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Exploring the Evolution of Customer Support with Veronica Rose
155 Plays1 year ago
In this engaging episode of the Player Engage Podcast, host Greg welcomes Veronica Rose, a seasoned customer support expert with an impressive background at companies like Bose, WB Games, and Vecna Robotics. Veronica shares insightful experiences from her journey in customer support, starting with her time at Bose. She discusses the unique challenges of supporting high-end audio products and the nuances of catering to a discerning customer base.
Shifting gears to her role at WB Games, Veronica delves into managing support teams for beloved video games such as Lord of the Rings Online and Dungeons and Dragons Online. Her stories from this period highlight the intricate balance of maintaining player satisfaction and managing game-related support complexities.
Veronica's career path then leads her to Vecna Robotics, a pioneering warehouse robotics company. Here, she confronts a whole new set of challenges in supporting robotic forklifts. She details the criticality of advocating for the user in such a high-tech environment and discusses her strategic decision to outsource support, partnering with Keywords Studios to assemble a team adept at handling the company’s sophisticated support requirements.
A key theme throughout the episode is the significance of proactive customer support and establishing strong connections with customers. Veronica recounts a particularly moving story about transforming a player's negative behavior into a positive gaming experience, illustrating the profound impact of empathetic and effective support.
This episode is a treasure trove of knowledge for anyone in the realm of customer support, offering a deep dive into the dynamic nature of support across various industries and reinforcing the timeless principle of prioritizing the customer's needs. Veronica's wealth of experience and wisdom makes this a must-listen for professionals in the support sector and those aspiring to join this vital field.
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Transcript
Introduction and Guest Background
00:00:00
Speaker
Hey, everybody. Welcome to the Player Engage Podcast. Greg here. Today we're joined by Veronica Rose. Veronica has a rich background in customer support, working at companies such as Bose, WB Games, and Vecna Robotics.
Career Beginnings at Bose
00:00:13
Speaker
I'm excited to hear about the growth, how that works, how you just look at customer support. Before I go any further, Veronica, thank you very much for joining us today. You want to do a little introduction of yourself? Sure. Hi, I'm Veronica Rose. I have been all of those things.
00:00:30
Speaker
My focus though is just customer support and
00:00:34
Speaker
And the growth path of everyone in that career path, I don't know. Customer support. And there's a lot going on. Support. Sorry. I can do that again. Don't be sorry. This is the whole conversation thing. Camera fights here. It's going to take forever, Greg. I'm sorry. No, it's not. And then we could just have the time. So it's an interesting concept because I started my career in customer support. And it was a nightmare to me. I was on the phones getting, and we also kind of,
00:01:04
Speaker
With Bose, I'm interested on what the career was like at Bose. But from my career path, we were in the financial sector. And when services went down with someone trying to trade stocks in the stock market, it was a nightmare to call and yell at you and be not nice. And it was sad for me. But for Bose, which is an awesome company, you can make headphones. You make all audio devices. Well, what's customer support like at Bose? Well, I can tell you what it was like, because I believe that
00:01:33
Speaker
since I left there in the interim years, they have outsourced all of their support, which is unsurprising as they're in the Massachusetts area. That's where their support was. So it's pretty expensive here. It was an interesting job. I started working there as a customer support agent
00:02:00
Speaker
Uh, slash tech support agent because I worked overnights during the holidays and it was, Oh my goodness.
Challenges at Bose Support
00:02:09
Speaker
It was them having their commercials on TV at like 3 AM and people would call and just be like, Hey, tell me about this, this bozy system. Or like, uh, I would like to learn more about your digital radios. So I.
00:02:26
Speaker
I learned a lot because I was not really that big of a, like a speaker head or, you know, people who were, who were big into Bose, but I met some really great people working there and being third shift, like there's like five of you and you get, you get to be really close and you learn how great customer support can be in that, in that small environment.
00:02:50
Speaker
At that point, was it purely phone support, email support, something else as well, or is it really those? Thank you for thinking I'm that old. Hey, who said rotary dial, you know, smoke signals? We had to do everything in sign language because there were no talkies back then. No, it was mostly phone support, though, because they would run the ads.
00:03:19
Speaker
It was actually, it was 2007.
Emotional Aspects of High-Value Sales
00:03:23
Speaker
So it was right around the time that Hurricane Katrina had happened in the South and all of these ads were running in the South. And like as a human, I felt really bad because I'm like, these people have like literally lost everything. And here I am trying to sell them $1,000 stereo.
