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00:00:01
Transforming Player Support: A Deep Dive with Dang and Conor
58 Plays4 months ago
Episode Description: In this episode of Player: Engage, Greg chats with Dang-Stefan La Hong from Playa Games and Conor McGinley from Bytro. They dive into the transformation of customer support in the gaming industry, exploring the shift from external to in-app support systems, the integration of community platforms like Discord, and the balance between automation and human interaction. Learn how these leaders are enhancing player experiences and managing the challenges of implementing new technologies.
Timestamps & Key Takeaways:
- 02:46.01 - 03:48.53: Transition to In-App Support Dang and Conor discuss the motivations behind transitioning support systems from external methods like email to integrated in-app solutions, emphasizing the benefits for efficiency and player satisfaction.
- 07:35.62 - 08:53.39: Player Reactions to New Support Systems Dang shares insights on player reactions to the new support system, noting the mix of appreciation and initial overwhelm with automated responses.
- 09:52.28 - 10:58.61: Integrating Discord for Community Interaction Conor explains how integrating Discord has helped manage community support by enabling players to interact and assist each other through dedicated channels.
- 12:22.85 - 13:33.84: Managing Team Expectations and Automation Fears Both guests discuss the importance of managing their teams' concerns about automation and ensuring that human oversight remains a crucial part of customer support.
Key Concepts:
- Transition to In-App Support: Moving support systems in-app improves consistency, provides better context for issues, and enhances the player experience by allowing them to stay within the game environment.
- Player Reactions: Players' reactions to new support systems can be mixed. While automation can streamline processes, some players may prefer traditional methods and need time to adjust.
- Community Interaction: Utilizing platforms like Discord can help manage lower-level support queries through community interaction, allowing support agents to focus on more complex issues.
- Automation vs. Human Touch: Balancing automation with human oversight is crucial. Automation can handle repetitive tasks, but human agents are necessary for complex and nuanced issues.
- Managing Change: Implementing new systems requires clear communication and expectation management to address fears and ensure smooth transitions for both teams and players.
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Transcript
00:00:00
Speaker
Hey, everybody. Welcome to
Introduction and Episode Preview
00:00:01
Speaker
today's episode of the Player Engage podcast. Before we get started, I just want to let you know what you're going to be hearing. You're going to hear from Dang, Stefan Lahong from Playa Games, and Connor McGinley from Bitro. Both of them are part of the Still Front family, and both of them are customer service leads, as well as community service leads out for their
Discussion Topics and Listener Engagement
00:00:19
Speaker
respective companies. And we're going to talk about the transition to a new tool.
00:00:22
Speaker
So how do you work with your players? How do you work with your community? How do you work with your own internal employees and prep them for a new tool? How do you make that change? How do you make sure that players are used to a new system? So there's a lot of cool best practices around customer service here, and I hope you get to enjoy it. So let us know how you feel about it and drop us a line.
Guest Introductions
00:00:47
Speaker
Good morning, everybody. Welcome to the Player Engage Podcast. Greg here. Today we have a fun episode to lead us into the Gamescom Community Clubhouse that's coming up here in a couple of weeks. We are joined by Dang Stephan Lahang from Playa Games and Connor McGinley.
00:01:04
Speaker
um bytro They are both part of the still front front family. um And you'll see they have two very different perspectives in community management and leading a support team. Dang has been the lead community manager for Playa Games for the past couple of years. And he's also been at big, or he was at big point for over 10 years. And the most exciting part if we have time to it was he spent four years at Porsche. So for some weird reason, we have extra time at the end, we're going to dig deep into Porsche.
00:01:32
Speaker
And with Connor, he was a customer support manager at Bitro for over three years. And he's also spent time at wildlife studios as well as Accenture.
Guest Backgrounds
00:01:40
Speaker
So we have a full episode full of great stuff today. Before we go on, dang Connor, thanks for joining me. Dan, you want to introduce yourself?
00:01:49
Speaker
Sure. Hi, guys. My name is Dagen. I'm a team lead community management at Playa Games in Hamburg, Germany. um I'm within the gaming industry for more than 15 years, mostly engaging with customer service and community management. Yeah, and happy I'm happy to be here and have some interesting conversation with you guys.
00:02:11
Speaker
Yeah, we're excited to have you here. Dang, you have a great background. I know you've spent a lot of time in help shift, so I'd love to kind of pick your brain on that. And thanks for joining. And Connor, also thank you for joining us today.
Transition to In-App Support
00:02:22
Speaker
You want to say a little something about yourself?
00:02:24
Speaker
Hi, I'm Connor. I'm the customer support manager at Beiter Labs, also in Hamburg, Germany. And for the past eight years or so, I've been in and out of the gaming industry working for developers directly and for contractors, which is always a lot of fun. I'm also happy to be here.
