Achieving 4.5 CSAT While Resolving 2X the Industry Average of Tickets per Agent – The Recipe for Social Quantum’s Modern Support Journey

Goal

Social Quantum’s goal was to decrease player churn rate by enhancing the player support journey while giving the product and development team the tools to make the best product possible.

Overview 

What is the one thing we all dread in the mobile app industry? User churn. It will make you question the validity of your product and the value of what you’re providing to the market. User churn also has a direct impact on lost revenue. Korzhevsky Gennadiy, Head of Player Support at Social Quantum, took the challenge of combating this personally. They wanted to develop products that modeled user engagement and boosted user retention. 

Their origin dates back to 2010 when the basis of their app journey begins. Since its inception, Social Quantum has become one of the world’s leading mobile game developers. They have developed apps such as Wild West: New Frontier and Megapolis, which garnered the position of being one of the 10 grossing apps on both app platforms combined in 2013. With 12 support heroes (agents) they aim to deliver best-in-class support to players. By handling 20k tickets per month in 12 different languages for 3 different apps, they assist over 100 million players. They knew it was important to “build great products and make games your players love”. 

Before Helpshift

Before taking Social Quantum to the next level, there were growing pains that led to the need for some changes. Gennadiy was responsible for their old help desk system that was built in-house and got the job done at the time. However, it was a very basic email ticketing system. As a mobile game company, Social Quantum needed to serve their customers where they were and keep them in the game, not send them to their email inbox! They needed a holistic in-app support system.

The method was also extremely time and resource-consuming which required their developers to build and maintain their own system instead of focusing on the core of their business: game development. There was a clear need for an external robust and scalable tool to handle the influx of support tickets as the company grew. This is where Helpshift came into use. By implementing the new system, it kept the business up to date with the latest features and innovations in the industry, allowing them to stay ahead of their competitors and providing the best in-app support experience. 

It proved to be easy to integrate the in-app support tool Social Quantum was looking for. Instead of being the typical “Player Support” department that most apps utilize, Gennadiy wanted Social Quantum to become the true “Voice of the Customer”. Thus, feedback provided by the customers  became actionable items for game designers and product managers to build a better product roadmap.

When deciding which company would help take Social Quantum to the forefront of player support innovation, the decision was based on the direction the company wanted to go. Gennadiy wanted the company to move away from email responses and more towards a total in-app experience for the user. Compared to Zendesk, they did not have the in-app SDK or features that reflected the changes needed for the company. If Social Quantum wanted to remain within the email support realm, the possibility of Zendesk being the answer could’ve been entertained. Helpshift proved to have features that were more advanced and in-app which aligned with the support Gennadiy wanted the users to experience. Keeping user retention in mind, there was no hesitation in selecting Helpshift as the solution. Agents now handle 89% of issues via in-app messaging and only 3% via email. Keeping the players in the app and providing them with stellar service in-app was the ultimate goal. 

Solution

Social Quantum are early adopters of all the latest technologies and features to always stay ahead of their competitors while offering state-of-the-art support to their players. They utilize the Modern Support Journey in its entirety. 

FAQs: The support journey for Social Quantum starts with having an effective FAQ in place. As the first point of defense, about 90% of players who open FAQs don’t open a ticket. That is a 90% deflection rate which in layman’s terms means if the app has 10,000 issues arise in a month, then 9,000 of those issues are deflected (or if 10,000 users visit FAQs, only 1,000 become issues). The key to this is to have the foundation of a resourceful and thorough FAQ in place. It is very important to never lose sight of the room for improvement by ensuring consistent updates, insight review, and researching reports to aid in furtherance. Social Quantum has the highest number of issues reported via Smart FAQ of all our customers: more than 2500 Smart FAQ issues in 4 months. ~600 to 650 issues per month. Some Smart FAQs (created via web browser) issues have ~7% increase in CSAT compared to overall issues CSAT for Social Quantum 

Smart Intents: If there is still a need for the user to submit a support ticket, Smart Intents helps categorize the issue and route it to the correct bot or agent. In the system, reports can be reviewed to ensure the effectiveness of Smart Intents and selections can be made based on the business or support team’s needs. 75% of all Social Quantum tickets are started with Smart Intents. Social Quantum suggests monthly reviews be done to make sure if there is room for improvement, these changes are implemented. Say, for instance, a new feature is introduced to the gaming experience – Smart Intents provides that information to the player. 

“We are now able to understand most of the issues incoming and provide fast solutions for the issue”.

Custom Bots: A critical role in the support journey that aids in helping Support staff better handle issues. More than 36% of all incoming tickets are fully resolved by bots while more than 38% are partially automated with the highest CSAT of 4.23. Data about the player is gathered to provide a personalized response that takes into account the platform, build number/version of the app, language, and country. 