00:03:43
Speaker
I think, you know, it's that it's personal choice. I'm sure there are people have money for $1,000 serious, but it did feel really like not great sometimes where they were like, I think maybe if I put it on a credit card, I could do this. And I, you know, that that's
Popular Bose Products and Customer Interaction Joy
00:04:00
Speaker
the part that that I did not love. The part that I did love was, you know, when an older person would call and they would they would be so excited that they had this, like,
00:04:12
Speaker
they had the money finally for this, like, this elite brand of radio and they were going to show it to their kids at Christmas, that kind of thing. It's the funniest thing I remember growing up. Everyone had the bows, was it like the wave something or what it was? Like the wave radio. It was like the hottest item and it just feels so antique now even thinking about it. Yeah. Yeah. I see them every once in a while and like, you know, if you go to like a,
00:04:41
Speaker
like a small shop where like the, it's just like a little independently owned thing. There's usually one in the, on the back wall that they're listening to. Cause they do, they are excellent sound. And I think at the end of the holiday season, I got the acoustic wave, which is the taller wave radio, the, I don't know, I don't even know how much they are. Cause I was never in the market for one. But, and then we also got the, um, the quiet comfort headphones.
00:05:10
Speaker
The ones that are noise canceling. Those are amazing. They don't make the, the on ear ones that I had have because I still own them. Excellent. If you want really good headphones. See, you still got the little sales. Just call this number. We'll get you set up.
Transition to Turbine
00:05:29
Speaker
So from there, you love customer support. You find turbine. Yeah. So I started looking because my kids at the time were
00:05:40
Speaker
around three and five. I was done living the overnight life while having kids who were starting to get into school because it's hard to get home at 7am, put them on the bus, sleep for a little bit, wake up and you know. So I started looking for something different and my husband was at a poker game with his buddies and one of those guys happened to work for turbine.
00:06:10
Speaker
And he said, Hey, you know, we're hiring for customer support. You know, Veronica could do that. And I was like, I like, uh, I like Ashran's call. One of my favorite video games. And, uh, I applied and I, it was like, it was like that to get the job. Like it was not hard at all. I was like, I don't know what people complain about. Little did I know that it is actually very hard sometimes to get hired into video games. So yeah, that was.
Career Growth and Expanded Roles at Turbine
00:06:40
Speaker
I mean, that was how I, how I came to, to go to turbine was that I, I wanted a customer support position and I liked their product. Yeah. And that turbine, you held a number of different roles, right? So you started off at customer support, I think are all probably falls under the customer support branch, right? Is this when you were first exposed to like the different parts of customer support as well? Yeah.
00:07:03
Speaker
It was, it was mostly, so when I started, it was in-game support. So I was the person who, if you were playing Lord of the Rings online and you accidentally deleted your pony, that you were submitting a ticket in game. And, and I would, I would tell you like, Hey, sorry. Um, well, when I started, Hey, sorry, I can't give you back your pony because you've already gotten one item reimbursed to you because at that time, and I don't
00:07:32
Speaker
It's not the rule anymore. So I guess I can say it that you were allowed one item to be reimbursed over the lifetime of your account. So as long as you were a player, you can only have one, which personally, I was like, this is ridiculous. Like one thing. Yes. I get that. Like when you delete your pony, you have to like drag it into the middle of the screen, let it go.
00:07:59
Speaker
accept the delete thing and then go, Oh, no, I deleted my pony. But it happened apparently a lot. Never underestimate people. So so that was my first job was Game Master. And we all had our we all had names that
00:08:22
Speaker
was like pseudonyms, I guess. And so I created the pseudonyms. You can know it now, but you couldn't when I worked there. I was plus dust because I wanted people to think I was insignificant. I don't want you, I don't want you to hate me. Look, I'm just dust insignificant. Also, people were wondering if I was male or female forever. There were arguments on Brandywine of whether or not I was male or female. Got to love gamers.
00:08:46
Speaker
I know, yes. I always tell them that there's no such thing as girls on the internet. And then of course they would go like, I told you, that's a dude. And the other people would be like, no, she's a woman. But yeah, so that was the first stop. And then senior game master. So where I started teaching the new, the new game masters, the ropes, and then from there I became, uh, I think I went to fraud support where, um,
00:09:16
Speaker
If you said, hey, I didn't mean to make this purchase, we could go look and see if you used all the stuff. If you did chargebacks to your account but you still wanted to play, it would come to us and we would work through that with you. And then from there, I became a manager of in-game support. And then a senior manager where I was the head of all of the things.