00:02:43
Speaker
We're happy to have you both here. And we're both really excited about this panel that's going to be going on at GDC as well. And what we heard about Community Clubhouse previously was that people wanted it to be more technical, more advanced strategies. And what we're doing right now is kind of like a, for those of you who went to university and know university, i one a one-on-one level course, right? This is our intro we're going to be doing right now. And then we're going to get much more in depth at community clubhouse at Gamescom. So this is the teaser for that. So if you're hungry for more, let us know afterwards, but let's start high level for both Dang and Connor, you know, you've both made this realization within the past couple of years that you wanted to move your support from an external location to in-app. So whether it was web-based, whether it was forum-based or Discord-based to to focusing it on in-app. And I'm curious on kind of what was that moment that Lightbulb went off where you said, you know what?
00:03:37
Speaker
We need a better solution for this. We need to find a different way to help support our community and provide the appropriate level of support for them. So, you know, ah yeah, so some of a high level perspective, Connor, do you maybe want to kick us off and how you kind of went about that route and what made you realize that? When I started at Bytra, we were using a contact form, an email set up.
00:04:00
Speaker
and When you're working with cases like this, you wind up on a very case-by-case individual basis. It becomes much, much harder to track issues from specific locations, from specific game states, from different trends. so
00:04:20
Speaker
organizing a a setup that lets you process a lot of cases very quickly and effectively is next to impossible if you don't have the context and the metadata from the app itself.
Efficiency and Support System Improvements
00:04:32
Speaker
Was there a specific goal or KPI here at help shift, we do OKRs and kind of our OKRs are always improve first time response or average handle time. Was there kind of a ah goal that made you think, all right, let's revisit this, this current situation on how we can improve it?
00:04:52
Speaker
so After working with this system for a couple of months, I specifically wanted to move to HealthShift because I'd used it before. and What I find exceptionally useful is being able to firstly collect the information about the player, about the app,
00:05:11
Speaker
So we don't need to ask them questions such as their username, their email address, that's already stored, that's already accessible for us. And if we are aware that something might be going wrong in a specific area of the game,
00:05:26
Speaker
It's much much easier then to see well the players on this map and they've said they've had a bug it's probably this one we know about so already you skip a lot of the interaction and get straight to the point which is the most important thing for me when dealing with players and What we were really looking to do was increase the amount of results we could manage because you want to keep agents in a flow state. You want them able to hammer out good quality decent rep replies quickly without needing to debate with the player to get to the point.
00:05:58
Speaker
I love that. And I want to come back to that in a little bit on how you make sure that your agents remain consistent with a high level of quality responses, right? Because again, consistency, and if you want to be able to scale, you need a good consistent methodology that that agents can come in on board real quick and do the same thing over and over again. So I want to come back and and kind of double tap into that. but I'm curious from Dang's perspective, how do you recognize
Community and Player Feedback
00:06:23
Speaker
that something needs to change? Was that when you were at maybe big point and you saw how Helpshift worked or you saw or you just knew once you jumped into Playa that a better help desk was needed? um No, it was already a big point when I realized that yeah kind of email-only support is outdated. We need to go more modern ways.
00:06:47
Speaker
And first and foremost, I wanted players to not have to leave the app when asking for support, finding um knowledge database, of service ah themselves within the app without having to leave it and also having the possibility to contact support directly from within the game. That was the main win for me.
00:07:15
Speaker
and to realize a better user experience regarding um support. What did your users, kind of what was their reaction to a new support system? ah And this is always, you know, and my background as a sales engineer, right? And we always talk about implementation and how that goes. And you don't always want to kick a sleeping dog is what I like to say sometimes is if everything's working, but you realize there's there's a better way here. So how do your players react to a change when all of a sudden their system is different?
00:07:46
Speaker
um It was mixed, some were really appreciating it, but some older customers who were used to have the email conversation, they were probably kind of overwhelmed with the new system, did not really know how to interact with automations, and were rather asking for a direct contact to a human person instead of being directed through a leaded automated conversation.
Volunteer Involvement and Discord's Role
00:08:15
Speaker
um But within the community, I realized that other players, when those who had doubts about the new system probably were complaining about it and um in our Discord, other players jumped in, explained them the system and also showed them a way where you will get help much more quickly. Because the questions which are being asked automated as In the other case, have been asked by our agents and then the customer needs to read the email, agent needs to read his reply and so on, which takes a lot of time and by direction of conversation, whereas we with the automations, we could collect all important information with an automated method it conversation basically right away.
