Transcription
[Music] Welcome to another episode of the Crafts Podcast. Today we are joined by Tony Wan, who is the head of customer experience for True Play Games. Uh, welcome, Tony.
Thanks for having me, John. Good to be here.
Yeah, it's been a while. It's been a while since we last met in person, but I, you know, I've been following your career, and I think you have a very unique uh, craft. Uh, you know, do you want to talk more about that?
Sure. Yeah, I mean, uh, you know, it's been certainly hasn't been a straight path. Uh, you know, started, um, if we talk about kind of, um, I was in the nonprofit world for a long time and then moved from doing non-profit and government work over to the private sector. Started in gaming quite a while ago, but on the production side of things, so really working with, you know, engineers, artists, business folk, and just getting launching a game, putting it out there, and you know, did that for a number of years before I really got into, let's say more of the customer experience and the customer service side of things. Um, in one of the startups that I did where I was pretty much given like all of the player-facing stuff and really kind of fell in love with the ideas there and and wanted to see if those sort of crazy ideas that I had, um, and then executed at the startup would scale with much larger games and companies. And so, you know, later on went over to Riot and then most recently, you know, Epic Games was there for the past three years.
Awesome. So, you know, I think customer service for a lot of people, um, myself included, has been an afterthought, and I feel like when something goes right, we take it for granted; when something goes wrong, like we get super angry. Um, it just seems like a super tough role. Can you talk about how that is accentuated or or is just the same in gaming versus, you know, non-gaming?
Yeah, I mean, I I I think for sure in in gaming it is, um, a little bit accentuated, right? Kind of depending on how long the company's been around and or how many hits they currently have, you know, live, but usually it's an afterthought because a lot of people, the way they start getting game studios is you get the bear essentials, right? You have your dev team, you have your artists, you have your designers, and then you just kind of go for it, and you're hoping to to land, you know, something uh, with with an audience. And only after things get successful and you're like, "Oh, man, I think what do we do now? There's all these tickets; all of a sudden there's all these people, you know, writing in." And so, um, it definitely gets, you know, accented, I would say, um, in the game space, and a lot of companies find themselves in a very difficult situation depending on the size of their hit and really scrambling sometimes for years afterwards trying to pay back, let's say the tax on on not being prepared. But then you you have that kind of financial question beginning too of like, how how much should you invest? And I think a lot of game companies don't think about, um, would be a wise, I would say, bear investment to make sure that you have sort of the correct systems in place before things really pick up.
So do you think there were any, let's say, inflection points in gaming uh, player support/customer service, and did it emerge at any particular companies? I'll give you some examples, just top of mind for me. Um, I've played all sorts of games, but good CS player support, I always think of companies like like Blizzard, Riot, Epic, uh, basically that that's it in my mind, top of mind. Like what do you think since you know more about the industry?
Yeah, I mean, I I think, you know, you start out with, um, Blizzard is certainly what I would I would call out as kind of one of the OGs of of looking at really investing in their customer service teams. I mean, um, you know, they they hired, uh, started up a bunch of in-house, you know, call centers. Um, they had a, uh, from testimony of friends who were there when, you know, the CSRs got spun up, they always talked about like kind of this rabbit, almost like religious commitment to, um, to like making sure that they were taking care of their players, right? And, um, and I think that a lot of what kind of Blizzard built around taking care of their players ended up reverberating throughout the industry, and a lot of them becoming, you know, in some cases not even backed by data per se, but you know, just there's this almost kind of like religious like feeling like, "Oh, you have to do x; you have to do y." And, um, you you could see the legacy of of those ideas in companies that, um, explicitly make a part of their mission, you know, in some shape or form, a a really strong commitment to being player-focused, right? Um, so, you know, Riot, um, has it within their manifesto; you know, it's kind of been consistently there, and you get a lot of really, um, sort of passionate conversations internally about how much should be reinvested, you know, what are we doing to focus on the player? And you see just yeah, you you definitely see those things, um, uh, kind of pick out through uh, pick up through the rest of the industry. And so you see a lot of people learning from each other; a lot of a lot of the teams say from these places, you know, throw Supercell in there later on as well, um, really do have a tightly knit community, um, I think especially, you know, being partly out when I was out in Europe, there's a big community, just organic community that was built out there of player support folks who would meet together in conferences, kind of industry-only, closed door, to share a lot of best practices, ideas, what worked, what didn't work so well, and trying to even kind of share that learning with startups or smaller studios that are in the ecosystem and really trying to help each other out. So there's a very healthy community of sharing, you know, a lot of us, I think we've seen each other at different companies, and we know each other. And so, um, you know, a lot of these ideas kind of get shared around, and, um, you definitely do see, um, a lot of those ideas, although I would say, um, there's there's still, because of the way the teams spin up, there's still uh, quite a large gap between kind of the number of people who've kind of been through the ringer and been at a number of these companies and then kind of the, I would say, the next generation of folks who are coming up, um, and uh, having to some of them trying to relearn all of the stuff that uh, you know, some of us have battle scars, you know, to to to help them out. A lot of them are trying to reinvent the wheel, and so you'll see you see a number of us trying to provide more, um, broader resources and documentation just to just to help other people out so that they don't have to, you know, go through all of the pain and rediscover things that have already been tried.
So you mentioned Supercell, and I would say I'm a casual mobile game player, but for some reason, maybe because I am casual, I've never even attempted or thought of submitting like a ticket uh, for a mobile game, whereas for PC PC games or desktop memes, I, you know, I find it to be like easier, uh, it's like a natural tendency for me, at least, to go to like maybe like a forum. Yeah. Um, can you describe like the differences between maybe like PC games or, you know, could be live service games versus mobile games?
