How Wildlife Studios Saved $2.5M with Automated Ticket Solutions

Overview

Darren Murray, Senior Program Manager of Player Experience, and the rest of the team at Wildlife Studios know one thing for certain — it’s all about the player.

In the mobile gaming industry, one hiccup in the player’s journey can make or break your relationship with that user. If you respond efficiently and constructively, you’re likely to keep them satisfied and engaged with your app. However, if your customer support is lacking speed, accuracy, and empathy, you’ve likely lost a user forever.

In order to deliver a truly remarkable player experience, you must have an equally remarkable customer service offering, something that became a priority for Wildlife Studios in early 2020. Since then, the company has implemented Helpshift’s automated solutions to deploy more than 400 custom bots, achieving a QuickSearch bot deflection rate of 10.1% and solving 68% of all issues without a single human interaction.

The result? A total savings of $2,526,661 over the year-long engagement. Learn how below!

Introduction

As a leader in the mobile gaming industry, Wildlife Studios currently serves billions of players worldwide across 60 different games. With an emphasis on player experience and engagement, the gaming giant needed to create a seamless customer support journey to keep users satisfied without leaving the app.

They turned to Helpshift’s software development kit to customize a variety of automated solutions across their portfolio of games, including in-app mobile messaging, in-app native FAQs, and more.

The Challenge

Supporting a growing number of monthly users, Wildlife Studios’ support team became flooded with support tickets on a daily basis. If they wanted to keep up with their current growth trends, they realized the need to introduce automation into their customer support function, ultimately moving away from email and web assistance and toward complete in-app resolution.

Yet everywhere they looked, they struggled to find a balance between customization and ease of integration. Few solutions offered custom bots, and those that did required extensive code to create and deploy the bots in a timely, effective manner.

“It was easy to envision ways we could use Helpshift to support our players and the options were limitless, our creativity could roam free. But with other companies, we saw a ton of limitations and really couldn’t have the player journey we truly wanted. Again, custom bots and automation played the biggest role.”

The Solution

With a primary effort to increase automated resolutions, Wildlife Studios partnered with Helpshift to create more than 400 custom bots that lead customers through self-help solutions in every contact. In doing so, Wildlife Studios modernized its customer support journey in the following steps:

1. User Intents — Customize the automated experience to the player by understanding their reason for reaching out to support.
2. API Bot Integration — Provide instant recommendations and answers to common questions related to account restoration, item restoration, and matchmaking through a variety of API bots.
3. In-App Messaging — If the player needs additional service, connect them with an expert through in-app messaging to resolve the problem using the right combination of service and automation.
4. In-App Feedback — Instantly gain insight into the player’s experience with in-app CSAT surveys immediately following service.

Because they didn’t require code to deploy, the company seamlessly created customizable solutions for specific issues. Among other automated solutions, Wildlife Studios also introduced in-app native FAQs, and Helpshift’s AI powered QuickSearch bot which serves up to top 3 most relevant FAQs providing a last chance for players to self service before proceeding to create a support issue.

What’s more, Wildlife Studios took advantage of Helpshift’s growing product base to embed the Helpshift Unity package into their new games to offer full-service automation solutions.

“Helpshift is willing to learn and grow with its users, we provide feedback to their roadmap and our voice is heard. We’ve just completed our first year using Helpshift, the growth of the platform in that year has been substantial. We’ve received so many new tools and features that have assisted us on our mission to offer exceptional player experiences.”

The Success

Wildlife Studios achieved a 10.1% QuickSearch Bot Deflection rate, helping them solve 68% of issues completely with custom bots. This has resulted in average monthly savings of $100,000 through the first year of the engagement. Even more encouraging, those automated resolutions are growing, as 97% of issues were assigned to a custom bot in Q3 of 2021. What’s more, Wildlife Studios achieved a 98% FAQ deflection using their in-app native FAQ.

Because these mundane tasks are now automated, Wildlife Studios has also increased meaningful interactions between users and agents, giving agents the bandwidth to solve complex problems and create productive solutions.

“Due to our level of automation, it means our agents are targeting the issues that they can directly handle and deal with, this means that their productivity is more meaningful. Another bi-product of our automation being high is that we deflect a lot of tickets! This leads to significant cost savings as automation is, of course, cheaper than an agent.”

By the Numbers

• Total Savings of $2,526,661
• 10.1% QuickSearch Bot Deflection Rate
• 98% FAQ Deflection
• 68% of Issues Resolved by Bots ($100,000/Month Savings)
• 97% of Issues Assigned to Custom Bot in Q3 2021