00:09:11
Speaker
yeah Yeah, it's funny you I hear that quite a bit. and It's kind of the beauty of building a community. And maybe it's not exactly where you're going, but you know, a lot of people in community get used to just being able to talk to someone, whether it be via email, whether it be a chat, and whether that be your support agent or someone else. ah And the beauty of having a Discord set up is that if someone still wants to drop their question to a channel, right, they can still have conversations with the rest of the community as well. It's just you save your support agents for the tickets that need to be handled.
00:09:38
Speaker
And you can also segment users, right? So if you want to make sure someone goes directly to an agent to speak to that agent, you have that ability to. And Connor, I know you've dealt with something like that, right? You were kind of a Discord friendly support team ah prior to your move. I was curious kind of how your your older players, players who have been playing the game for a while, how did they take to this new based system when you when you got things set up? And how did you deal
Challenges in Implementing New Systems
00:10:06
Speaker
with that?
00:10:07
Speaker
The Discord inclusion actually came about only a little bit before the adoption of Helpshift. Rather, the community support was handled through email through the contact forms, but volunteers would handle it.
00:10:26
Speaker
ah We still use Discord now, not for support, but there are help channels, there are discussion channels, so there's plenty of ways for players to have their low-level questions answered to deliver their feedback, and so on, with CS acting as a more structured way to handle that sort of thing. um um In regards to how the community responded to the new system,
00:10:50
Speaker
The ones who were vocal about it really didn't like it. They found that having multiple automatic steps that they would have to go through was taking up too much of their time, often repeating human agent into the text and not knowing why that didn't just magically grant them a human agent.
00:11:10
Speaker
um and generally complaining that this new system isn't the old system, because that's what 99% of these complaints will be. I don't like the system. It's not what I used before. I don't see what was wrong with what I used before. So they did manage to get their hands on some old links, support links that have been shared in the past, so they could continue to send contact form or emails to the old support system, which I kept active as a redundancy.
00:11:40
Speaker
because when you adopt something new, there's always a chance something is going wrong where you can't see it. Always best to have a backup system, which these players would use to try to get their hands on volunteers again and have a direct response, which didn't quite go to plan for them because they just got me advising them to contact the yeah the new system.
00:12:03
Speaker
It's funny how how people just love what they know, right? And it makes sense because they know it, but people were to give new new things a shot, right? that They're there for a reason. It's to make your team scale better, to make things more efficient, to make people more effective. And it's kind of an interesting conversation you have to have with your team, as well as your
Team Adaptation and Feedback
00:12:21
Speaker
players. And something that always really fascinates me with that, both of your studios, both Bytro and Playa are part of the still front group.
00:12:29
Speaker
thing is, I think both of you have very different approaches to customer support. And it's awesome, because it says a lot about a storefront and how they kind of give you your authority to do what you want to do to help your users. But can you kind of, I guess, and I don't know how I'm gonna ask this question. So I'm just gonna ask it kind of, you made the move to help shift, or it could be any platform, right? I'm just curious ah on kind of how do you temper your team? How do you temper your your players? How do you temper everyone? Like, and how do you review the process once you make that move, right? It's a It's not just, ah hey, I'm going to turn off the old lights, turn on the new lights, you got to prep everybody. So, ah Dang, I'm going to see if you know how to answer this first because it's a wild question, but kind of how do you set the expectations for everyone when you make a change like this? The expectation management was that I introduced HelpShift to my team, um mostly pointing out the advantages for their daily work.
00:13:25
Speaker
um and also because they heard there will be automations and there were some fears that their jobs might be redundant and um um due to the automation that because in their world everything can be automated completely and then they said oh I'm not needed any anymore So there was something I had to mitigate, telling them it's just to gather information more quickly, being more efficient. And if they have more free time due to being more efficient, we can switch the work power for more useful tasks like expanding the knowledge database or any other stuff we are dealing with in community management, which is not related to
00:14:20
Speaker
support itself how did your agents react after the change whether it be three months down the line six months down the line did they see the benefits of the new system or or do you think those fears are kind of still um No, I think ah the fears vanished right away because tickets were still coming in, they had still stuff to do. um I
Automation and Agent Efficiency
00:14:44
Speaker
think they needed to get to use to the new system first, but it went quite quickly. um They found out some processes which could be improved, so I was um
00:14:56
Speaker
waiting for feedback, getting feedback and then implementing it to improve the processes, automations. Probably I missed some information which needs to be asked and then I just created this step to have a full picture of the problems players are being reporting.
00:15:15
Speaker
Yeah, i meanwhile, it's easy handling. There are some pain points, which I um report to to my customer success manager, and then hopefully others feeling the same pain, and then it will be solved at some point. And I think my agents also realize that it can be problems can be handled more quickly for the benefit of the player.
