According to brand survey in 2011, Gamania takes a leading role in terms of brand recognition and market share among game industry. Gamania’s brand image gives people a youthful, vigorous impression, however in the customer satisfaction regard, it still has room for improvement! In this issue, we invited 3 supervisors: section chief of Customer Service, Paul Hung, division chief of 2nd division of Game Operation, Ken Tang and section chief of Internet Technology, Paul Ding to talk about the current situation of Gamania’s customer service. In the meantime, we also like to gather minds about enhancing our customer service image. Gamania’s next move of customer service needs to step to the right direction!
G!VOICE: Customer service personnel stands on the front line of dealing with customers. What kind of problems may emerge from Gamania’s customer service?
Paul Hung: there are three channels for Gamania’s customer service: telephone, emails and physical visit center, among which the phone calls are the most common. Compared to professional call centers such as the bank or telecommunication companies, where they possess of detailed customer and account information to provide their personnel with instant individualized information, currently our service platform doesn’t required players to provide detailed personal information and we are unable to connect directly to back office to request of game accounts or make changes.
▲Phone calls are the most important channel for players to seek help in Gamania.
When customers call, we could assist in checking partial information regarding their accounts. We are more capable of dealing with requests in terms of campaigns or content of the games, however in terms of the game process of the account and customized service, we need to pass on to back office for further handling.
In the event where the system or the game encounters problems, customer service personnel could answer content that has been approved by operation but not the actual answer. Although this may cause some suspicions for some clients, to avoid bigger impact on the company as a whole, this is the dilemma that front line customer service personnel needs to deal with.
Right now we incline to not preserving detailed information of our customers, but merely accounts and telephone numbers. This is a guarantee to both the customers and the company, but on the other hand, it will increase difficulty in the differentiation of our service.
Currently the first criterion asked of our call personnel is accuracy, including the accuracy of information and of procedure. Furthermore, we ask them to approach our customers with friendly attitude and empathy. We still have a lot to improve. The dilemma lies in how we consider both the cost and efficiency in providing friendly and cordial service. For customer service personnel to service the most customers, he must control the time and the accuracy of service every time so that more clients could benefit from their services. For example, we don’t wish to see only 20% of the customers give the feedback of ‘satisfactory’ while the other 80% couldn’t receive any service at all. We hope that over 80% customers could receive accurate service and we strive to strike a balance between efficiency and customer satisfaction. For us, this is an improving process. How to take care both efficiency and empathy is the direction that we strive for.
Compared to other industries, our company doesn’t give much authorization to our front line customer service personnel which means the customers need to wait longer to confirm their requests. The personnel will gather some common scenarios, hoping to get a certain degree of authorization to shorten the waiting time.
G!VOICE: To improve customer satisfaction, what do the operation unit plan to do?
Ken: Players are our bosses! Therefore the operation unit often functions with customers in the back of their minds, be it providing new games or better servers etc, we strive for the best. However, we do have some ‘tug of war’ going on with the Korean developer. For game developers, Taiwan is not a big market, compared to mainland China or Korea, therefore many games and their tied-in campaigns are designed from Korean players’ perspective. For Taiwanese players, there are bound to be some problems. To let the developers take Taiwanese players into consideration, we started to host some players meetings on some of the focused games about a year and a half ago. We invited Korean developers to Taiwan to personally listen to what Taiwanese players have to say. If they have any problems, they could directly respond to the developers. Every time we finish the meeting, we usually get pretty positive feedback on online gamer forum.
▲Mabinogi held a player meeting session in 2011. Korean developer flew to Taiwan to get a better understanding of the actual demands of Taiwanese players.
We continuously modify our approaches so that players could have more favorable impressions towards Gamania. Some players call us ‘Black Gamania’ on the internet, because initially to achieve revenue target, our design of campaigns caused some negative feedbacks. To overturn this image, we started to organize community activities, such as giving away some freebies to increase players’ satisfaction. In the meantime, we also strive to shorten the ‘issue handle’ time after players notify us the problems. This is significant to Gamania: the customers think of us as more approachable.
