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Scaling Excellence: A Deep Dive into Player Experience Leadership with Rustam Kuramshin
62 Plays7 months ago
In the latest episode of the Player Engage podcast, we had the pleasure of hosting Rustam Kuramshin from AppQuantum, a seasoned expert in player support. Rustam shared a wealth of knowledge from his eight years in the industry, discussing the intricacies of player support and the importance of creating a seamless player experience. From the evolution of customer support in gaming to the role of AI and automation, Rustam provided valuable insights into the current landscape and future of player engagement.
Listeners will find Rustam's discussion on the day-to-day operations of a player support lead particularly enlightening, as he delves into the challenges of scaling support teams and the significance of understanding player needs. His personal anecdotes and experiences offer a unique perspective on the growth and development within the field.
- Discover Rustam's journey from a support agent to a player support lead and the lessons learned along the way.
- Learn about the shift from email to in-app player support and the impact of AI and automation on the industry.
- Gain insights into the importance of communication skills and product knowledge in delivering exceptional player support.
For those eager to dive deeper into the world of player support and experience, this episode is a treasure trove of information. To uncover the full scope of Rustam's expertise and the strategies employed at AppQuantum, tune in to the Player Engage podcast. Your next level of understanding in creating unforgettable player experiences awaits.
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Transcript
Introduction & Social Media Plug
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome to the podcast today, everybody. Before we get started, a little housekeeping that I need to take care of here. First off, thanks for listening to the Play Your Engage podcast. Be sure to follow us on social media. You can find this at PlayYourEngage.
Upcoming Events & GDC
00:00:11
Speaker
You could also go to PlayYourEngage.com to check us out. Also, with GDC coming up, if you're looking to check out GDC, keywords as well as community club house are hosting a number of events. So be sure to check out PlayYourEngage.com where we'll have links where you can learn about and attend community club house and also see what we're doing at GDC.
00:00:28
Speaker
So check it out and enjoy today's podcast. Thanks a lot for listening, guys.
Podcast Focus & Collaboration
00:00:32
Speaker
Welcome to the Player Engage podcast where we dive into the biggest challenges, technologies, trends, and best practices for creating unforgettable player experiences. Player Engage is brought to you as a collaboration between Keyword Studios and HelpShift.
Guest Introduction: Rustam Karamshin
00:00:46
Speaker
Here is your host, Greg Posner.
00:00:48
Speaker
Hey, everybody. Welcome to the Player Engage podcast. Greg here. Today, we are joined by Rustam Karamshin from App Quantum. He has a really cool background in player support from companies like, like I said, App Quantum, Player Insight as player experience lead, and a number of other different companies as well. So I'm excited to kind of learn about his day-to-day, what goes on, what goes on in his head. So Rustam, thank you so much for joining
Rustam's Background in Player Support
00:01:12
Speaker
us today. Is there anything I'm missing that you want to say about yourself?
00:01:14
Speaker
Yeah, have a round. First of all, thank you, Greg, for having me on your podcast today. So let's talk about me. I'm working in the player support over eight years right now. I'm a tech savvy guy in those player support, but also working with people and meet their expectations and fix their problems.
Rustam's Gaming Habits & Role Discussion
00:01:40
Speaker
And basically not only on my work,
00:01:44
Speaker
and also on my daily routine, helping my friends and family to how to fix their games or maybe Apple TV or Google Chromecast, et cetera. I've been there. It's the life of a customer support people. I think you can fix every piece of electronic in the world and it's just like, all right, I can't do that. Don't call me about that, but you'll still get those calls. Yeah. And even in the middle of the night.
00:02:10
Speaker
Yeah, right. There's no rest. You spent a lot of time in customer support. And that's that's awesome. I got my career started there. And I've learned a lot. So I want to ask you questions about your day to day.
Responsibilities & Team Structure
00:02:21
Speaker
But before we get started, let's go with a simple one is, are you a gamer still? And what are the games that you're playing right now?
00:02:27
Speaker
Yeah, I'm still a player, so gamer, mobile, console, PC, standalone, Nintendo Switch, and even sometimes Nintendo Gameboy, yeah, sometimes when I want to replay my
00:02:44
Speaker
Pokemon Yellow series, yeah. Are you playing pal world then that kind of compete with Pokemon? I didn't try it yet, but I watch a lot of YouTube videos and I want to try it, but right now I'm just playing Helldivers 2 with my friends.