00:15:40
Speaker
I appreciate your transparency there. And it's good to hear, you know, quite, quite frankly, I feel like at times when you have to be the one that makes that change, you're kind of looked at as kind of you're you're becoming friction to what that group is used to, right? And how do you how do you convince people maybe maybe dang or maybe kind of you can take this one. How do you convince your team that this is the right move we need to you need to just trust in the process and we will get you there right like sometimes being able to see clearly at the end it's through all this haze is hard. So how do you get them to see through the haze to be able to see the clear side?
00:16:19
Speaker
So I was quite fortunate when I set everything up because, as I said, I worked for Helpshift before, so by the time we went live, we had a basic infrastructure in place for the professional agents on my team. They went from very little categorization to everything is now organizing convenient folders of of specific issue types so they can work through, they can expect the content of the ticket before they open it.
00:16:49
Speaker
so they were all very happy with it. The volunteers, on the other hand, were not part of the new system. Their responsibilities were being adjusted now, so they were quite unhappy about this. As far as they were concerned, they were being replaced by an inefficient automatic system that didn't respect the players and didn't respect them, which is, of course, entirely untrue. And one of the main ways that I got them to accept the new way of things is to
00:17:22
Speaker
encourage them into more proactive duties because volunteers and CS agents, they're not the same thing. CS agents are of course professional and are there to do a job. Volunteers are there out of passion. So we moved them into unofficial tournament management, engaging more with the players through Discord, through games, basically more play and less work.
00:17:51
Speaker
I love the way you put that I mean, and I think that's kind of what we like to kind of say a lot is, you know, we try to automate the mundane things password resets refunds, right? Because so again, even as an agent doesn't necessarily want to deal with that stuff, right?
00:18:07
Speaker
But if you could get them thinking about the more logical, tougher questions, ways you can maybe strengthen other skills, maybe it's focusing, and like you said, more on the community, more on another thing like trust and safety, right? ah You can kind of expand the agent's mindset by saying, hey, you can work on some more complicated things. And I think that's a huge selling point we have, because again, you don't want to be stuck in the mundane. um but I'm curious from both of you know, you've both gone through this process, and you've probably gone through it with multiple tools, multiple times, multiple things like For the two of you i mean i know you guys i think first met face to face i think last week or two weeks ago like what are some best practices you would recommend to each other on kind of how you work with your teams how you scale cuz again you both when we spoke with you earlier right i think
00:18:54
Speaker
Connor, I think you have a lot more tickets than Dang. Dang's a little more strategic with how he handles his tickets. So like, you know, there's a lot of community managers, a lot of support leads that that listen to this. So how do you approach your day to day? What are your best practices that maybe if you were to start your own studio, that you would implement right at the gate? And again, that's a pretty loaded question. So Dang, you want to kick it off? um Yeah, that's really good question. um Basically, if I had a free choice, I would um implement as many as possible ah automated solutions, which are fully independent from any agents. Like you mentioned, password reset, data deletion requests, and so stuff like that, which is basically just a kind of monkey work. And then just a more important, more
00:19:50
Speaker
ah complicated issues being routed through the system to an agent just to have the time to take care of more more important stuff which is also I guess more interesting for an agent to do. Very similar in I divide everything between information and actions and information should always always be something the players can find out themselves and when we come to actions. If it doesn't require specific access or expertise, the player should also be able to do it themselves.
00:20:27
Speaker
and If this means having an automatic system in support where players can ask a question, get redirected to an f FAQ, I still count that as the player doing it themselves. That's still ah very much self-driven.
00:20:45
Speaker
take so Sorry, I was going to say something. I didn't have a second half of that sentence. So what we don't want to do is waste the expertise of our agents who are experts and professionals in what they do. And they should be challenged every single time they have to talk to a player.
00:21:09
Speaker
and so building the infrastructure, building the automation so that everything gets filtered to only the good stuff coming through. That's the important thing. That's what I wanted to get at. What I loved hearing you talk about Connor earlier conversation was how you're now basically reviewing every automation, every bot, everything that you have in the system today because of feedback that you've gotten. And it's not negative feedback, it's just feedback, right? So how do you determine how you're going to go back to look at every automation, every bot step to improve the workflow here now that it's already set up, right? You basically built yourself a building. How are you going to, how are you going to go
00:21:48
Speaker
take a look at all that, and how are you going to prioritize it? Oh, this is the toughest question you could have possibly asked. You know when you are working on something creative, and you finish it, and you look back on it, and you think, I hate everything about this. No one else can see the flaws. No one else can see anything wrong with it. But you know. You know where all the holes are. So what I tend to do is build something that works, lowercase w.