Sure. Yeah, I mean, um, you know, you've seen in the industry, um, and it's continuing to happen today, there's uh, I would say in some cases there's been a gradual change for some of the more traditional studios that, you know, it's like triple-A; it's like the old Hollywood type business model; you're getting a dump 60 million dev for like six to eight years, right? And you're hoping for huge ROI. Like studios that still produce games like that, um, kind of uh, have, you know, that traditional type of customer interaction where you've got forums, you know, they have kind of their their set systems and cadence in different channels, very mature channels of communicating with players, um, and all of those things are are set up, and it's, um, let's say there tends to be more technical challenges on launch maybe with all the different hardware configurations, um, and so, you know, you you're going to have those different types of issues where they're going to reach out. But in in general, they're they tend to have some of the older considerations around that. A lot of them might still have very significant in-house teams; some of them are transitioning out, especially since COVID hit; they're like, I had friends call me up from EA; they're like, "Hey, like we've got to, you know, in order to kind of spread risk for these kinds of events, we now have to kind of plan for the future to have more of our, um, support teams outsourced, um, rather than all in-house," because they were really really hit super hard, you know, by the pandemic. And so you saw a lot of the the kind of traditional AAA players, um, at least move some of their workforce to outsourcing, for example, um, and you just see like, um, kind of a lot of different tendencies where, you know, if you have hardware concerns, if you're if you're Sony or if you're uh, Microsoft Xbox team, um, Nintendo, they tend to do things like have, you know, phone support or voice, which uh, a lot of the kind of mobile folks or live service games won't have just due to the sheer volume of contacts that they get, right? I mean, um, you know, you have, let's say, uh, a much smaller player base that's just stuck on a console or gonna have hardware problems who really need to talk about that stuff versus, um, anyone who could just ping you because they want free stuff, you know, "Give me more free premium currency," or whatever it is that you're struggling with for your live service game. So live service games tend to have, um, a lot more volume just due to the nature of being, you know, free-to-play, right? Like one of the things a lot of people aren't ready for is just sort of the ridiculous, um, daily intake that you can get from having a free-to-play title that's extremely popular. You know, there are some cases where, uh, you know, my days over at Epic, I would share with with other friends what our, you know, daily volume spikes could be on on your new season launch, and they're like, "What the hell? We don't get that in the year," right? Like it's, um, it can get pretty gnarly. And so, um, one of the challenges when you were supporting is mobile titles, free-to-play titles, live service games; it's really dealing with the challenges of scale, especially if you have a hit on your hands. Um, it can get very very, um, kind of, um, big and uh, difficult to manage very quickly if you're not ready for it.
Okay, so this is kind of technical, but I think we may have talked about this in the past, which is, you know, what's like the evolution of the importance of of forums to games and to CS, and uh, what do you think? How are things transitioning with software like Discourse, which I'm not even sure what to call it? I think there's like a proper name that you told me last time where it's like like a self-service; they get to answer questions before they uh, like get triggered together or anything, right?
Right. So yeah, so please please talk about that.
Yeah, sure. I mean, um, you know, forums, uh, there's there's always this big debate. Um, it really depends on the community, right? Like I think forums can still be a valid way for people to help each other, um, in some cases it just depends, I think really on the players. If they want to keep something alive, they're gonna do it, right? Um, and that doesn't always work out. Like there's not always a very strong community that's empowered by uh, the development teams to be able to kind of run like uh, like a forum that's like very well moderated and, um, taken care of, because a lot of these forums just get out of hand, and people a lot of companies just shut them down just because it's like, "This thing is crazy; there's way too many people in here; we don't have enough, you know, resources to like monitor this thing; people are it's getting toxic." You know, there's a lot of different reasons to kind of shut these things down. And so, you know, people are looking for help, and then you have trolls on there, and you have all this other, you know, kind of, um, you know, let's say challenging behaviors to manage and to moderate. And so a lot of people really are opting for a self-service route or to go to channels like Discord you mentioned, but, um, you know, other channels as well to get better self-service, right? And a lot of companies what they're looking to do in these channels to kind of help deal with the volume is a lot of them will deploy certain kinds of different chatbots to help with kind of very basic transactional type questions, or if you don't know where to go to to do something for yourself, don't use those. But, um, I think a lot of the chatbots actually, I think kind of suck, right? Like like a lot of them aren't very smart, and so like they're not really going to do a lot for you. I remember just kind of being a consumer of these things; a lot of people would try to sell me on a chatbot; they're like, "Hey, you know, it deflects, you know, 80 percent of," and I'm like, "Yeah, you you piss people off; like you're just making them angry," right? But then they count as as as a success. And even when I went to, let's say, some, you know, very broad customer service, um, kind of executive, um, conferences, I remember in one of them there was a lady who was talking about this, and and I was just very curious; I was like, "Okay, that sounds really great; like do you ever talk to your customers about how satisfied they are with this automated experience?" And things got quiet really quick, and I didn't want to seem like a big jerk, so I just kind of stopped there, but it was very like obvious to me that a lot of people don't vet the the true satisfaction or like the customer experience with these kinds of tools. And so, um, I think, you know, the the best route has always been like a page from Amazon's book, I would say, for example, would be just don't have problems at all, right? Like I think a lot of the best products and services out there do you really respect your customers; like they just just don't have problems, right? That's you that you need to go stop whatever it is that you really want to do and like go talk to somebody, because I always tell, um, my customer service agencies, like as lovely as you are, people don't actually want to talk to you, right? They'd rather not. And so if they're contacting you, you know, there's definitely some problems there, but you can through better self-service, um, and there's a lot of different technologies that play into this, but essentially find really smart ways of surfacing the best information and the best kind of self-service workflows to help people find the answer that they need or solve their own problem in a very short amount of time, um, and I think those are the much better solutions just because it's easier for for customers versus interacting with a very clunky, um, chatbot that can't understand, you know, when they're when they're really upset what's going on, and then they have to get transferred to to a real person anyway, and then it just sucks, right? Because you just made it harder for them.