Queues: If the issue can’t be resolved by the measures listed above, it will be assigned to agents and placed in queues. Prioritization is given to paid users to ensure they get the fastest response available so they can get back to their gaming experience. Expectations can be set for each queue on when the players can expect a response. For paid users, within 5 hours priority support is rendered and within 24 hours for the free users. By providing these expectations up front, players know what to expect and tend to have a better experience with the product. This also will allow issues to be routed and prioritized correctly based on the player/user value. 

Agent Desktop: Not only is the customer kept in mind, the agents are kept in mind as well. With the tools of a modern platform, it is much easier to answer and handle many issues. All important data is given to tickets with meta-data and logs are attached with all pertinent player information to check internally. The productivity of the agents linked to the agent desktop with a very convenient tool to work with tickets handled roughly 1600 tickets a month.

Feedback Bots: Once the support ticket is resolved, the journey does not stop there. Feedback bots are assigned to make sure the user is satisfied and if not, tickets are re-opened and assigned to a team leader for follow-up. If anything less than 4 stars is received, the options for rectification range from sending new responses to the player to working with the agents on improving the handling of tickets. 

Analytics: A very important piece of the process is using analytics to make sure a healthy system is in process. Real-time operations as well to make sure the KPIs in place are being met. 

“With the Modern Support Journey, gamers can get back to playing the game faster and agents can handle a larger volume of support tickets.”

Ecosystem Integrations 

Discord: With the Discord integration, players can submit tickets directly via Discord and agents are able to answer directly in Helpshift. Social Quantum’s channel has 5K members. It may not be huge, but some players use the feature a lot. It is much better to build a community on Discord than on Facebook and their players like to stay on Discord. It is a much more powerful tool and is the most convenient way to communicate with them. Social Quantum has a channel called “Official Ticket” to receive support tickets. There is also a lot of peer-to-peer resolution and most issues are being solved by the community. They also have admins who can be mentioned and asked for help, but 95% of questions and issues are being resolved by active community members and moderators. 

AppFollow: AppFollow is the best tool for tracking and responding to reviews. The integration made it much easier for Social Quantum to do so. After the integration, the Megapolis app rating in Google Play increased by 0.50 points.

• 15% of reviews actually change reviews/ratings to be more positive after receiving a reply from support.
• The support team responds to all tickets the same way they respond to regular tickets sent to support agents. They send the reviews with 1, 2, and 3-star ratings in Helpshift. 
• Social Quantum didn’t reply to reviews at all before the integration. They didn’t want to give access to Google Play console or Apple Store to agents because of safety and because it was too hard to track. It’s too difficult to manage from different platforms and track the agent’s work. Now they track the review process much better and actually answer app store reviews.

Slack: The integration with Slack is primarily being utilized as an alert system for when there is a spike in issues. If more issues are submitted than usual within 10 minutes, an alert triggers in Slack and they review what’s causing it. This is used to quickly identify when there is a mass issue and they escalate this issue immediately to the developer team. It allows them to be much more nimble and fix product issues much faster than in the past.

Results 

The improvement based on utilizing Helpshift’s product(s) has been monumental. The product and development teams are now able to identify which bugs have the most criticality and in turn, now know where to prioritize efforts. This helps the company deliver a better product overall to the market and user. Fewer bugs mean fewer issues that take the players away from gaming and less frustration. The addition of custom issue fields helps the agent categorize tickets when resolving the problem. Each week, reports are reviewed and statistics are made based on the current Support status. Helping identify root causes for recurring player pain points aids in detecting patterns and areas of opportunity before negative feedback is received from the users. This includes broken processes, inefficient policies, and training gaps on the internal side. All data gathered helps empower the Support team/agents which adds to easing the everyday demands on their job. 

Through Helpshift, a 0.3% contact rate was achieved (industry benchmark: 1.2%). This is monumental because some games need heavy support but low contact is always the main goal. The higher the contact rate, the more issue volume Support Teams see, which strains resources and productivity. The snowball effect this has can result in longer waiting times which leads to a low CSAT. Contact rates by themselves are best kept low.
After utilizing Helpshift, the CSAT score was 4.52, while the industry benchmark is 4.0. The time to first response was just 1.52 hours while the industry benchmark is an entire 24 hours. The industry benchmark for issues resolved per agent is roughly 700 per month, and Social Quantum agents were able to resolve 1600 issues per agent. One of the most impressive KPIs is the volume of tickets increased from 10k to 20k YOY but the number of agents remained the same. They were able to achieve this with quick replies and bots that are easily deployable and even easier to use, which work together with smart intents, allowing them to be very effective. The deflection rate was 90% which is 15% more than the industry average. Social Quantum was able to create high-functioning FAQs where 90% of their players were able to find a solution without needing to submit a ticket. We were able to help Social Quantum save over $1M ($1,034,732) from Feb ‘21 to Feb ‘22.

By the Numbers

• 1600 issues resolved per agent per month
• 4.52 CSAT score
• 1h52 TTFR (time to first response)
• 90% deflection rate
• $1M saved in one year
• Contact rate (issues created as % of MAU): 0.3%