00:22:17
Speaker
and ask the agents who are working with it to let me know every time there is a stumble, every time they trip up on something, every time they need to go and find more info or do two clicks instead of one. I make a note of that, go back to the automation and see what can I do now to remove that extra click, to remove that obstacle. Occasionally, I will find tickets where they've been closed without a response because one of my automations is triggering in a way it shouldn't be.
00:22:45
Speaker
So things that are happening by accident get the biggest priority. I need to turn that automation off or I need to remake it. Something's going wrong. I don't understand why, so it has to go until I do. And then after that, we deal with frequently asked questions. If we're always answering the same thing, a bot needs to answer it. And then finally is optimizing the agent's workflow.
00:23:14
Speaker
So whatever's taking them a bit longer than it should be, remove that. You shave two seconds off a ticket, but when you're handling thousands in a month, that adds up.
Performance Evaluation with KPIs
00:23:26
Speaker
It's really well said and I love how you're getting feedback from your own agents to improve the system and the platform that you're providing to them. you know We say the same thing about talking to your gamers to figure out feedback from the game. What do you like about the game? What do you don't like about the game? So you're basically eating your own dog food, which I love because the only way to improve what you're doing is to hear back from the people that are in there on a daily basis ah doing it. And I think that's a fantastic way to look at it. And and dang, I know you're much more KPI heavy. I know kind of your KPI.
00:23:56
Speaker
as well. But I remember you kind of throwing a whole bunch of KPIs at me when we got started. So um I know, and I believe, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, that part of the reason you wanted to make that move was to help, which was for enhanced KPIs, or maybe KPS that you didn't have before. Can you tell me a little more about maybe what was missing and why KPIs are important to you?
00:24:16
Speaker
um Yes, our old system was kind of a black hole regarding KPIs. It has some statistics, but quite complicated to extract. And I think the only KPI I i ahead got hand on kind of was ah first response time.
00:24:41
Speaker
and maybe the solution times. I don't recall in in detail anymore. But um yeah, help drift is ah way easier to get hands on KPIs. Like CSAT, we couldn't measure CSAT beforehand. This was quite helpful because I didn't have any idea how our agents are so performing.
00:25:05
Speaker
um Turns out we are doing quite well. um first response times are more easier to get. Basically, any KPIs you wish with ah with a new platform is easy to get. And that's super helpful for reporting on my side to evaluating um agent performance in total, but also for each of my agents in particular.
00:25:35
Speaker
If there are some bad KPIs, we can talk about it, look into it. Why is that happening? And then try to improve the performance again. Sometimes it's trivial reasons. Maybe some translations got wrong or something like that. And then communities just pissed and right. So the agent, although he did a good job in a bad way, that's people expressing their anger.
00:26:05
Speaker
I think it's also a good tool to have, if people are dissatisfied with or frustrated, then they have some kind of a possibility to, to how to say, to canalize their anger through giving a bad rate or something. Well, if you look into it and you see why this happens and you see the seaset in another light, so it's not,
00:26:32
Speaker
that an agent always is performing bad if the CSAT does not meet expectations. But ah we didn't see, if you still have a look on the global CSAT on our product, even bigger impacts on our community do through some some problems we produced after an update. There was no significant impact on the CSAT if you look at globally.
00:27:03
Speaker
Yeah. Do you, you know, I know some of your strategy includes kind of working closely with Keyword Studios to help kind of optimize processes. Are you seeing value? Are you seeing kind of your goals that you had set? Are you seeing those be hit quicker or you're not sure yet based on kind of the help that you're receiving? I'm not sure if I risk reach more quickly. I would say it has to maintain my goals basically and regarding internationalization it has some features which are quite helpful for my setup where I have only one agent for example for a specific language when this agent is on sick leave or vacation and then we have some tools to still help the players
00:27:56
Speaker
is ah It's interesting to hear. First off, I guess you're talking about language AI, right? In practice, you know I love the idea of auto-translation of inbound and outbound messages. Are you seeing the value there? I mean, obviously you're saying that that when your agents that only speak specific languages are gone, you have a way to respond to those customers now. um One, are customers still getting upset about translations that are wrong? um And did language AI help with that?
00:28:26
Speaker
um Hard to judge, actually. um We got some complaints that maybe the AI translates game-specific phrases wrong because we did not yet train it. But in the end, the players are happy that they get help quickly.
00:28:51
Speaker
And then I think they oversee some smaller mistakes in in the translation I've observed. Yeah, just backing up a moment, right? You mentioned you're kind of, you weren't able to measure CSAT before,
Networking and Idea Sharing
00:29:06
Speaker
right? Did you have an idea of where your CSAT was before and where it is today? No, no clue. I don't have, today it's a very satisfying.