00:09:46
Speaker
social media and in game support and support and tech support. Do it all. Yeah, yeah, whatever I can I can do it. So it must be this kind of shell shock for lack of better words. You know, I remember, again, being a customer support agent, and at the end of the day, I'd look at the board and say, I closed 30 tickets today, 50 tickets today, I feel good. And then you become a manager. And it's not
00:10:14
Speaker
same type of number counting. It's not always easy to feel like you've got things accomplished that day. How did you like that transition? Did it take you time to grow into it? Yeah, it took me a long time because the support organization for WB was not huge. I mean, you think of WB as this huge company. They do
00:10:41
Speaker
movies and VHS and and and and But each of them each of the parts of it are pretty well separated and So there were maybe 20 people at the most ever within the support team and So there weren't a lot of mentors. I mean I had my boss, but we were sort of growing up in tandem and
00:11:12
Speaker
And so the stuff that we learned was the stuff that we learned together. So when I had, when I had people become supervisors and managers under me, it was one of the first conversations that I had with them is that like, one, the people who are your peers now are now working for you. And you, you don't keep the same relationship. You want to, because you want to still be the same.
00:11:41
Speaker
But it is very much for the first maybe six months you go, what do I even do here? Because I don't have that number at the end of the day to prove that I've done a good job. So you don't have that ticket count or that feel good like, oh, I talked to a customer and it was awesome interaction. Usually if you have to talk to a customer at that point, it's because it's not an awesome interaction.
00:12:09
Speaker
So just to kind of fill in the blank, right? Turbine was, was it acquired by WB games or it became just WB Boston? No, you're good. Just for people listening, just to clear it up and how it went down. It was acquired by WB games, I believe it was 2012. And it was, it was around the time that WB had just come into gaming as, as had started buying up a bunch of studios. And so the, the,
00:12:39
Speaker
The only studio that really had like a really fleshed out support staff was what is now WB Games Boston. So that was Turbine. And they kept the Turbine name for a few years after WB bought them. And so a lot of the other studios, so like Netherrealm Studio that does Mortal Kombat would use
00:13:08
Speaker
Boston as their support team. So we would, we would work with them when they came out with a new game or there was a bug or people needed to be delivered a new Raiden costume or things like that. Montreal, Avalanche, Rocksteady, Playdemic when it was part of it.
Impact of WB Games Acquisition
00:13:29
Speaker
We worked with Playdemic a little bit. They were more separated, but all of these things together would use our support in some ways.
00:13:36
Speaker
Very cool. So now you're getting visibility across kind of the gaming world, right? It's been a number of years you're in there and, you know, you start managing these teams and building teams, right? When do you start formulating these strategies on what works and what doesn't work in customer support? Because there's also this kind of interesting transition over the time where things become more digital, right? Of course, they were always digital, but there's less phones, there's more emails, chat starts kicking in, like different types of things. And then
00:14:02
Speaker
all these strategies that exist today probably started being thought about back then, like VIP type of stuff and things like that. So when do you kind of start thinking about all this stuff? Yeah, so I think it was. Oh, my goodness, I want to say it was right around the time that. Maybe. So when we sold off the MMOs, so we sold them to Daybreak, so we sold MMOs because
00:14:32
Speaker
there was, we were shifting from this sort of old style of gaming to mobile gaming. And that was when Game of Thrones Conquest was going to launch. And so we had with the MMOs, Lord of the Rings Online and Dungeons and Dragons Online, we had phone support. So if you had an account question, you could call us. And then in-game support, you could email only or
00:15:01
Speaker
not email, it was in-game chat. So we had different ways that you could contact us. And when we shifted to this sort of mobile game strategy, we kept the phones open because we were like, well, it's a phone. So like they'll want to call us, right? If they have a problem with their game. And I think we left the phone open for like three months and we got a voicemail.
00:15:30
Speaker
like one. That was it. And that was how I learned that people like to play on their phones and not talk on their phones. So yeah, it was a huge leap for us as just this tiny sort of support staff, because most of the games that we have are email support. They have. It's still a part of me.
00:15:57
Speaker
And so it's mostly email support. There's not even at least at the time that I exited, there was no sort of strategy for like, let's move on to just like SMS or let's move on to something like larger, a different kind of strategy because email support seems to work well for WB.
00:16:20
Speaker
What Veronica may or may not remember is that in 2020, I was on the email thread with her as a sales engineer for Helpshift, trying to sell WB Helpshift, but they were very, very content with their Zendesk strategy, which fair, I understand, but can I get with the time? Sorry, Greg.