00:03:03
Speaker
Okay, so your role at App Quantum is a player support lead, right? Yeah. Sorry, I had this up. So your role is a player support team lead. Can you kind of explain to our audience, well, what's the role of a player support team lead at App Quantum? Because I realize this might differ from company
Career Aspirations & Coaching
00:03:23
Speaker
to company. Yeah, it might differ from company to company. But
00:03:26
Speaker
My main responsibility is to handle how the player support team is structured, whether we need more agents or less agents, what is our daily routine, how many tickets we have during the day, what type of tools do we need to
00:03:56
Speaker
like maybe order or buy or maybe R&D or maybe create with our internal development department and also one-to-one sessions, development program, maybe someone of the agents wants to be like maybe QC manager or maybe he understood that we
00:04:25
Speaker
agents want to rise in the UI department. I have this story in my background when one of my teammates understands that UI is his next big step.
Planning & Organization Strategies
00:04:39
Speaker
So you're part of a good manager, things identifying what your employees or the people that are working for you, where they want to aspire to get to, what they aspire to do. Is this part of when you're talking about coaching, like understanding what their interests are? Yeah, because sometimes in customer support, if we'll talk about only player support,
00:05:02
Speaker
It's like a niche, just jump on the boat in the IT industry, and then you want to understand whether you want to stick with it. But maybe we saw different examples from the agent in technical support, like game designers, programmers, front-end, back-end, etc. or client-side.
00:05:31
Speaker
So one of the things I feel like you need to do is you have to be a little organized, at least a little probably more organized than I am to keep notes on people to understand kind of the tools that you're taking a look at, I guess. Is there a specific tool that you use on a daily basis that kind of helps you keep organized that lets you stay on top of what you're doing? On top of what I'm doing, so any to do this application,
00:05:56
Speaker
It's, or even like back in those days, like our fathers do notebook, notebook with the pen.
Quality Control Integration
00:06:04
Speaker
So yeah, sometimes you need just a good cup of tea, coffee at the morning, can at least what you're planning to do today. Maybe you need to just have a three meetings because in our fast-paced world when
00:06:21
Speaker
everything changes within the hour, maybe in minutes. You need some kind of plan that you have three meetings with one-to-one and you need to discuss it because if you want that your team will grow with yourself, like
00:06:40
Speaker
you learn different tools, frameworks or paradigms, or maybe you want to scale and adapt to your team to the higher level, you need to plan this. You need to understand that one of your agents prefer like technical side of the issues. He good at it.
00:07:03
Speaker
and someone is better at quality control. So you need to plan their journey in your team and adapt new tasks.
Team Meetings & Feedback Importance
00:07:16
Speaker
Back in those days when we want to integrate quality control in our team,
00:07:24
Speaker
We use any other team, Google Sheet and export the data. And at the first steps, it's a team lead responsibility. But you could just provide this training session for an agent. And this agent will do the most of the work and train. And he will be this feature owner of this
00:07:55
Speaker
quality conversations and help other agents to do their job better. It's a fun way to kind of take a look at it and understand how you can best solve a problem because certain employees are better at certain tasks and being able to identify that and put them. How often do you normally meet with employees? Is it a weekly meeting, monthly meeting?
Career Evolution & Support Shift
00:08:16
Speaker
What's the cadence of that? Cadence, we have basically every weekly meeting, so we gather
00:08:25
Speaker
with all of our team, just to plan our, let's say it sprints. We plan our tasks, how many issues we received on our last week, maybe some pain points we have, maybe urgent issues or bugs in our applications we need to push on this week.
00:08:54
Speaker
And if we talk about one-to-ones, sometimes for the junior, that's it.
00:09:02
Speaker
let's say junior agents, it's better to do it on a weekly basis because it's a new employee, lack of experience in some, like how to do or resolve this issue, maybe answer on a player's review in a Google Play store, for example. And you need to provide him a feedback, consistent feedback, because back in my days when I just
00:09:32
Speaker
signed as an agent role and I wanted this feedback and I want to understand in which direction I need to upgrade my skills, even like communication or maybe technical side.
00:09:50
Speaker
Yeah, so yeah, consistency. But for the senior, for example, senior, it's okay for the B weekly, even monthly.