00:29:17
Speaker
where we have been before, I don't know, but I would assume that we were on a good level as well. Okay. um You know, I want to dig more into this other topic here. um You know, again, you guys were probably together for I think it was last week, right? Where you guys were two weeks ago, where you guys got to meet? It was two weeks ago. Two two weeks ago, you know, you're, you're all part of Still Front, but I don't think you guys were necessarily familiar with one another. And then, you we have Ed Hartman here who kind of helps facilitate an introduction between the two of you because you're both part of still front. Like, now that you two know each other, you're almost going to start forming your own community, for lack of better words, where you can share best practices, we've heard best practices from Connor, we've heard best practices from from dang, right? Like, when you first meet, like, what type of do you do you talk strategy to talk about that you just talk about
00:30:06
Speaker
ah the Olympics, football, and what's the conversation like? it And do you think you can start talking to others at your group or other groups because of these strategies that you two formed together?
00:30:19
Speaker
Connor, you want to start it off here since everyone's silent? Yeah, sure. um To begin with, i've I'm quite an integral worker, so I mostly focused on my own things until Ed introduced me to Dang.
00:30:34
Speaker
And after that, we did have a fairly long conversation at the Playa office, which is extremely large with very large kitchen, which I've had on my mind for it a little while now. And next time I'm in Hamburg, I'm going to have to find the excuse ah because, you know, certain things can't be discussed online. It has to be in person and it has to be at Dan's place. So.
00:31:00
Speaker
that's that's That's the plan going forward. Has to happen for breakfast, right? Yes. So the intent for me will be to get in touch with other studios as well, try and facilitate open communication, because the difficult part is always going to be you approaching other people in other departments. And this applies to any way you are.
00:31:28
Speaker
You don't want to be the guy who shows up and says, let me see your stuff so I can tell you how to do it better. And you also don't want to put onto somebody else's plate, hey, can you come look at my stuff and tell me how to do it better? Rather, I work with what I have and have to put the effort into reaching out to networking a bit, which is ultimately what this will boil down to.
00:31:51
Speaker
I, yeah, and you know, I think a lot of us, I'm just gonna say a lot of us also kind of get this imposter syndrome thinking that I don't really know as much as I think I do but I would discount that with the two of you because you guys both know a lot right and I just think you know once in a while you just need to be able to talk to someone to kind of spitball ideas come up with ideas and I think I think just when you two talk together and hearing and kind of the different approaches you take, it's fascinating because you do take different approaches. And this is probably probably harder for our listeners to understand and how they work with their teams. Again, I think Dang has a ah bigger team, whereas Connor is working more with automations and a smaller team. But I guess Dang, same question to you more so kind of about the the networking, the kind of spitballing ideas together. um do you Do you feel that? do you Do you see more of it now that that
00:32:39
Speaker
conversation has been made and do you see it scaling within the still front group? I think it's it's too early to to say that the conversation in this regard is increasing within the still front group. I think we need to find a way um to start conversation first. Currently, we had a brief conversation, Connor and I, two weeks ago.
00:33:07
Speaker
was quite interesting to talk about how we are approaching customer service, how we are using tools and stuff, ah really inspiring as well. I think it could be beneficial to have some kind of a round table from all with all the customer service leads.
Personal Interests and Gaming Discussion
00:33:27
Speaker
So I have one or two more questions for you. But before we jump into that, I want to talk a bit about gaming, because that's why we're here. What games are you guys playing these days, Connor?
00:33:38
Speaker
So I'm all over the place in in games at the moment um because a friend of mine has a YouTube channel that he writes reviews for. I'm playing another crab's treasure so I can make sure his review makes sense, which is a lot more work than you might think. um I am into souls like some souls games but I usually get about two-thirds of the way through before I'm like I need a break from this and then I just never go back to it. That's why Rise of P is sitting unfinished in my library. I'm also a big fan of city builders of turn-based RPGs. I have ah
00:34:25
Speaker
The new cycle, it's called. It's kind of a diesel punk city builder that's really cool that I've not really sunk my teeth into yet. And last night I was playing Chaos Gate Demon Hunters, the the Warhammer game. And I've been struggling a bit with that. I'm actually not good at turn-based RPGs. I tend to 10 turns in, move one guy a little bit too far, and then the whole map wakes up with every single enemy there. And that's just the end of the game for me. I lose one mission. That's it. I'm out. I'm done. So no civilization for Connor. We're sticking to real-time at RPGs.
00:35:07
Speaker
um Dang, what game are you playing? um Actually, I do not play that much any anymore. I used to play way more a couple of years ago.