Okay, I've got four follow-up questions; I'll just I'll do I'll do I'll do one at a time. So actually, I meant I meant this Discourse, which, oh okay, your Series A, because I I forgot about them, but you know, they're like a seven-year-old company that just raises. Yeah, what what is that called? Uh, it is something like self-service workflow; I don't think that's the right terminology. Um, do you know do you know what the what it's technically called? Uh, the, um, RPG. So so in the sense of I remember how like this Discourse, there is a forum component, but in addition to the forum part, there are uh, just kind of like top questions that somehow the admin can moderate or float up to like subjects and topics; it's almost like a self-service, um, not like a workflow, like a Stack Overflow, right?
Yes, what's the Stack Overflow called like with that type of product?
Yeah, yeah. So, um, you know, it's it's an online forum; it's peer-to-peer, right? And so, um, uh, you know, typically we'll just describe it as like a peer-to-peer support, right? Um, and uh, you know, if you look at a lot like Stack Overflow is, you know, one of the kind of greatest examples that we look at where it's people helping other people. Um, replicated it across a number of orgs has something like that for the Riot team in Europe and then something similar for, um, Unreal Engine, right? Where uh, kind of the engine users are helping each other out on uh, you know, um, kind of very common uh, usability uh, issues. And so peer-to-peer support, um, [Music] what was the the question about peer-to-peer? Like just what about it or?
Um, uh, well, what about it? Like is that being used in the game industry? I don't really see it. I helped implement this Discourse for for New World, but I didn't see that many other companies get into it, actually. If anything, sorry, I have to bring this up; I remember, um, maybe something I chatted with you was it Epic Games? I think Epic Games shut down their forums; someone shut down their forums around.
Yes. Yes.
Okay, so can you talk about why did that end? You kind of mentioned it, alluded to it earlier about the support, but also what did you replace it with?
Yeah, so I mean, um, the the thing about uh, the forms, the forums at Epic weren't owned by support; it was owned by community, and community didn't have the bandwidth at the time to really support those; it was getting, you know, a lot of traffic, not enough people to go through everything, and they, you know, before I right right before I got there, they had sort of tried to to redirect from all the players to like, "Hey, can you just go to player support and like file a ticket instead, because it's getting like super unruly," right? And so you you ran into the problem of just not having enough people and not having the appropriate like structural setup, right? Because if you have, um, let's say if you do like a, you know, use the Discourse product, right? Where you can organize the conversations very easily, and you can almost like gamify the participation of, you know, people up on the platform, or if you need something very similar like like a Sprinkler form, etc., these all have tools in which, um, you know, you're you're you're helping to create almost a social game out of peer-to-peer support, right? Where people are getting recognized, getting back to school, that kind of stuff. And oh, some game companies do that; you'll see, um, I think EA, if I remember it correctly, has some of this for some of their titles. And so, um, you can use that together with your community team to like build a community around of, you know, players supporting other players, which is really healthy. Riot has something called, and I'm not sure if it's still in operation, it's called the Wrenchmen program, and these people are, you know, directly supplied with, um, let's say, just information, you know, news to help uh, you know, manage their different communities; it's done in a variety of different languages. I think one of the strongest ones is the uh, the German community for League of Legends. And so this kind of work is being done in pockets; I would say it's not a widespread phenomenon yet, although I would say that there is a lot of potential for it; it's just, um, a lot of people don't really, it's hard for I think internal teams to make the business case to purchase these; a lot of these are pretty expensive, um, the softwares that support them can be costly, um, and they kind of have challenges around just making the case for that. And usually you also have you tend to have, um, challenges to ownership, whether that be the community team, right? Who who owns these channels? Do we want, you know, player support like talking so openly, you know, across these like public, um, forums? Uh, are they trained on what to say? They get, you know, PR just gets mixed into there, so there are some of those concerns as well, um, and and yeah, basically the reason a lot of those kind of things get shut down, um, in in Epic's case, it was certainly just not having enough people at the time, a really small community team, and they were just super slammed, and we couldn't hire fast enough, and it was just like, well, um, let's just shut this down for now, and that's that's all, you know, it's kind of just like this reflex action, um, and like once in a while some some of the community team is like, "Hey, we need to start up forums again," etc., but I still don't think it's happened yet.
No, I actually kind of respect that because sometimes companies, and I think Epic is interesting because they are, you know, obviously they're taking some both stands in the industry, and they're not afraid to just do things like that. Um, [Music] But okay, so that was my first follow-up; the next three are really just like customer service stories I've been through this week; I want to share my takeaway, and I want to see if you have some other thoughts about it based on like just knowing this industry. So it's about Amazon, Delta, and IRS. So, you know, since I worked at Amazon, I've seen I looked into things a bit, but I've always been an Amazon customer for, you know, God knows how long, maybe 20 years now, and I realized that over the arc of time, like even like especially today, uh, for like the average user, it's actually kind of hard to figure out how to contact Amazon; like they they added a few layers to the menu, so you kind of have to like be persistent. Um, so that's one follow-up later for you, which is when you think about this purposely uh, kind of obfuscating how to contact customers, right? Because like Amazon's known for having great customer support, but they've done this; I don't know when they started this, but I definitely noticed it this week. Um, actually, we'll cover one at a time since there are much more. So what do you think about that one?