Scalability & Technological Adaptation
00:09:58
Speaker
Yeah, it's an interesting point to put that people may not know necessarily what skills they like at first. And it's your job to help kind of learn and help expose that for the support agent. So taking a look at yourself, right? You've been in these types of roles for over eight years at this point. You started at Game Insight, kind of we talked about,
00:10:19
Speaker
App Quantum, how does your approach changed, right? When you first started, right, you were probably more of an agent, but like, how did your approach to working with your staff?
00:10:31
Speaker
changed. So reflecting back on my journey, back in those days, we were in the middle of paradigm shift from email only contact channel to the predominantly in-app player support. So and at this point, we realized the importance of scalability.
00:10:53
Speaker
and finding workarounds faster and quick adaptability to the technologies changes. Because I think maybe in 2016, it starts shifting to the early stages of ML, AI, on the big stage of IT, not only internal, like space or nascent, et cetera.
00:11:21
Speaker
or maybe only in Google fan companies, but in small companies like IT and et cetera.
Player Journey & Experience Significance
00:11:30
Speaker
And my biggest learning was about understanding our players' needs and meeting their expectations. Because when in early 2005,
00:11:47
Speaker
like we played on flash games in the browser but nowadays like on the mobile handheld phone and our pipeline of releases be weekly for example maybe less because
00:12:06
Speaker
players want their new features in-game events, conquer new mountains, for example, in any other game, and compete with each other.
00:12:19
Speaker
and to get the reward for this approach. So we work a lot on improving communication, building helpful self-service centers, quickly resolving technical issues. Player journey doesn't just... So I learned that a player's journey doesn't just resolve around the actual gameplay. When a player meets their any issue, you just open the in-game support
00:12:49
Speaker
for the, with help center, with FAQs and et
Automation & AI in Support
00:12:52
Speaker
cetera. And on the second button, he just contact it with an agent, you know, maybe a bot. It helps to resolve the issue faster.
00:13:04
Speaker
Yeah, I like a few things that you said there. I think you talked about scaling, you talked about automation. You also talked about player immersion or the player experience doesn't just fall into the gameplay itself. Also, even beyond what you said, the player experience, the customer experience, these days people go on Discord, people go on Reddit, people try and find other
00:13:27
Speaker
communities. And it even still follows that branding, right? So if you're playing a type of game, you want to feel that type of immersion, no matter what channel you're on. And people just think it's customer support. And yeah, it is just customer support. But the more it feels immersive, the more it feels like it's fine-tuned to them, I think it's going to be the better experience for them. And it's going to be something that they're more likely to use.
00:13:48
Speaker
And the thing I want to focus on here is you talked about automation and scaling it in the early stages of chat, right? You mentioned it was like about eight years ago when people started kind of starting to move away from email to in-game support. How do you, Rustam, how do you take a look at these technologies and like, how do you improve yourself on them while also managing some people? So first of all, I started to learn every
00:14:16
Speaker
site or maybe reports which generated big companies. For example, Forrester, an analytics company, they posted a report.
00:14:33
Speaker
delivered another report where they said that all the customers, they don't want to hear AI, looks like a human.
Staying Informed on Customer Success
00:14:44
Speaker
They just want short, concise answers and shortness of the issue resolution. So just press a button. And for example, from banking, you press a button and your credit cards was reissued.
00:15:02
Speaker
So in this case, you don't need an agent to resolve this issue or query. In gaming industry, for example, it's easier to implement, like reissue the purchase or subscription, or maybe restore progress or transfer progress from one platform to another.
00:15:28
Speaker
So you're creating those workflows to help kind of, again, you realize that it's more about getting the customer directly to the solution rather than kind of, and what's the quickest way to do that? Yeah, because I'm this player, I'm this customer.
00:15:42
Speaker
In some cases, when I want to put myself on the road of research and development, I'm just opening different support channels or maybe read books like Delivering Happiness about Zappos, or maybe, for example, a book about the best service is no service.
Efficient Issue Resolution & Workflows
00:16:09
Speaker
So it's not only about these success stories, but they also mentioned a story where you need to learn. So in my case, for example, if I purchase in-game item, so I want this in-game item and I want to receive this item as soon as possible.
