Customer Success Spotlight: Best Practices for Supporting Mobile Games

The Customer Success Spotlight is a monthly blog post offering industry insights, best practices, and benchmarks for customer service professionals based on commonly asked questions. This month we sat down with Samantha Pang, Helpshift’s Senior Manager of Customer Success, to learn some tips and tricks about how mobile gaming companies can best support their players. 

Q: We’re new to providing in-app support. What are some of the first steps we should take to prepare our team and our player base?

Samantha Pang (SP): The first thing you should do is think about how you’re going to staff your support team. You want to staff around volume, so you need to think about how many tickets you expect your agents to handle per hour. Then, look at your traditional channels. With Helpshift, you’ll be able to deflect more issues — in fact, with the switch to in-game support, you can assume your incoming ticket volume will decrease by 20 percent to start.

Additionally, “in-app” is very different from traditional channels like email, and players will have different expectations that need to be managed carefully. Players may think that messaging is the same as live chat. One way to manage this expectation is to set up an automation to respond immediately with a message such as: “Thank you for reaching out to us, an agent will get back to you within x-hours.”

Lastly, leverage your social channels, such as Facebook and the Forum, to inform your users that you’re moving to a new in-app support channel. There should also be an FAQ explaining how to contact support from within the game.

Q: Where do I start to build out my knowledge base?

SP: First, think of the categories you’d like to have fleshed out that will encourage your players to self-serve. Standard sections include categories like account issues, billing, and gameplay questions. Try to include keywords that you know your players will most likely search for.

Additionally, break out gameplay questions into subcategories focused on core components of the game. For instance, character-focused games should have subsections for characters.

We also recommend adding “Current Known Issues” and “What’s New/Game Updates” sections to increase ticket deflection when there are bugs or major updates to the game. This will allow you to communicate in a one-to-many way with your players and prevent them writing in about the same issues.

Q: Could you share some best practices for writing FAQs?

SP: Focus on the language and tone. Remember, your players are reading FAQs on their mobile device, so keep it short, concise—and replace long answers with screenshots or videos. Helpshift’s search is semantic and automatically renders relevant results (like a Google search), so it always helps to incorporate the right words. You can also set keywords to strengthen the search function right in your FAQ.

Q: What are some common mistakes to avoid when offering in-app support?  

SP: You definitely want to avoid setting the wrong expectations like making it seem equivalent to live chat or email. Players need to have push notifications enabled in order to be alerted when an agent has responded. Additionally, you need to think about your workflows thoroughly and make sure they are reasonable. For example, set the right time to first response and time to resolve targets so agents have clear and attainable objectives.

Q: Do you have tips for optimizing my dashboard?

SP: In order to optimize your dashboard, you should implement these best practices:

• Set up Automations to most efficiently route incoming issues
• Set up Time-based Automations to maintain SLAs for getting back to your players and closing out issues if you don’t hear back from them
• Maintain your targeted time to resolve by closing out issues and keep your backlog clean
• Route email issues into Helpshift from other support aliases
• Customize your Web Contact Us form to collect more information upfront
• Use Queues to route and auto-assign issues to your agents based on their skill set and availability

Q: What are important metrics I should keep track of, and what are the main industry benchmarks?

SP: For FAQ metrics, you want to aim for:

• Read FAQs = 1.5x the volume of Opened Help so that at least one FAQ is read
• Reported Issues = 10 percent of Opened Help which would mean that you’re deflecting 90 percent of issues

Other important metrics include:

• Time to first response (non-VIP): 24h
• Time to first response (VIP): 12h
• Time to resolve: 5 days, or set a benchmark that makes sense for your operations
• CSAT: ideally, 4 out of 5, but anything above 3.5 out of 5 is considered good for gaming. We all know that players can be difficult to please!

Best practices don’t end here. Check out 4 Tactics for Best Customer Service Responses in Mobile Gaming for examples of how to craft exceptional, personalized responses, and read 5 Key Insights on Providing Scalable Support to learn how you can apply Melsoft’s strategies to keep your mobile user base strong.