Um, I I don't like burying uh, the ability to contact customer service teams, um, and I I think that's unfortunate. A lot of people use it as a tactic, certainly to reduce costs, and you'll see you'll see it in various forms. A lot of companies will increase friction as a way to make people kind of give up along the way, and I really really don't like that. A lot of them will frame it as, "Oh, well, we just want to make sure that if you're going to contact somebody that you really need to," or they say, "Oh, they'll try to put a million different uh, kind of self-service type questions in front of a person to see if any of those things are the solution," um, but what that ends up typically doing for a lot of people is just making them more frustrated, right? And if we look at one of the trends in the industry of kind of moving away from uh, sort of the historical KPIs, customer satisfaction and MPS, to more something like CES, a customer effort score, people are really interested in [Music] CES because it more strongly correlates to better customer outcomes, and that's just very simply, did you make it did you make life easier for your customer or did you make it harder, right? And I think that, um, putting in unhelpful friction that doesn't actually help you solve your problem is is just getting in the way, right? And I I don't like the tactic; I think it's a cheap way to reduce costs; it may look good in the short term, and maybe this is a bigger comment on how we measure success and you know kind of the short the short sighting as we get from sort of, you know, quarterly business reviews and quarterly earnings reports and etcetera. So maybe there's something to be said about that in a much larger discussion, but you know, as long as that is sort of one of the biggest driving factors behind how peop how customer service executives and leaders are rated on their effectiveness, um, you will get sort of that short-term view of the customer; it's like, "Oh, well, I'll just make it harder for you to like even talk to me, and you're you know, I know that that'll reduce my contacts by 30," and it's like, "Wow, that really sucks," but you know, sometimes these are the the games that are being played in the background at any at any company.
All right, the second example, which is interesting, is Delta. So, um, I I love traveling, and even or due to COVID, I couldn't travel a lot, but at least certain airlines like Delta, they let me keep my status, which I love; status because it helps me get free upgrades, um, from like pre-COVID. And, uh, so essentially I have access to the Diamond Medallion line, which is like the highest level of tier for Delta, and I I frankly I love it; I love that I could just call this specific number, and only Delta Medallions can call it, and I get and I usually get like a customer service rep in like two minutes, and they're like super nice; they always give me like, Is there I actually thought about this or or looked into it; is there like an equivalent in gaming? Like do quote-unquote gaming whales get better service depending on the company or the game?
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. There's lots of I've had I sure wrote an article about why I wouldn't do this at scale, but I think there is an argument to be made, um, if your company has a specific kind of game like like a a lot of these sort of game like just straight-up gambling games, right? Where you're doing poker or something like that, and a lot of your business is based on very obvious VIP, you know, segments of clients, it makes total sense to like cater to them because at that point it becomes really a luxury product, right? Um, it's a luxury product; it's exclusively uh, this perks are exclusively for them, and uh, you know, kind of a lot of those benefits trickle down, let's say, to the rest of the gaming population that doesn't pay, um, and in free-to-play games you'll see that quite a bit; there's there's a very small percentage of the population that is essentially funding the game to be free for everybody else to access, right? So if you have any kind of positioning where you're thinking of, you know, creating a luxury segment within your game with very exclusive perks, um, people have done, you know, pretty outrageous like crazy things for uh, the biggest whales of their games that I would never personally do, but I mean, I think, you know, that that's the kind of clientele they have, um, that's the kind of game that they have, you know, um, and it makes total sense for them to make that reinvestment just because these people are paying those ridiculous amounts. There's another version that I think's more fair and makes a little bit more sense in in broader terms, and so this was something I did at a startup; I was never able to, um, [Music] uh, convince, let's say, a larger company to take this route, but but I think it's really interesting. And so what we what we did was create kind of a value formula, um, for people who are super duper engaged and we're connected to other people; like this person playing makes other people play, right? So these are people who aren't paying you any money, but they're super like engaging; they're very active; they might be clans, you know, they're very active on the forums, etc. And so they get they play a lot, and they get
A lot of people play; they might not buy anything, but they're super duper active and super duper engaged, and they get other people to play your game. And um, so we would try to have this formula that valued time played but also valued, you know, people that spent. And so, you know, part of the VIP group were some of them didn't pay any money, but they were extremely engaged, right, and very popular on social, et cetera, and clan leaders or whatnot. And some of them were paying, and so it created this kind of very interesting VIP group.
We broke it down into tiers in which we could talk to different levels of people who were engaged, who didn't pay, maybe blended, and then maybe folks who just spent a ton of money, right? And we could get these, um, kind of interesting different perspectives and to be able to even prioritize, uh, their issues, right? So when they come, just similar what you share with Delta, you know, it's okay if you are in the top tier—whatever criteria gets you in the top tier, combination of, you know, play and spend, or just pure play engagement, or just pure spend—then, um, you know, those people would get service very quickly, and they would be routed to…
And a lot of companies, especially in the East, like in China, they have zero problem with this; they totally do this all the time. Like they have literally—you have your own dude sometimes. Like I remember I was speaking to—I used to consult for, uh, NetEase back in the day—and one of the GM's talked to me; he's like, "Oh yeah, I totally, uh, totally am into, you know, high-level customer service." He's like, "I play this one game, and I spend thousands of dollars, and like they give me this guy's phone number. Like he just has like this dude he calls whenever he needs anything." So it's basically like your own individual, you know, white-club customer support agent whom you have—his like work cell phone, I guess—and whenever you have a problem with your game, you just call this dude or this girl, and they help you out, right? So there's definitely versions of it.