00:16:36
Speaker
whether it will be agent or bot or maybe any other AI solution. So faster, it's better. You mentioned also earlier on, right? We talked about scaling support teams. And I think that's something that people do struggle with and understand how you could do that. So this is kind of a two point question, and maybe it should have been a separate question, but you also just mentioned Zappos delivering happiness, right? How do you
00:17:02
Speaker
stay on top of the latest trends of what's happening in customer success. How do you educate yourself on that? And with that, because scaling is part of that, how do you take a look at scaling? And how do you think about implementing things like that? So only on the base, in the customer support, you have like a formula, like full time employee. And you just, for example, you have on average,
00:17:29
Speaker
1000 tickets per week. You need eight hours, you have an eight hour shift per day. So you need this amount shifts per week. And you calculate this, it's like basic, like common approach, I think in customer support, to just calculate a full-time employee.
00:17:51
Speaker
But this approach doesn't count on how this issue you just answered about the gameplay issue or gameplay question. For example, how to hatch the egg, for example, in Palwart.
Workload Management & FTE Needs
00:18:13
Speaker
Or maybe it's like,
00:18:16
Speaker
transfer the profile between one platform to another. It's a different time consumption of the issue. And for example, if in any bad cases like urgent, when you have a buck on your production, it's like,
00:18:36
Speaker
correct in tickets immediately, and you have to have this amount of agents just to resolve this issue based on your SLAs and KPIs. Even if you have, for example, four agents on your shift, you ask another one
00:19:04
Speaker
to go out for extra money, for example, and resolve these issues in time.
Acting on Player Feedback
00:19:10
Speaker
When you factor in metrics like that, though, do you take into account potential bots and what bots can handle? Yeah. Nowadays, it's better to do it quarterly, just to analyze your issues, categories, issue types, and analyze this data and create flow with
00:19:33
Speaker
bots and through APIs. So if in some cases, for example, player wants to... He's providing a feedback, for example. We gather information from the player about the feedback. This feedback
00:19:52
Speaker
we can deliver or handle this feedback to our product team. And if our product team decide that this feedback was very precious, so we created a new feature, for example, in our game, and we want to deliver, provide this player with in-game crystals, in-game currency, or maybe a unique item,
00:20:19
Speaker
It's easier to do it with a custom bot at API, so just track this information, store it in some database, and then just push this reward to
Communication with Product Teams
00:20:33
Speaker
the player.
00:20:33
Speaker
You mentioned kind of communication with the product team and that's something we've seen some studios sometimes have trouble with. And my previous lifetime when I was a customer support person, it wasn't gaming, but like we would butt heads with product a lot because we would think we would know the features that our users were complaining about and product wasn't.
00:20:51
Speaker
Always, whatever. You see your side of the world, right? How do you and your team, how do you guys make, like when you do make that request to product, right? Is there a formal methodology to do that or you just drop it in like a Slack or Teams message and let them know? I think in like urgent situation where like your production server or the game client just crashing on the blink of eye,
00:21:16
Speaker
you need just provide this information to your product team, product manager, producer, programmer, or backend developer as soon as possible. And in the short message with all the information about this bug or the issue. But if you want to fix the bug, you are leaving, all the players are leaving this with this bug, for example,
00:21:43
Speaker
one year you need to provide a good like technical documentation like bug report in task tracker with step to reproduce with examples of tickets maybe screenshots or maybe logs
00:22:00
Speaker
we will talk about like PC games, it's easier to record the logs on this type of platform.
In-App Support & Data Management
00:22:08
Speaker
Basically, at the first place, I think you need a good communication skill, because even if you are working in the customer support, where communication skill is the main skill, but when you start like
00:22:25
Speaker
talking about the feature requests or bug issues, you need a different approach in your messaging. Yeah, right. It's something that I think both teams can agree upon and follow.
00:22:40
Speaker
When it comes to your specific team, I asked a little earlier kind of what tools you use and you talked about, well, for a different thing. You mentioned kind of pen and paper, but for the actual technical work that you are using, like I know help shift, right? But what platforms do you utilize for your team that they're working with their customers on, that they're escalating, that they're working on? Are there other tools as well?
00:23:01
Speaker
So right now at Quantum, we are using Help Shift in our games because it provides us with this cool feature in App Support. Because we are also playing the games, it's easier to communicate within your application rather than just use like deep link
00:23:26
Speaker
mail to and then drop an email yeah it's easier to answer an email on your phone and then on bpc or on your tablet and etc but when you could resolve your issue within like
00:23:44
Speaker
Okay, not minutes because of the asynchronous communication, but within a couple of hours.
