The immersive nature of games is one of their biggest appeals, providing a fun distraction from the often mundane nature of everyday life or providing more meaningful benefits such as a tool to combat depression.
Customer service is a crucial aspect in gaming because that important immersive quality can be broken by games that crash and then force gamers to look for help and assistance that may not be immediately available or clearly accessible.
If this happens, enough gamers will look elsewhere, and no gaming site or online casino wants its players trying to find a new casino because of it.
A lot of gaming studios feel they lack the resource or bandwidth to offer technical support to their customers on a continuous benefit, which is why many gamers end up looking for assistance from peer-to-peer networks such as the likes of community forums.
This can be very helpful for gamers but studios that can provide their own support channels are a better option for gamers and for the studios as they have more control over customer service.
With the rapid emergence of mobile and online games providing help for gamers in order to allow them to remain engaged has become more crucial than ever before.
Gaming support
Modern games are complicated and usually unfinished when released, allowing them to have fixes offered over time along with new content and extra features.
This also enables the voice of the consumer to play a much bigger part in the nature of the finished product, and customer service is now starting to become part of the overall gaming experience rather than a grudging afterthought and with a greater degree of creativity.
Offering online help for mobile games did not make much sense, which is why the studio responsible for the massively popular Angry Birds game franchise decided to use Zendesk’s mobile SDK to actually offer tech support from within the game itself.
This resulted in a massive surge in tickets regarding issues that might have otherwise been left unresolved.
The in-game support had the same appearance and feel as the game, resulting in tech support becoming a seamless aspect of the gaming environment.
Another good example of this creativity in tech support is Riot Games, who saw the benefit of investing in ticket deflection and self-service.
Intelligent caching allowed for the loading of tech support articles in milliseconds, and an automated solution handler uses AI to find and answer frequently asked requests such as hacked accounts or lost passwords.
Gaming studios have begun to develop innovative methods of making customer service and tech support options a part of the overall gaming experience.
To do this, they have required a much greater understanding of gamers and the ideal ways to communicate player support.
Even in circumstances where the provision of optimal tech support may not be as obvious as the examples above, staying fast with tech support is assisting gamers and allowing studios to do right by their clientele.
The sooner a gamer can get the tech support they need, the sooner they will get back to playing the game, making everyone happy.