00:16:40
Speaker
Yeah, I can tell sabotage. No, but you know, it's fascinating, right? Because I mean, it's funny, we're almost going full circle. We have a number of customers that are reopening their phone lines because they're looking at things like VIP support. And how do you provide that better experience for your new gamers? And
00:16:56
Speaker
everything in my life I'm looking at right now seems like we're going full circle. Like, hey, we did that. Oh, nope, we're going back to what it was like. And it seems like it's more personalized. Yes, I'd rather do chat. I think chat is easier. I don't want to talk on the phone. But if I'm a very important player to someone and they open their phone lines for me, I'm going to feel special and want to work with that company. And I think it's interesting how these older not older, right? Because it's only a few years ago, but like, how we're coming back to technology that has existed a few years ago. Yeah, I do think
00:17:25
Speaker
Well, everything old is new again. So that's exactly what's happening with clothes and stuff. It's really sad. But that cycle also seems to be speeding up of what's trendy and things like that. So as far as the phone support thing, I would love to see more of the VIP type things. They're hard to
00:17:55
Speaker
They're hard to build. So when Game of Thrones conquest first launched, it was unclear how successful it was going to be. So it sort of grassroots became this huge success. And then marketing went like, oh, we can build on that. And so from the support point of view, we were caught off guard with
00:18:25
Speaker
people spending what we thought were, was like exorbitant amounts in video games. Like this is ridiculous. Like when they yell at us and say that we pay your salary, like they legit do. Like, so, so that was where we were like, okay, well we have to do something. And, and so we started looking at like ways to create a VIP program for
00:18:54
Speaker
the Game of Thrones customers. And we had a couple of little forays into it of like, well, maybe we cue them differently or maybe we gift them differently. But then there was issues with like, okay, well, if they're international, I can't just send them X. I can't send them a gift because there's
00:19:19
Speaker
laws and rules and this is going to take forever to get here, but this is going to get here tomorrow and then they're going to think that they didn't get one because theirs is going to take forever and that. Yeah, so it's a huge undertaking. Kudos to anybody who's made it work.
00:19:37
Speaker
Yeah, it's fascinating. Seeing some of these companies, how they scale, how they build out these systems, it is a giant customer journey, customer map of understanding who goes where. And all of this can be manipulated fairly quickly. So if you want to do A-B testing, you can see what's working and what's not working. So you built out your strategy at WB, you kind of
Outsourcing Strategies with Peter Gerson
00:19:59
Speaker
expanded it. And then you met our friend, Peter. Peter
00:20:04
Speaker
works at Keywords, Peter Gerson. Who I told he should do this podcast and he's like, I'm too busy. You're not too busy, Peter. He's going to be on here next week. I don't know when it's actually going to launch compared to this one, but we were going to be talking to him. Who's really going to do it? Yeah. I'm so excited. I'm going to skip this episode and go to the one with Peter. Peter is kind of a generalist in the industry who knows
00:20:31
Speaker
a little bit about everything, enough to be dangerous about everything, right? And you met him, I guess at this point, you're at WP, and you're looking to outsource some of this work. First of all, I mean, if we can go into it, or you remember, right, because it may just be a no detail to use, like, how do you realize at this point, it's time to start thinking about bringing on additional help from external sources? So, so part of it was so we did have support, we did have some outsourced support. But we were using them
00:21:02
Speaker
I don't think we were using them appropriately. We were using outsource support as a supplement to what we were doing in-house. So it became a, oh, if we had extra tickets because this item was broken, we can have these people do that quick reply to them because they needed to be personalized in some way instead of just a bulk reply.
00:21:33
Speaker
At the point where Game of Thrones started to take off, at that point, I think we were getting something like 10,000 tickets a month. It started getting insane. And it was, these were tickets that required investigation, not just like, hey, this is a cool game, or hey, can I have free stuff? That kind of like, you know, basic like, oh, we can turn these out.
00:22:03
Speaker
Because the game was new, it still had bugs and things, so we had to look at every ticket. At the same time, the players who are big into these Forex strategy games, a lot of the most vocal players, I'm not putting everybody in here, would be very upset that their help request was answered with a template or
00:22:32
Speaker
someone who did not seem to be English as a first language. So that was when I started looking for, hey, can we get inexpensive support that is Americanized or that looks, their sentence structure looks like it's American.
00:22:54
Speaker
not to dupe people, but to take out one step of how do I train these people to get them to respond as though they were sitting in my studio. So that was where I met Peter, because I'd gone through a bunch of different, looked at a bunch of different BPO options or outsourced options, and 5CA, sorry, am I allowed to say 5? We'll leave it now, yeah.
00:23:24
Speaker
beep that part out. That's where he was at the time. And they were where I landed because they had onshore offerings. And at the very beginning, I was like, onshore or die, you cannot have anything but onshore for this. And once I started working with him, I very quickly was like, oh, okay.
00:23:53
Speaker
Manila is absolutely an option as someone who is sort of that American style, like they understand the culture of the U.S.