Improving Support Systems
00:23:53
Speaker
And it's easier to grab information about actual player on the back.
00:24:02
Speaker
of this SDK, you have information about his support ID, platform, app version, maybe issue type, maybe how much it's his or her total purchase.
00:24:19
Speaker
And it's easier to route this issue to the actual agent. Maybe it's the first line. Maybe it's the second line. Maybe it's a question about a legal question. So it's a manager issue. Because sometimes I handle this type of tickets in daily routine. Yeah. Sometimes it's... Yeah. And I love that aspect of the platform is that you can kind of
00:24:48
Speaker
set up the routing to go to the appropriate teams and things like that. How often do you take a look at the user feedback, your players feedback, and figuring out how you can change the support system to better fit their needs.
00:24:59
Speaker
Yeah, so in gaming industry, CSAT in most cases isn't working like we want because it's like a double-edged sword. So in-app provides you, in-app support provides you with the easier communication channel. But at this point, every pain point and every like issue player have, it's also mirrored on the CSAT.
Feedback & Continuous Improvement
00:25:28
Speaker
So you need to analyze not only CSAT, but for example, MPS or customer effort, because for example, customer effort score provides you with information about, for example, how good your hub center is, or FAQ, or maybe your bot flow isn't working like you expect.
00:25:57
Speaker
Maybe you need to deconstruct it and make it shorter. You can find any, not any, but good best practices.
00:26:10
Speaker
in different blocks, even help shifts, block, or maybe any other customers for service like Zendesk, Hubscout. It's based information, but you need to analyze it on the quarterly basis because it's fast-paced world, anti-development, not only just IT, but the gaming development, you release
00:26:35
Speaker
five events past year. And then you create a different version, like with guilds, in-game charts, communities, and et cetera.
Gaining Inspiration from Other Games
00:26:49
Speaker
So yeah. I know there's some tools out there that help enable kind of
00:26:54
Speaker
feedback for your customer support agents internal, right? Like basically review periods, like I can't think of any of the tools. I know Miros is one, but are you using any tools to help provide agent feedback for coaching for stuff like that? I used Miros as an example. Yeah, it's a good
00:27:14
Speaker
a tool to analyze big amount of data. It's easier to do it and it's easier to connect help desk services to mirrors because of the API integration or maybe native integration. It provides a safe place where you can communicate with agent personally, like on one-to-one or like nowadays you have not only in-house teams, but working from home
00:27:45
Speaker
You don't have a separate meeting room to chat personally. So you have to have this type of separate page to talk only with actual agent and provide with the feedback, giving a different approach how to resolve some kind of issue.
00:28:07
Speaker
As a gamer yourself, right? You said you play on almost every system here that we have here. How often do you go into the support menu of other games? Just kind of see what they're doing and how they're doing it. Or is it something that you don't really... It's a good question.
Adapting FAQ Formats
00:28:23
Speaker
I think if you want to be a good customer role, not only in player support, but only even all the customers,
00:28:34
Speaker
you want to ask yourself to go out and drop a message to different support teams. And sometimes it's a good idea to test their nerves and pretend that you are not insane. For example, I just lost my progress and
00:28:57
Speaker
watch how they respond on this message. The good artist, like, copy, like, yeah, the greatest deal. The inspiration. Yeah, the inspirations, because when you see different approaches, you can combine some like text messages, or create a new tool, like internal tool, how to resolve the issue. Or you understand that your FAQ isn't good enough,
00:29:27
Speaker
For example, in Asia, FAQs, in Asian games, they use like a stars and they change bullet list in a star like bullets. So they have a different approach in formatting, FAQs. And I saw it, the last place where I saw it is on December,
00:29:53
Speaker
It's an action RPG game, and they use this type of formatting. But in Europe, in the USA style, I think it's a good approach with bullet lists, one, two, three, and et cetera, maybe chapters, et cetera.