00:35:18
Speaker
and the only game I purchase once a year is Call of Duty and that's just because a couple of friends of mine are playing every Friday multiplayer together and on hardcore mode these search and destroy only the whole night and once in a while I'm i'm joining them but
00:35:48
Speaker
yeah I guess the last season I managed to join them five times a year or something like that. Just more, way more other interests in real life meanwhile, where i'm but which I prefer to playing online the whole night.
00:36:07
Speaker
All I heard there Dang was that you don't really play games, you only play Call of Duty hardcore mode which is like a weird flex you have there. I only play the hardest game with the most anxiety out there.
00:36:19
Speaker
um Love it. um So I have two more questions for
Future Goals and AI in Customer Service
00:36:22
Speaker
you both. um We are entering the latter half of 2024. A lot of cool technology has been introduced across the board. ah what What are your kind of expectations for the rest of 2024? Do you have any goals that you're trying to hit or any technologies that are exciting you? Connor, you want to kick it off there?
00:36:41
Speaker
I'm aiming to, and this is going to sound bold because it is a little bit bold, I want to see how much of my CS can be self-sufficient because I only have a few agents and the agents I have are really, really good.
00:36:58
Speaker
And so what I would like to be able to do is have all of the basics running itself, have all of the players being helped effectively. That's a key word here. I don't believe in any kind of support that deflects players without them getting helped.
00:37:14
Speaker
So I want to work towards making sure players get their answers, they get what they need, and my agents are more free to go through tickets, to go through cases, to be able to properly quantify bug reports and things that we find, and to put together feedback reports.
00:37:31
Speaker
because it's all well and good having reviews and things. ah Google reviews, Apple reviews. Typically, players leave reviews more when they are angry and they've just quit. And that's not super useful for knowing how best to improve the product because this is an angry player writing out of anger. ah When you have a more engaged CS system, when players can reach out to you and have a proper conversation with someone who knows the game and understands the game,
00:38:01
Speaker
you get much more valuable feedback out of them because they're already passed the basics, they're already passed the fix the game level of feedback and you can have the back and forth, you can ask them directly, you feel this is unbalanced, what would it look like to you if it were more balanced? And that's the kind of relationship I like to build with the community and make sure we can do all of that Buy next year would be nice. We'll have to see what happens there. I am not a great long-term planner. Well, you got a great partner here. If you need any help with that, you can reach out to us and let us know and I love it. But can you give kind of some visual to the audience right here? like How many tickets ballpark are you having a month? How many agents do you have? like Just kind of get people to understand what you're dealing with here.
00:38:50
Speaker
At the moment, I have two people who are working full time and a working student who helps us out half that time. I believe we have confirmed our third agent who will join us later this year, which I'm very happy about. And we deal with, now the last time we went over the stats, we were looking at something like 44,000 over 90 days. Like this is a lot of contacts for not a lot of people.
00:39:20
Speaker
So yeah ballpark would be about 5,000 tickets an age in a month, which is ah a high number, which is great. And it's awesome to hear. um I want to, and maybe we save this for Gamescom, but thinking about, you know, if you want to scale more, you need to connect to backend systems, right? Whether it be wallets, whether it be player databases, right? Is that something that you're investigating now, something that you're interested in, something that you're already doing?
00:39:44
Speaker
I'm almost certain I've seen it done before at a previous place, but I'm not sure which previous place. I'm just... I'm memories of a bot that was used to... So a player would complain, my currency's missing what happened to it. And this bot was able to then just list their previous transactions of premium currency. And nine times out of ten, that's going to answer the player's problem. And if it doesn't, it means that the yeah the currency has actually gone missing.
00:40:15
Speaker
And so because this is going to take a little bit of work outside my department and require some technical expertise that I simply don't have, it's on the list. It's just not at the top of the list unless someone comes to me and says, hey, I'm an expert at exactly this. I already worked for your company and I want to do it for you. So of course, if anyone from Biotro is listening, I am open to this.
00:40:38
Speaker
All right. Everyone tweet about it. and Maybe we don't use Twitter anymore. Nevermind. Um, dang, same question to you now is going into the second half of 2024. What are your goals? How are things looking? Um, basically I'm looking forward to have more AI features within help shift to, to try them, implement them to our processes. See how can we benefit from AI making the work more efficient.
00:41:10
Speaker
yeah I'm just looking forward to which possibilities will be there from a user's as well as from an from an agent's perspective regarding the AI usage in customer service. And yeah, I'm really curious what's coming up within the next year or one or two years regarding AI will be, I think it will be huge. There's a big potential.
00:41:36
Speaker
um Other than that, I look forward to the um PC widget which is coming out so that I can finally also have our Steam players staying within the game when contacting support or looking for informations.