00:24:05
Speaker
I think that's an awesome point to bring up because I think most of the time people think outsource support and they think probably the cheapest version of it that's not great. They're getting poor English, broken English, right? And that's not the case anymore. This isn't a plug for any BPL, but it is a plug because I work here.
00:24:24
Speaker
Right. The language barrier is really not that much of a thing anymore across the world because people people have tools that can either help them or people know multiple languages, right? It's not the same thing anymore as back in the day when when you have people trying to to kind of skirt by skate by with like choppy English and and like and like books that tell you what the answer exactly. Yeah, the playbook.
00:24:48
Speaker
I'm going to take a quick time out. This is a little thing we do in the episode where we like a rapid fire questions. I'm going to throw five random questions at you and I'm just answering their super simple questions. Hopefully. And we'll go. So ready? Sure. All right. If you're going to go to a bar, what's the drink you're ordering?
00:25:09
Speaker
Well, they call them different things. It's like a whiskey mule or an Irish mule, a Moscow mule, basically. But instead of vodka, I want whiskey in it. Love it. Great choice. What did you have for breakfast today? I had oatmeal, plain steel cut oatmeal with an apple. I hear oatmeal a lot from people in gaming. It's, I'm sorry, it's on my mind. I like fast food. What is your dream vacation? My dream vacation is just
00:25:38
Speaker
I, well, I did it when I turned 40. I went to London for like two weeks. That's my new vacation. There you go. What is your, what's the last book you read? The last book I read was The Nine Princes of Amber by Roger Zelazny. The last question is what would be your last meal? Oh my goodness. I'm a big food person. Steel cut oatmeal with apples.
00:26:05
Speaker
You got to be worried every time. I would also ask for like six or seven lobsters on the side so that they had to make those for me, but I would not eat them. Okay, you're in Massachusetts that you got good lobsters. I send them down to Jersey. We need some we need some lobster help here. Okay.
00:26:23
Speaker
Cool, so back to our regularly scheduled program here. So you've learned to outsource, you've kind of understood in the beginning that maybe the original strategy there wasn't the best strategy, right? But it works, right? And you go on from there.
00:26:38
Speaker
Maybe we'll skip some time ahead right now. In 2022, you start at Vecna, which is not a gaming company. It is a robotics company, and that's a wild change. Can you kind of give like an elevator pitch? What is Vecna so people who are listening understand what they do? Okay, so Vecna Robotics is a warehouse robotics company. So they have automated forklifts that will
00:27:09
Speaker
pick up an object in one spot and then move through a warehouse, whether it's five miles or around a maze like Pac-Man and then drop that thing off in another spot. So it automates a job that would be super tedious or something that would be expensive for the location to fill in and then just makes it less expensive.
00:27:36
Speaker
That sounds awesome, I think, about all the Amazon promo videos you've probably seen with little robots running around doing the same thing. How do you find that role? And is there something about robotics in Massachusetts? Because what's the other robotics company I'm thinking of that has- Boston Dynamics. Yeah, right. I think they're also based out of Massachusetts. Is that right? Yes. Yeah, that's where they beat up robots with all these things.
00:28:04
Speaker
Like they're really big into their marketing, which is really great. I've seen spot. I went to the Indy 500 last year and
00:28:15
Speaker
they had some spot dogs, some robotics dogs there, they're like bomb dogs, basically, that they'll go up. They're not really, they look that they're on four legs, you know, you can. Yeah, it's awesome. I love their videos. But yeah, sorry. Yeah. All right. How do you find it? And they got really popular after the Stranger Things episode about Vecna. Not the same Vecna. Wrong Google search. Yeah.
00:28:42
Speaker
So, but the way, the way that it happened was I, I was looking for, I was looking for something different. I, you know, I wanted to, I wanted to change up what I've been doing. I've been doing games for so long. And I found this role, um, to lead a support team at Vecna. And one of the things, one of the, one of the, not, not requirements, but it was like good to, nice to haves was video game experience. And I thought, well, I have to.
00:29:12
Speaker
I have to see what this is. And I quickly learned why video game experience was going to be like key to any success for the support team at Vecna. Yeah. Yeah. So, so the support staff for, cause you're like, how do you support robots? Of course you have. So there were different levels of customers. So I would call one paying customer. So this is your like.
00:29:42
Speaker
Give me a company like Target. We'll say Target. You have your VP people who are going to be like, we want to automate warehouse infrastructure. How do we do that? Oh, let's get a robotics company. And they they would be the paying customers. So they're like, please put your robots in our warehouse. And then
00:30:03
Speaker
Then there's the user customer. So those are the guys who are in the warehouse, who are actually physically going to be with the robot and on the team with the robot. So the support staff would talk to the user customer. So they would call or email. Sometimes they would text for like, can you help this robot? This robot is not working. Can you tell me why it's not working?