Support through Various Channels
00:30:10
Speaker
But it's also a good time to analyze in which FAQs, for example,
00:30:20
Speaker
support team uses GIFs or images because some cases we have because we are people some better some of them it's better to read the text some of them it's better to just watch a video on YouTube or GIF or maybe image so yeah it's different approach
00:30:44
Speaker
Yeah. I think it's interesting, right? I mean, I know help just reduce support, kind of the different types of self-service versus agent. And it's always interesting to understand what subset of users want to do self-service versus which subset of yours want to provide an agent. And I think it all comes down to your point a little earlier. It's like your FAQs, how are they formatted? Are they clean? Are they, again,
00:31:05
Speaker
It's interesting, I didn't know about it being different in certain parts of Asia, the different lists. But once you start knowing that, do you create separate, what you can do, right? Do you create different FAQs for them? And just picking up on those trends, I think is fascinating. I wouldn't even think about doing that. And we mentioned about eight years ago is when in-app support started. And now we're seeing other channels really kind of kick it into high gear, where things like Discord, Reddit's always been a little bit popular there.
00:31:34
Speaker
How do you, A, do you even look at providing customer support on those platforms right now? Is it things you ever thought about? And how would you, I guess, how would you handle that or approach it? I looked at it. So,
00:31:50
Speaker
I haven't like internal tested it like an on trial, but because all was a different approach. So discourse, I think they, they suspend it like in game SDK features. So it's like less communication within the app.
00:32:14
Speaker
You need to, like for the players, if we will talk about mobile games, it's easier just to stick with one single channel. It's like not only single channel because you have the basic one, email and the help service on your site and then in apps. So this is the main basic three types for the mobile thing. It's good enough because the one will provide you with all the data about the player.
00:32:44
Speaker
If we will talk about console, for example, I think it's like you, it helps if you have a QR code to open via web chat to communicate with the separate team using your phone. It's harder to analyze data and help
00:33:08
Speaker
players in Discord is harder. If you want to communicate with a little community, it's okay. Because it's easier to communicate with, for example, 50, 100 active players, but if you have millions of active players, oh, it's a mess.
Team Innovation & Achievements
00:33:35
Speaker
Because of the lack of the automations, custom bots, APIs, you will have to hire so many agents for the manual work and not just automate this using the button, et cetera.
00:33:53
Speaker
Yeah, you know, it's one of those things that in the app, you could control the full experience. You can pass through the data you want. The problem is you can't really stop people from talking on Discord, right? And I mean, I don't know. Helptiff does offer a Discord plugin. This is in the sales pitch, right? But again, you can't capture all that information, right? We can capture things like the Discord username. And to start, it allows you to still keep your data from within the platform. But to your point, right, if it's on your own,
00:34:19
Speaker
proprietary system, whether it be your game, whether it be your website, then you can at least control that data. Once it's on the web or on Discord, it becomes a little more the wild, wild west where you don't know what the type of data you're going to get is. Yeah, because for example, in Twitter, I have some
00:34:38
Speaker
cases when I contacted customer support through Twitter, and they send me, for example, an email or link to their web chat, and then they communicate and resolve my issue within this channel, but not in the Twitter, in the DM, the Twitter. But if you want to help the players,
00:35:02
Speaker
You need to check Discord or Reddit on a daily basis because it's your active and mostly hardcore community. They will provide you with bugs and issues within the seconds when this, for example, you update, deliver to the production.
Future Career Steps & Technology Integration
00:35:28
Speaker
A little bit more about kind of the role of player support team lead.
00:35:33
Speaker
When you wake up in the morning, there are certain days you wake up, you're like, yeah, I can't wait to do this at work today, or days you dread because of something, what happens? Well, what's the type of exciting thing that gets you excited to get going in the morning and get working? Because we are working in the gaming industry, so developing new features, new events. I want to help my... It's not only about me right now, because back in those days when I was an agent, it just
00:36:02
Speaker
worked only around me. So my goal, my, my, mine, et cetera. But right now it's all about my team. I want that my team do something. So they create maybe some agent use chat GPT to create a new feature or maybe script to handle their daily routine task faster. And then we just asked our internal development team to create
00:36:32
Speaker
single work in new, not just like application, but a microservice to handle this on a daily. So just get out it. The 8AM, for example, mentioned me at Slack about how many issues created during the night, or night shift. And yeah, it's not only about me, but about the team here.
00:37:00
Speaker
I think that's a sign of a good manager, someone that gets excited about enabling others to achieve what they want, achieve more, aspire where they go. I think that gets your team excited and wants them to probably work harder. On the flip side, something I struggled with a lot of my career is not knowing what's next, right? You don't know where your career goes. So as a player support team lead, where would you aspire to go from what would be your next logical step if you even thought about it?