Yeah, that's awesome, by the way. Jimmy—Jimmy is a producer on our show—and he was, um, he was actually hosting under tournament, so he's just—he's on now just listening in. All right. On. Hi, Jimmy. Um, okay, uh, two—okay, two follow-ups there. Uh, first is, um, it's awesome that you actually try this because, uh, one of our previous guests, Ilya Rotelli—I'm not sure if you met him at Riot—he talked about this concept called super nodes, and we—we tried to implement it at Amazon; I don't think we were able to because of the measurement part, but—but you're exactly spot on because outside of just pure, you know, money spent, um, the people who are like guild leaders, they put so much effort into things. Like I'm in this wildfield or—I wasn't for Shadowlands, and I stopped playing after, uh, that expansion came out—or I actually would beat the raid, and, um, it's just so much extra work that, uh, he had to do on the side, and he doesn't get paid. Actually, it's crazy; he paid his own money to buy like reagents and like potions or for the guild because people—people would—people be selfish if I don't want to buy, so you buy food and potions for everyone. Yeah. Um, so that was one—one thought. And then—and then—and then the final one is that the final example is IRS, which I'm not sure if you have any comments; it's just totally bad, but I want to share just how crazy this story is, which is—so this has never happened to me before because, uh, I just kind of use TurboTax, and it kind of works, but in—apparently in 2018, for my 2018 taxes, they contacted me in 2019, so during Covid, and apparently, um, it was lost in the mail, so I didn't find out about this until 2020. But in 2020, essentially, since I never replied, the case has been decided against me, and I've been—and I've been collecting interest and penalties, and now it's like eight thousand dollars. So now I'm like, "Whoa, what—what the heck happened?" So then I call them to figure out what's going on, and I don't know if you ever call the IRS, but first of all, you have to go through five prompts to—there's like—there's like, um, it's like a menu with seven options, but only one path gets you to a customer service rep, and I'm talking about—you have to figure out the right path; I think it was like three two two two. I figured out three two two two, but they don't even let you press the button; you have to listen to the whole prompt, and after I hit 322, it's probably like a four-minute verbal prompt; you don't even get connected. Like it says, "Oh, we're too busy now." Oh wow, yeah. And then because, you know, it's like 8,000 online, I want to like try to resolve it, so I tried multiple times, and in this crazy weird way, I called another number because I was frustrated; I was like, "Look, I can't get a hold with them; I'll just set an in-person appointment." So I call the hotline to set up an in-person appointment, and they said, "No, your problem can only be solved by this number; we'll transfer you," but like, "Wait, don't transfer me because I just try to get on." It's like, "No, no, like when we transfer you, he gets the head of the line," and I'm like, "Oh, okay." So they transferred me, and then I got disconnected. So, Grant, I had to call the appointment line again, and the appointment line this time it said it was too busy for me to call them. Yeah, so that's what I did yesterday; it was like seven hours, and at the conclusion, I—they honestly wore me down, so I finally got to a customer service rep, and their recommendation was—and by the way—and then we figured out that I wasn't even wrong. So what—what they found—like that's returned—it's very technical, but it's something along the lines of they charge me taxes for like, uh, gross, uh, income on—on stock when they charge me for the gain—for the short-term capital gains—yeah—or gains. So it seems like a pretty amateur mistake, but now they were like, "Look, just pay everything up front with the penalties; write us a letter by mail." They're like, "Because—because I'm like, 'Okay, cool, I'll fax it to you.'" Like, "No, no, no, it's too late because this is already, uh, closed, so you have to send this to the reconsiderations department." It seriously sounds like a weird, like, movie, like that—like, yeah—or something. So then I'm like, "Okay, violates that; I'll just pay first; I'll write you a letter," and they told me it'll take four months to reply back and maybe I'll get a refund back for money that I shouldn't have to have paid—paid in the first place.
Yeah, I mean, this just sounds like a customer service disaster, and I think, uh, yeah, IRS can get away with it because it's the government; you don't really have any options, but man, I—it just—it makes me kind of super appreciate even sometimes when I have frustrations with the private company. Yeah, um, you know, even when I'm super pissed off about something, I can email someone; I could—I mean, I've never written a letter, but I could write—letter—social media would be great; they're playing somebody's group, so like outlets to do things, but here you can't, and it's so frustrating. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, um, there are certain industries that operate in a very similar fashion, right? So you know, a lot of telecoms are massive; you don't really have that much choice, and so there are some of these industries where you get a few key players, and you—you don't really have a lot of options; you will see a lot of this similar patterns in those companies. It's like, "Oh, why is customer service so bad for these types of companies?" Well, because there's no incentive for them to not be so bad because you don't actually have a choice. And behind closed doors, a lot of the executives at the very top of these companies will say things like, "You know what, I just want okay service; I don't want fantastic service. Like just having okay service would be better than a lot of other people," right? And they will—they will build processes, and this really—it does—it makes me angry as well; they'll build processes that ping-pong people back and forth in between, you know, let's say two—two reps, and it doesn't make sense for anybody and super duper frustrating. And—and it's really, um, I think it's really nice that you recognize, you know, some of the challenges on the other end of, you know, for the reps because for a lot of reps, they're just following the process, and it really makes them angry too because they feel stupid; they have to deal with negativity all day; they get yelled at, and it's, um, a lot of it is out of that human being's hands. And so a lot of times what I do when I get in those situations—like I had to call a telecom once—and, uh, so I called this company, and, uh, the first rep I get, I say, "Hey, look, I know you—you probably have no authority to—to do what I'm about to ask, but you—you've made the mistake; I know you probably have these KPIs to watch after, um, so I need you to contact your manager; don't waste our time here; just contact your manager and tell them like this is what—what we need, right, um, what we need to get done," and she was totally cool about it; she has to go into our manager; manager tries to stonewall me, and I'm like, "Look, dude, like I know you probably get negative marks against you, you know, um, if you give me a refund, like you have a very simple choice: either I can, you know, report these charges as fraudulent and charge back, and then your company has to pay for everything plus another fee, or you can refund