these questions are quickly added to the FAQ base.
Matt from Hutch Games, the brains behind fun, car-themed mobile games like Rebel Racing and H1 Manager, weighed in on the importance of making your FAQs available in-app. Players want to play. If your FAQs are stale or they have to leave the game in search of answers, there’s a really good chance they’ll never return.
3. Create harmony between bots and agents.
When it comes to introducing bots and automation, another popular gaming company revealed that they only had one big regret: that they didn’t automate sooner. At the moment, they’re using bots to collect data from players that’s then sent on to agents. The makers of a football video game added that custom bots were very helpful when they started, but lately they swear by Helpshift’s QuickSearch Bot, which gives players a conversational way to find answers to FAQs.
After using bots for over a year, Egor at Melsoft, the creators of My Cafe and Family Island, thinks they’re most effective when paired with agents, especially for payment issues. In his opinion, players should be routed to an agent after 4-5 bot touches, otherwise they start to disengage from the conversation.
4. Use data to be proactive vs. reactive.
Another big gaming company thinks most of the answers to improving the player experience lie in the data you already have. With this, you can easily predict when there will be an influx of tickets and a need to scale up support.
Richard at Wooga, the makers of June’s Journey and Pearl’s Peril, underscored the importance of combining the SDK and game data to predict when they can expect a spike in support issues.
5. Know that players are the most demanding app users.
We learned a lot from the Game Changers conversation. The biggest takeaway, overall, is this: gamers are the most creative, enthusiastic, impatient, and demanding users of any app. They’re raising the bar and setting new expectations for all mobile experiences, including gaming, social media, entertainment, and learning. So, if you design the best experience for players, you’ll be ahead of the game in the new user-centric era.
Find out how Helpshift can help you level up your player experience. Schedule a Helpshift demo.