00:37:29
Speaker
So I think the next step, maybe like bigger games, bigger approach, maybe scale my
00:37:38
Speaker
game, bigger team, bigger approach, maybe tools, tech-saving
Skills for Success in Player Support
00:37:45
Speaker
guys. So yeah, I like tools. I like test the new tools, implement them. And also, I'm providing my team with technical presentations, how this feature works, how you can use this feature to test business logic.
00:38:07
Speaker
Is it working or not, for our example? You know, if I came to you like 10 years ago, I said, Rustam, what should I do to get into the industry and say, hey, you make sure your email skills are good, you're organized, you can keep up to date.
00:38:19
Speaker
similar things still these days, right? But now we're in a whole new era where it's not emails. So say there's kids who are young and want to get into the industry, the gaming industry, and they're looking at maybe CS as being their approach. Any advice you would give people to get started? That's a fantastic question. So as a player support,
00:38:40
Speaker
I think first of all, firstly, develop strong communication skills. Player support, you are not just assisting players with bugs or issues, but also, like you mentioned before, communicating with your internal team, product team, marketing team, etc. And you need to train this, like,
00:39:09
Speaker
the skill to be a bridge between players and your development in product team.
Patience & Professionalism with Players
00:39:18
Speaker
So clear, prompt and respectful communication. I think it's essential.
00:39:23
Speaker
Communication skills are key, right? I mean, I think no matter what industry you look at, especially you are the face of the game to someone, right? I mean, when someone, a player reaches out and I'm working with one of your agents, right? They're representing the game. And I think if you have sloppy typing skills, poor grammatical skills, right? That's probably not the look your game or your company wants to have.
00:39:45
Speaker
Yeah, it will be my second point. So you need to understand your product. Because even if you are not like a mobile player, but you, a player, this means you're immersing yourself in the games and communities you are interested in. So it will help you to understand what frustrates players. For example, in the, like,
00:40:16
Speaker
mobile games, you open the Reddit, you read it, and it helps you understand and combine information from issues. It's easier to create a bug report for your product team. And also it will help you to meet their expectations. In most cases, in tickets, you will meet less good feedback, only negative.
Continuous Learning & Adaptation
00:40:47
Speaker
highlights of their issues, progress transfer, payment issue, game question. So you need to gather this information.
00:40:59
Speaker
You must possess the patience of a saint in the player support, like in the customer support. In the world of player support and experience, not every player will be polite or understanding. And it's important to keep calm and remain professional in all circumstances.
00:41:20
Speaker
I love that. I have experienced that many times in my life of trying to deal with unruly end users and it's hard to find a way to keep your cool sometimes. I think the last point is remember that the gaming industry is incredibly dynamic. Just keep learning and adapting with the changes.
00:41:46
Speaker
be new games, new communities or technological advancements.
00:41:52
Speaker
And you always be in the good position. So, Rastam, I appreciate all that insight that you brought to our call today. I think it's great to understand how you can succeed as a support rep, a technical agent, right? How you can kind of build out your career, how you can help your agents, how you can grow, how you can deal with that. There's a lot of information here and cool stuff. So I appreciate that. And before we go today, is there anything else you want to share with our audience?
00:42:16
Speaker
Yeah, thank you very much and let me say it's not just a job, it's a career, but a career that requires passion and dedication. If you love gaming and have the desire to create a real impact on player's gaming experience, then there is no better film than this
Conclusion & Next Episode Teaser
00:42:35
Speaker
one.
00:42:35
Speaker
I love it. I love it. You can become the face of a game to some players that need help. And I think it's super important. And I think it's a great way to get started. That's how I got started in my career. I think that a lot of people can get started very easily in customer support. And again, Rustam, thank you so much for joining us today.
00:42:52
Speaker
You can check out App Quantum. We'll send information about their website. We'll send information about Rustam. So again, thank you for joining me today, Rustam, and I hope you have a great rest of your day. Thank you, Greg. Have a nice rest of the day, too. Thanks for listening to today's podcast with Rustam. We learned a lot of cool things about customer support and how you can build and scale teams.
00:43:09
Speaker
If you learned anything, please be sure to click like and share this with others that you think might get some value out of this episode. Next week's episode is going to be a great one. We're going to talk about accessibility in gaming and hear how we can get more people gaming because the more people in this community that are playing games, the better it is. So come back next week, learn more about accessibility. And I hope you guys have a great rest of your day. Thanks.