00:30:33
Speaker
the team then assists with, have you tried turning it off and on again? Because ultimately it's a forklift with the brain attached to it. And for any number of things that they would call to ask about, how do I get it to turn on? How do I get it to do this? Why is it sitting over here?
00:30:57
Speaker
because the light stack would have codes on it, so it's software. Ultimately, everything that we're talking about is software, video games, robotics software. And then the more interesting part of what my team worked with is something that looked a lot like a really 80s video game of a layout of a warehouse.
00:31:26
Speaker
And you can go to Vecna's website. I think you can see this on the website. If a robot is stuck in a particular location, say that a box has dropped off of a warehouse scaffolding or something, and it gets in the way of the robot, the robot will attempt to go around it. But if there's not enough space, because it has little
00:31:54
Speaker
sensors around it. If there's not enough space, the robot will then submit its own ticket, basically, and say, hey, I need help. I can't get around this box. And then one of my team members will go like, I'm going to help this robot get around this box. And you look through the camera and go like, OK, we can make it as a human. I can see we can make it. And then you sort of enders game move
00:32:23
Speaker
the robot around the obstacle and then say, okay, you're clear. And the little robot goes on its way. Fascinating. Crazy. A hundred times a day. So your team was responsible. I guess was that the primary use case to take control of the robot drive around? Yeah. Help the robots when they got stuck because part of where
00:32:53
Speaker
The robots are autonomous, but they don't think for themselves. So this is where everybody's like, the robots are gonna take over. I promise you, they're not. Just put a little piece of plastic on the floor or like a small bit of two by four in the way and you're scot free. You can go, that robot will be there. Wondering how it's gonna get around.
00:33:18
Speaker
So, you know, this is where Peter is going to reenter the story
Unique Support Approach at Vecna Robotics
00:33:23
Speaker
at some point. But I'm curious, at what point do you realize, hey, we need help here? Yeah, because so my team was nine people at the time that Peter comes into the story. And with each new customer, there is at least six new robots.
00:33:47
Speaker
that come online. And part of the service is 24-7 Pivotal Command Center. That was the name of my service team. 24-7 support. And once you get eyeballs looking at X amount of robots, you are like, because
00:34:13
Speaker
The robot will sit and idle for a second and be like, I'm not sure if I can get around this. Let me think about it for a minute. However, the team's so good, they can see the robot stop. They can see the outline that the LIDAR is creating like, oh, I can see that there's an object in the way. So they are sometimes faster than the robot at sending that information back to us. Humans, again, you know,
00:34:41
Speaker
And so at some point I was like, okay, we need more people because it's going to become untenable for anybody to look at 100 robots all over different warehouses. And so I start thinking of how do I outsource this job? Because again, we're in Boston, we're in Waltham, it might as well be Boston. And it's expensive for support.
00:35:10
Speaker
I'm also looking at, because it's 24 seven, I'm looking at, okay, well, where, where can I have people who would be working that overnight shift overnight to Boston, but maybe where they live, it's not overnight. So sort of a follow the sun type model. And then I start thinking, well, who is going to be able to do this job because it is,
00:35:37
Speaker
It's so weird. How do I even explain it to someone who's never read Ender's game? So my immediate thought was standard call center. Think about standard call center. And then I was like, no. Yes, they will have the customer support skills. So when someone calls and says, hey, can I do this? Or can you fix this? They would be like, yep, we can
00:36:05
Speaker
We can turn it off and on again for you. But I was like, there's no way that I can train them how to basically play a video game that might end up in you running into a bunch of boxes or something like that. And then I thought, OK, well, if we do tech support outsourced, like an IT solution almost. And then I was like,
00:36:34
Speaker
No, that's more expensive than just having in-house customer support. Like once you get to scale, like if I'm hiring eventually 18 people or something like that, it's going to be really expensive. I finally was like, well, it is like a video game. And so I called Peter and I was like, Hey, dude, I got this, I got this idea. Call me crazy. And
00:37:03
Speaker
And I said, also, I only need three people to start because I need to know if it works first. And nobody, none of these companies would have ever entertained three people for a solution for someone. They don't even want to do the paperwork. But Peter was like, well, that's interesting. Sure, let's try it, which I love about Peter because he's just like, why not?
00:37:33
Speaker
Yeah, try it. I could throw some people at that just to see if it see if it sticks. And it like from the word go, it was fantastic because Vecna as a startup had very little in the way of training that was not just verbal past from one human to another. It's the best form, huh? Yeah. Yeah.