me the half that you double charge me for, um, and you can maintain a customer, right? You have a very simple business choice to make here," and he's like, "Okay, you know, um, let me…" He treated me like a thief, which I—I did not take kindly to, and I—I let him have it; I was like, "You know, you're talking to—you're talking to a customer, not a thief; I don't care what your—what your KPIs are, right?" Um, and then so after a lot of hollering, um, he transferred me to their loyalty team, and even though they took 30 minutes to investigate all of my claims, uh, they ended up giving me the refund, right? A lot of times, um, for these kinds of places, you just have to show a little bit of empathy: "Look, I know what the hell you're going through, but like this is not the way to resolve it, and you know, you need to get me somebody who can actually help me," um, but it doesn't help when they can't even pick up the phone, right? So, um, you know, the government's like the worst for bureaucracy, right? Ridiculous process. You know, I think this brought two thoughts to me: number one, I think, um, that I was essentially successful in my final call—the final call actually went through with the IRS because I—I wasn't pissed off, and I wasn't trying to do what you were saying; I was just trying to be calm—and I didn't help the situation. Now—now that I know what you just said, I'm going to take that strategy 100% of the time because, uh, because you're right; they're not the ones who design the process; they're just trying to go through like a playbook or something. Yep; most of them are. Exactly. And, uh, what was my follow-up thought? Um, oh, my follow—my follow-up thought was, you know, I never did this before, but—and you can't do this for like sensitive things like yours, you know, like IRS using your social security number, but I think in certain cases it might make more economical sense to hire like an assistant overseas who works for you by the hour, and maybe like one day—like an eight-hour day—they take care of all this for you; that might be interesting; I've never tried it before. Yeah, to take all of your, um, like a personal assistant. Yeah.
So that's a—that's a good question, um, maybe this doesn't apply to gaming customer service, but just in general customer service: do they allow like assistance to handle like a customer's business? Um, I think there are some cases where it depends exactly what kind of business, but you can certainly hire different sorts of business functions. Let's say if you're managing, you know, a couple of small businesses yourself, and you need help with an accountant, and you know, if you get all of the paperwork, uh, done to where, you know, the different parties know that this person is authorized, you know, as—as an employee of you or whatever it is, um, that—yeah, that certainly can work out, um, you know, having, uh, outsourced professional services like that; there's lots of people that do that, um, and it's, uh, it can certainly work out. Now you have to be careful, you know, about vetting like who these people are, um, and if you can work with, you know, competent, um, outsourcer who's cool with like, uh, you know, just—I don't know if there's any—it's a good question; like we do this at scale, and I've worked for companies that do this at scale, but, uh, for an individual kind of concierge, I'm sure there's something—I'm sure there's something, you know, it might be a little bit more expensive, but I'm sure there's something. Okay. My final series of questions are around entry-level customer service roles. I asked this because it's kind of a weird analogy, but I'm going to say it anyways; uh, I feel like in gaming CS or QA roles were like the path to like the American Dream. So many people start off in CS or QA, and then they end up into like production, and—and they become like game directors; like it's really like a very common story, but I think that was more the case maybe in like the 2000s when like the scale wasn't just that big. Now I only hear it because back then a lot of the CS orgs were just like in the United States, right? Now with a lot of CS orgs being overseas, uh, let's just—let's just take like North America or like, you know, US, you know, employees as an example: is there even like a path for—or—or is—is entry-level CS and QA even a path for like, let's say US students who just graduate from college, or—or is it something else? It's just like marketing—like—like that—that's a new entry ground for people to get into for gaming.
Yeah, I—I mean, I—I think it's a valid way to get your foot in the door, but I tell a lot of people, um, because the industry has come so far in a short amount of time, uh, your best bet is to—is to get your foot in the door exactly within the department you want to be, right? Like there's—there's less and less people going from QA or CS, you know, indirectly into game design, um, and you know, there's a lot more competition, so you know, just percentage-wise, you're going to see a lot of people going less. But I mean, there's so many people where, you know, a long time ago there weren't as many people who had experience working with game design tools or doing any coding, etc., but now you're getting kids, you know, they're coming straight out of university; they know how to code; they're technical; maybe they built a demo, right? And so I'm—I'm telling young people, "Look, if you want to be in game design, for example, best you go actually build something." It's way more compelling for me as an interviewer to see people who have some kind of portfolio to show versus like, "Hey, I gotta really"—like they might be really cool, you know, and they're—they're fun and everything like that, and they're great to the players, but I mean, if you're just telling me like, "I haven't built anything, but I'm really good at CS," and I'll be like, "Can you stay and see us and like help build that organization, right?" Because you know, starting CS organizations get more mature as well, and people build a career path, you know, within the CS org—stay there for like decades, right, or more—and so you know, there's a lot to be done there as well. And—and, uh, you know, even in terms of like tools engineering and stuff like that for more, um, mature CS teams. And I mean, even QA was much—much more of an in-round, especially to game design. He's—you still hear stories like that, but, um, I mean, I had a cousin who was in, uh, QA for a long time, and he was relentless; he tried time and time again to get a game designer role, but he—he never did, you know? He was a QA lead; been there for over a decade, um, made a lot of great suggestions to, you know, folks in the Hearthstone team, and—and did—well done; they even listened to, you know, some of the—the things that he said and implemented some of his designs, um, he actually passed away, uh, last, uh, not—not too long ago, my cousin, but, uh, he did a great job, and just—he just wasn't in the cards for him to kind of ever make that transition into game design. And, uh, you know, I think it's a much better route for people to go and actually build something, uh, whether that be a demo for a game or just a game themselves; it doesn't even have to be like a—like a, you know, PC game or anything like that; you could literally build like a board game or something, um, because a lot of the design elements are going to be very similar. So having something to show and talk about and having actually built something is, I think, much more valuable.