00:41:54
Speaker
Cool. I appreciate you sharing that. Um, last question I have for both of you, and then I'll give you the stage with anything you want to talk about, but I'm curious on what is your biggest success or what you're most proud of. And and please know that doesn't need to be related to, to help shift, but I'm just more curious in your role here. Kind of what what are you most proud to kind of say, Hey, uh, I'm very proud of this. Dan, you want to start this one off? I think I'm very proud of my team.
00:42:19
Speaker
because they, although probably having a bit um ah kind of restraint against changing the system, they in the end were quite open to it, adapted to it, and are now working with the tool um on a day-to-day basis, but um delivering outstanding um outstanding support, performance. Players are very satisfied with my team and with the with the support for outcome. That's where I'm really proud of. I love it. Spoken like a ah great manager, proud of the team. I'd love to hear that. Connor, same question. I have i have i have two. and One of them is on the same lines as Dang here because
00:43:08
Speaker
The agents I have are fantastic. They bring an energy and enthusiasm that means i can I can work with the automatic systems I am, that I can have whole days of barely communicating with anyone else. And once I pull my head out again, everything is still running perfectly. Everyone's good. Everything's proceeded exactly as it should. And it's because they are like just really good at what they do. I'm very, very lucky to have ended up with this team.
00:43:39
Speaker
um and then the other The other side is the automations itself. I have no idea how I've managed to handle the amount of tickets that I do with the amount of people I have, but whatever I'm doing, it is working. This system is ah it's an abomination onto technology, but it works. I'm very, very happy that that's happened because I have no idea how else I would have handled this kind of volume.
00:44:08
Speaker
I could tell you as a sales engineer, that is not one way I've ever described the system, but it but it works. But I could tell you part of this that might help you is that, you know, in our smart intent feature, which is our AI-based learning, you have 93, just about 93% of your issues being created with our AI intent, meaning that you're understanding the question that's coming in by the player, and you're automatically routing them to the workflow that best helps them with their AI. so A, did you know that it was that high 93% created with intents? And if you did know, is there anything you did special to get it there?
00:44:47
Speaker
I put the smart intents on every interaction. One thing that I can't, I can't abide is not knowing things that are going on. So within the help shift system, all of the contact that we have, I need to have some some metrics, some way of knowing what we're working with. And opening tickets and reading them one by one, it's doable. It's not efficient, but it's doable. And smart intent means I don't have to do that. I can see which smart intents have been used the most. I can compare this to CSAT. If we find one intent is getting a lot of one stars, does this mean
00:45:29
Speaker
players are picking this intent because it closely matches what they really want and no intent exists for what they really want. So do I need to add another? Are they too specific? Are they too vague? It's all data that I can use to refine it over time.
00:45:44
Speaker
And when you tell me it's 93%, I'm actually a little surprised. ah I thought I had it on more than that, so now I have to go back and see what's what what is evading the smart intents and then fix it so they can't.
00:46:00
Speaker
There you go. You know, knowing is half the battle. That's what GI Joe here used to say. So knowing what you're about to face and being able to be prepared and send it to the right people, the right team is very, very important to automating into scaling.
00:46:16
Speaker
So Connor, dang, I am very thrilled that you spent your afternoon with me and I appreciate that. And I'm looking forward to our extended conversation at Gamescom. Anything else that you would like to share before we go, maybe how people can find you or so on, um dang.
Conclusion and Upcoming Events
00:46:38
Speaker
Yeah, thanks for the opportunity talking to you and Yeah, search me on LinkedIn, send a friend request or how do you say business requests? I don't know. We meet each other at the community club house next month. Feel free to get in touch with me. Happy about some interesting conversations. Thank you, Connor.
00:47:05
Speaker
Same for me, I'm reachable fairly easily on LinkedIn. If you do send a request, add a little note, say how you found me. I get a lot of requests offering me construction services. Not sure why, but I get a lot of that. um And of course, if you do find me at any of these networking events, I am much more approachable in person than I ah appear online. So go ahead, approach me, tell me I'm famous, I need it.
00:47:34
Speaker
We are working on it. We will get you there and we will get you famous. Dang, Connor, thank you so much for joining. And we'll have all information about Connor and Dang and Playa and Bycho. But in about one month, in less than a month, in a couple of weeks, you'll be able to hear the two of them speak at Community Clubhouse at Gamescom or Devcom and Gamescom. So if you're going to be going to Devcom, be sure to check out their panel at Community Clubhouse. We're going to talk about the transition from email support to in-app support.
00:48:00
Speaker
We can scale on it. It was great to hear kind of how you guys approach these problems and solve them. um Thank you so much for joining us today. And I hope you guys have a great rest of your day.