00:38:04
Speaker
And and so it was it was very much like a fly by the seat of my pants undertaking at the very beginning and Like it's gonna sound like the shill now keywords is like and they have always been amazing to me to partner with to team up with there's a
00:38:28
Speaker
absolutely every human that I have ever come in contact with has just been like the best person. I appreciate that. Now it's a cool company, right? I mean, like, like, like you said to Peter, like, this is a technology problem. We're a technology company. Let's figure out a way to make this work. Yeah, it's not our usual bread and butter. But might not take a look at the new problem, figure out a solution because it helps you and might help others as well.
00:38:53
Speaker
Yeah and so we started some folks in Manila and in Mexico because at that time we had just started working with a company whose warehouse workers were in Mexico and I was like we don't have any Spanish speaking and at some point somebody's going to call us and they're not going to speak English because they're just they're just a warehouse worker they never thought they would have to work with a robot and speak English to get it to work again so
00:39:23
Speaker
So it was, it was kind of a, a good start to build on a like global sort of robot takeover. I think it's a cool problem and solution, right? It's something you think of. And you keep saying Andrew's game, and we talked about this before, like, I love that analogy. It makes perfect sense, right? Like a little booth and just maneuver that maneuver the vehicle and
00:39:47
Speaker
You know, it's, you say it's not necessarily easy to trust someone. I didn't really think about it. Like if you bump into a box, like you might be really causing some major damage, not just to the unit itself, but to the company that it's working for. Right. Like, so it's interesting. And as a, as a leader of, of customer support, right. Do you have different metrics you monitor for a company like that or KPIs that you monitor for a company like that compared to a video game company?
00:40:17
Speaker
No, no, not really. Because the life of the agent is pretty much the same. There's the tickets per hour and the quality of your responses and then customer satisfaction. I think the big difference is that with a video game, the player basis can be millions of people and you might hear from somebody one time.
00:40:49
Speaker
Maybe if they're really big into your game, you'll hear from them a few times. There was a lady when I was at, when I was at WB who she loved Lord of the Rings Online and she would like sometimes send us beef jerky, homemade beef jerky in the mail. Awesome. She was this like sweet old lady. So it's very rare to have someone who is a repeat, I almost said repeat offender.
00:41:18
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. Repeat, submit it. Repeat customer. Whereas someone who works in a warehouse, they, oh, this is Jack's shift. He always calls us when there's an issue and, and you get to build the rapport with that customer. And that's, that's something that's a little bit different than the world of video games where, you know, you have, you, you know, when that guy's on shift, oh, he's going to call and he's, you know, he's going to have this problem with the robot because it always gets stuck here.
00:41:47
Speaker
Let's just see if we can bypass that and move it for him. This is kind of a wide open question. I don't know if it's going to be answerable, but from Bose, which is electronics, to WB, which is gaming, to Vecna, which is electronics, is there kind of one big takeaway that you've learned about customer support that is important across the board, I guess, for lack of better words? If you're going to mentor someone, is there any tips that you would give them as a manager?
00:42:17
Speaker
Yeah. It actually, it actually, the biggest, the biggest one comes from my son. So when he was, when he was little, he asked me what I did for work. Cause you know, he's a little kid, he doesn't know. And I said, I work in video games and I, and I helped the player, you know, be able to play their game. And he's like, Oh, so you're like Tron, you fight for the user. And I was like,
00:42:47
Speaker
Yeah, I guess I'm like Tron. So it is literally something that I have thought about since he said it to me. And it is something that I have always done. That's not to say that the customer is always right or that the customer deserves everything that they want, but I do very much always fight for the user.
00:43:10
Speaker
I love it and I don't often like to talk about myself, but this is how I became into pre-sales. I was a customer support agent and I'd always hear about the problems and the things that people were sold and the fact that like, yeah, we can't do that. I'm sorry. I don't know. We can't do that and they'd get pissed off at you and stuff.
00:43:31
Speaker
When I learned about pre-sales, I was like, I'm going to fight for my customer support team. I want to make sure that my sales rep is being honest. I want to make sure the customer knows that they're being honest. At the end of the day, if you piss off your customer, you're going to have someone speaking badly about you online. And that's not a good thing. So I love that reference with Tron because, yeah, you fight for the user. And yeah, you're going to get into battles with your product team. You're going to get into battles with your engineering team. And they're going to fight back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.
00:43:59
Speaker
It's important, even if you're not going to win, it's important to fight for your customer, I think. And I think that's the greatest lesson you can teach anyone that's in this type of role.