That's such a good idea about board game because I personally like challenge myself to do like one thing outside of work every year, so, uh, 20—I think like 20—yeah, last year it was like a documentary about my esports team from like five years ago, but I had all this footage, and I found a production company; I learned like a lot of basic things to do that. This year it was this podcast; next year I was thinking about what to do—maybe like a book, which has always been a dream, but super hard, um, but the board game sounds like a really good interesting thing too because I'm not a game designer, and I feel like, uh, I think you're spot on around game design systems can be applied to all sorts of games, and board games seem pretty adjacent; maybe making a card game seems harder, but I don't know why board games seems like it's more manageable. Okay, um, final question for you is going back to the craft scaling CS orgs: how do you know if you are a master at this craft? Like what are the levers and KPIs you get to pull with—like I think you mentioned earlier, um, like contacts; I'm assuming you have like, you know, like a limited budget; what—what do you have to play with, and what are you trying to min-max?
Yeah, for sure, um, a lot of what you're going to be able to do is constrained by, uh, by budget for sure. And so, you know, if you have a place that has money to burn, consider yourself very, very fortunate; um, you're probably not going to be in that situation too often. But if you have, uh, senior leadership who understand, uh, what the investments are innately, um, then it's really a blessing for you to be able to take that and then build out the organization appropriately with all of the data, um, and building, um, you know, the connections of all that data back to kind of supplying, um, you know, what is the business value being delivered to all of these services. A lot of people never even get the resources to be able to figure that out, but I would say, you know, at the very top, you're always looking at a cost of your operations, and there's a bunch of different ways to get this, but unfortunately, a lot of people get caught up in kind of like the cost per interaction or the cost per ticket; I wouldn't say that's the best way to look at it, um, especially in the game space where you have free-to-play, um, I would much more be looking at things like kind of the cost per ML, um, because you're supporting your entire player base, right? And there's value to—as we spoke about earlier—players who don't necessarily monetize, um, I always need to say it—epic—like you need 99 other players to have bad royal, right? So, um, it's really important to understand that there's—there's great value, especially in these multiplayer games where part of the stickiness is having other human beings to play with—it—and have that mix of fun. And so, um, it becomes painfully obvious in some of these mobile games that you're just playing against bots, you know, um, so—so there's that kind of whole issue. So looking at, you know, kind of cost per amount of support, um, you know, you will be looking at the cost across your languages, so you know, what does it cost to support, um, divided by, you know, like the different markets that you're aiming at, um, and that kind of varies, uh, in terms of how a company splits that up: do they do it by actual kind of geolocation, to do it by language, you know, however the company—the business thinks of it. I think player support folks would do well to make sure that they're structuring the way they look at those—those cost KPIs in the same way so that you can easily assign a cost to, right, a region, so it makes sense so people doing, you know, in finance don't have to search around and be like, "Okay, how does this actually apply to, you know, the way that we understand the business—costs of the business," um, so getting that structure out, I think, is really important.
Then I would say like really, really focusing on—a lot of companies eventually come up—even ones that aren't as well-funded—come up with some kind of churn algorithm, right? What is the likelihood that some player will churn? And then once your data wizards do that for you, I think it's really, really important as soon as you have that—the player support organization needs to grab that and understand how it increases or decreases when they start interacting with your CS4, right? Because that's where the business value is. A lot of people never—ever—ever get around to that; they're just looking at these like enterprise call center metrics, and that's really besides the point because you don't know what any of that does and what players are actually doing in your game; you're just kind of—just going off like all of—all of this lore, right, that's kind of built up in the customer service industry more broadly and within the games sort of player support space itself, and it's like, "No, no, no, like you're always seeking to like invalidate the lore, right?" Like that—I—I don't buy like all of these kinds of—well, just because it—it, you know, increases, you know, player spent, and I say, "Prove it," right? Like prove it; if you're going to make a claim that big, you have to prove it. And I think one of the key ways in which you look at that, like realistically, is looking at how does it, um, affect that churn percentage. We know that change, you know, likelihood—the churn is always going to go up over time, but as they contact your support teams, that's a critical moment, and for which very specific ticket types do those matter most, right? Because then you're going to be able to separate the noise from the signal. There's a lot of stuff out there that's just noise; it's just people trolling your support team; it's like people taking a piss on it, whatever, right? They're just doing all of this stuff just to like, you know, um, have some fun or just to poke at you, or maybe they're just angry, and they're venting, right? And that's cool too, but then there's other super important, like business-critical stuff where, um, I've always phrased it—my teams have heard me say this a million times—"You can't pay—you can't play"—like those issues are bottom line, obviously very important. So if I can't access your game, not only am I super angry, like I can't engage, and I can't—if I can't engage with your products, the chances I'm gonna do anything helpful to your business is like zero, um, and if I'm having trouble obviously with something in the billing front, it's like—like I've—I don't know how many times I've been so embarrassed, you know, I'm helping players because I still answer tickets myself, and I say—they're like, "I'm trying to give you money, and you like won't accept it," and I'm like, "Gosh, I'm so embarrassed; this is like one of the crappiest things to like be involved in; I'm like, 'I'm so sorry; like what's going on?' Let me find out what's going on," right? And so you know, um, prioritizing those two is obvious, and then there's going to be a couple of other ones that are, you know, somewhat related where you're going to find real value in focusing, uh, your support efforts here—whether that's technology or people, um, or just better processes or better upstream—like again, going back to that old-school, um, Amazon philosophy—is like, "Just don't have a problem in the first place," right? How can you get to the source so that your—your customers don't even have the problem in the first place? And I still think that—that is—should be the ultimate goal for a lot