G!VOICE: players often raise issues such as unstable server, backdate issue or something cannot be fixed, how do IT help customer to solve the problems more efficiently?
Paul Ding: the task of IT is roughly divided into issue prevention and post-issue handling. In the past, the game Maple Story encountered a glitch, whenever the members reach certain amount, the system would fail. However, the authorization of source code was owned by the developer, we couldn’t really improve the situation from our side. We could only assist the developer to handle the problem. From this year, to shorten the handle time, we have established direct contact windows with the developers on major games such as Maple Story and Dragon Nest. We don’t go through operation unit anymore and therefore we could handle emergencies more efficiently and shorten the handle time since the issue is more easily discovered this way.
Every year we invests many resources on IT, such as upgrading the machineries. But for players, whenever there is an issue, it doesn’t matter how nice the machine is, they do not feel a thing. Therefore the main task for IT is to prevent such issues from occurring, such as doing routine information security test. After all, prevention is better than a cure. To be honest, some cases such as random attacks, we haven’t found a proper solutions and that is something we will continue to work on.
G!VOICE: when dealing with customer service issues, what kind of situations you have encountered where our personnel couldn’t do anything about it or unable to handle?
Paul Hung: the time of response from our developers! Even though our colleagues from operation unit and international business unit report the issues to our developers as swiftly as they can, the amount of time taken by developers to respond is unpredictable. And often, players lose their patience while waiting for an answer.
Source of picture: http://www.deviantart.com
Paul Ding: the difficulty that IT experiences is when the customer calls in, we couldn’t do anything about it because only the developers could solve the problems.
Ken: we have done our best to establish smooth communication channel with our developers but after all, we are not their main target market. Their operation units will still prioritize China and Korea over us. In addition, the turnover rate of their contact windows is fairly frequent, we sometimes need to re-communicate with them. For our operation unit it is also a challenge.
In fact, there is no single customer service scheme that is perfect! We couldn’t stop getting complains even if we try to clamp down on OGC. We could only follow the principle of 80/20 and protect the rights of most players. Many players are silent, the ones who call are just seeking for their own interests. This is something customer service has to deal with.
G!VOICE: service shouldn’t only be the job for front line customer service personnel, it should be for the whole company. In terms of customer service on all fronts, what could Gamanians do?
Ken: we could start from our corporate culture. A lot of consumer industries include customer service as part of their corporate cultures. If we could spread the importance of customer service from top to down, the employees could feel that urgency and implement it in daily work. In addition, we could enhance the empathy for our customers. Take the colleagues from operation unit for example, everyone could go on gamers forum to read feedbacks and opinions from game community, they could also play the games launched by the company so they could try to be in players’ shoes. The discussion section of beanfun! will also go online in July this year, players could give us their feedbacks on it. We recommend Gamanians to read those feedbacks.
Paul Ding: the new supervisor of GTW will be sent to attend ‘1 day customer service’ where they would go on the front line to handle the customers first handily. Such experience usually comes as a big impact. Take IT for example, maybe it was just a small programming glitch, the result could be a rap on the knuckles.
Paul Ding: the new supervisor of GTW will be sent to attend ‘1 day customer service’ where they would go on the front line to handle the customers first handily. Such experience usually comes as a big impact. Take IT for example, maybe it was just a small programming glitch, the result could be a rap on the knuckles.
To our understanding, out of 100 game accounts, only 25% will actively seek for our services. After calling in for service, there are about 50% of the callers would complete the satisfaction survey. Although 25% out of this 50% ranked their satisfaction level around 85%, this means out of 100 game accounts, we actually get in touch with 12 of them. Apparently, most players do not call in for service.
Since there are more than 70% of the players do not base their service impression on customer service channel, we need to enhance the overall customer satisfaction level of the company, from as big as the magnitude of platform, the compatibility of user interface, to as small as the wording on the webpage announcement and the accuracy of the content. There are too many aspects for us to work on and I believe the players could feel it if we strive to improve!