Personal Story of Transformative Support
00:44:06
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah, I love it. In your years of support, is there any story that keeps you up at night? That keeps me up at night? In a good way or like a bad way? Either way? Either way. That is more exciting, but good would be interesting to hear. That is more exciting.
00:44:28
Speaker
I guess I have one story that that I do think of very often. I think the guy is now like my friend on Facebook or something. When I when I was when I first started. Sort of going out of my way to break rules at turbine, because I did not like the fact that it was a like you get one item returned for the life of your account, that kind of thing.
00:44:57
Speaker
there was a player who was constantly getting reported for just being a horrible human being. In Lord of the Rings Online, you could appear in front of the players. You did have the ability to be a character in-game. Everybody had a character. And this... I don't know if I could say his name. I don't think he plays anymore. He might. His name was Chaos Wolf.
00:45:27
Speaker
which is perfect name for him because the kid was chaos incarnate. He was constantly getting reported. And I finally, like one day I saw him online and I went into game and I appeared in front of him and I was like, dude, what's your problem? Like, why do you, why do you keep saying horrible things to people? And he was like, he was caught off guard that someone
00:45:53
Speaker
Like, he knew I was an admin because I had a plus in front of my name. And I started to form a friendship with this guy. Just like small, every once in a while when I was working, I would see it was on and I would go say hi. And like, slowly, those reports got less and less and less.
00:46:17
Speaker
Eventually, it was like he would tell me a little bit about his home life and I would be a weird therapist in a video game, I guess. And he started Plus Dust Fan Club. He always said he was the president of the Plus Dust Fan Club. And eventually, when we got rid of the MMOs, I found his name
00:46:47
Speaker
And I found him on Facebook and I friended him on Facebook so that if he ever wanted to talk to me in real life, he could come and talk to me in real life. And we've had like a couple chats since then, but like, I think that was the biggest, like that helped, that made me feel better because there was this guy who was on his way to getting banned for life from his favorite video game. And, and he just didn't know how to stop himself.
00:47:15
Speaker
Hi. And so I was there and I could help him. I love it. I don't know anything about the book Tuesdays with Maury, but it almost seems like, hey, you know, you're just going to sit down with this guy every few weeks, you know, get to know him. And, you know, we often talk about this a lot while we're working at Helpshift, right? And not everyone's really doing it yet, but like proactive support, right? Reach out to someone before they come to you, right? And you are proactively reaching out to this character, right? And got to know them, right? And like,
00:47:45
Speaker
You talk them off a ledge for lack of better words, right? Like imagine putting hours and hours and hours and hours and hours and hours. And when we say that with video games, like it's no joke, it's lots of hours into this video game and your life. And then all of a sudden, like, because you're an a-hole, one day you're just banned for life and there's nothing you can do that. I love that you proactively, like, let's.
00:48:03
Speaker
get with this guy and start like seeing what's up and figuring it out. I think it's a fantastic message. I mean, it's an awesome story, I think. And thank you for sharing. And I think it's an important thing even to today again, right? Like proactively reach out to people. It's important to understand what these issues are and try and get in front of them. Yeah, even even like the smallest check in with somebody makes you human. And then then the respect level increases because you're that because then you're not just a
00:48:34
Speaker
entity that that bans them. Yeah, that's a great way to put especially online. You know, a lot of people are anonymous online, and they're going to be jerks because they could be a jerk online and not have to deal with the consequences. But but there are consequences. And luckily, you're able to do that. Yeah.
00:48:52
Speaker
So Veronica, I appreciate this conversation. I think it's some of the things that you spoke about seem like they were almost before their time, right?
Closing Thoughts and Appreciation
00:49:01
Speaker
Like things from understanding about segmentation when it came to Game of Thrones to outsourcing, even when you A at WB, also when you go into Vecna, making these realizations like, hey,
00:49:11
Speaker
There's a lot of things that align here to your story that you shared about kind of proactively reaching out. I think everything you're doing is awesome and really cool. So I appreciate you coming on. Is there anything you want to share or anything else you want to say before we wrap today's episode up? Just thank you. It's been great to talk about sort of the kind of fun stuff, the walk down amnesia lane that had things I haven't thought about in a long time.
00:49:39
Speaker
Yeah, no, thank you. Again, these stories are always fun to hear and share and talk about. We will have all of Veronica's information on our Player Engaged website. We'll talk about it if you're looking for any information and you want to tell other people where they could find you or... You can find me on LinkedIn. There you go. You can follow Veronica. Thank you so much again for this. I'm hoping we can connect again in the future. And yeah, thank you again for joining us today. Thank you.