of people because it's like, "Look, people don't want to talk to your support teams; they don't have to," um, and I think that if you respect your customers, you're going to try to do that as much as possible to deliver an experience that is kind of, you know, bug-free. So looking at finding out, you know, those—a lot of people kind of pin stuff to CSAT kind of traditionally, right? Because we're satisfaction—MPS—both of those are like—they're—they're very limited in their helpfulness, but especially early on, they can flag things for you so you know where to look and where to drill down. The problem is that a lot of people don't want to drill down; they just want to say, "Oh, look, I have a high, you know, metric here," and it's like, "So what," you know, "what does that actually mean?" And then they don't even look at like the individual categories to find out, um, you know, how valuable any of that stuff is. Productivity is another one—absolutely huge—however you measure that. A lot of people when they first start, they make a mistake, so try to avoid this one; they always look at like, "Oh, number of tickets or issues resolved," right? And it's like, yeah, you're going to incentivize a lot of really garbage behavior if you do that. It's much better to look at a general productivity metric, so if you're doing things like, um, like emails, it's like, "How many outbound emails do you have, you know, in general per hour for your—your best and most productive and most effective agents?" And then you can, you know, use those natural benchmarks to, um, to kind of push your organization, you know, up and understand what high performance is. But typically we'll talk about—either some people say emails per hour, or how about emails per hour—touches for hours—another one—if you have chat, you know, how many, um, it—you should probably have a limit on, in general, kind of like how long those live chats should be. Usually with teams that I'm working with, in general, we try to aim for a 15-minute chat, but if it's a more complex issue, like don't just abandon your players; just stay on as long as you need to—just, you know, most issues can be solved fairly quickly. So those are the—the top-line metrics you're looking at—overall effectiveness, right? I think Customer Effort Scores gaining traction in gaming, um, it's definitely very, very popular in retail and big tech, but I think gaming's a little bit behind there, so adopting CES I think would be really healthy, um, over MPS and over CSAT. Yeah, your budget, productivity, and those are pretty much like the big…
KPIs you want to be looking at in order to measure, you know, your success and understand how your players are are actually doing, and of course, that effect on the um, hopefully a positive effect on reducing the churn um, like likelihood percentage.
Okay, I know I said final question for the third time, or maybe twice already, but truly for the third time, uh, the word lore which triggers something in my mind, which is, you know, gaming; just companies always have different wording for common things, so I want to understand is there any significance to player support versus customer service? Because you know, there's like marketing versus publishing and even even something like esports; some people call it, okay, well, this is competitive gaming, and then the highest level is called like esports. So any significance behind the phrase or any lore behind player support uh, from from what I've heard um, and it's funny because when I first got started in this space, I did; my CEO called it customer support, and I didn't have a problem with that. I think [Music] why it's called player support; the philosophical reason that that my teams had for kind of going along with the nomenclature was that um, the player context was different enough from a typical customer context that we wanted to call that out; not only in terms of like, let's see, very broadly gamer culture and understanding that set of problems, but also in terms of the actual business because for free to play, a lot of the people contacting you are not customers; they haven't paid you anything; you haven't monetized them. And so um, it it sets forth a little bit of a different way of dealing with things.
There's also the other really big kind of hornet's nest around a lot of games companies have: how to outsource, you know, customer service functions, player support functions, and typically a lot of these very large BPOs you'll find of a very rigid best practices corporate feel to customer service that a lot of the games companies struggle to like beat out of like the teams that they hire, and that that's always a huge cultural battle because you have, you know, a very old industry that likes to do things a certain way, right, and um, you know, kind of along the lines of a lot of these rigid processes that we all hate, and it's like, oh, why is customer service so bad? Like in most companies that we have to call, like everyone dreads calling customer service, right? Well, it's because like the industry was built for something very different, like a long time ago, and what a lot of us want today are much more human um, interactions, and we want empowered customer service agents who don't have to transfer us to somebody else; you just say, "I can take care of that for you; yeah, I'll refund you right now, no problem," you know, take care of it; is there anything else we can help you with? Right? Like you'd much rather have that two-minute conversation with an intelligent empowered person than you would being transferred three tiers up four to eight minutes later, right? And then finally, after yelling your guts out for the third time, the person doing the right thing, you know, it's like, "I could just do the right thing, you know, 46 minutes ago," which would totally be in their power, right? And so you have, again, I think that sort of um, dichotomy; so you want to uh, you know, psychologically you want to use different language um, when you want a different thing, right? Like if I called it the same thing, a lot of people, especially if I'm doing any outsourcing, might mistake it for like, "Oh, you want, you know, the vanilla flavor we always have," to, "No, I actually want, you know, rainbow unicorns, like crazy as sprinkles and pop rocks," like I don't want that um, but you're calling it the same thing, and so there can be some confusion there. Um, I think that's those are the most valid things, and some parts of me think it's just like not really that necessary if you um, get as a contrarian, like you you should really just build it into the culture of your team and like the way your processes are, right, um, and that'll make the difference, and you don't necessarily have to call your team's player support if you don't want to.
I think it's necessary.
Well, thanks, Tony. Uh, I did not expect you to have such an actual thorough thorough answer, but I'm glad I asked, and I mean this has been an action-packed uh, hour plus on on gaming on gaming player support customer support, whatever whatever you want to call it, and it's been great because I feel like it's like it's like a master class slash soup to nuts explanation where I just I essentially I like, you know, I potentially could go interview for like a role now and just use your answers, at least remotely, unless I memorize them. So uh, thank you so much for sharing your knowledge with our with our audience.
It was a pleasure, John. Thank you so much for inviting me, and I hope some of them [Music]