Customer Service Jeopardizes Online Gaming?

Thanks to Gamesindustry.biz for their new opinion piece suggesting poor customer service infrastructure is the biggest obstacle to to the growth of online gaming. According to the piece: "The biggest threat to online games today is the industry's neglect of the customer - usually a subscriber. How can a group so focused on giving the customer what they want, fulfilling their inner desires and fantasies in an online game be accused of neglecting this customer?" The writer also advocates partnering with an external subscription management solution if it makes sense, saying: "..overlooking those operational details that support the subscriber (billing, authentication, marketing, etc.) can mean the difference between disaster and success - even for a very good game."

Comments

Do not play well with others...ever.

[silentbobdp]

I always thought other annoying players would be the biggest obstacle to MMORPG success.

Ultima Online

[RealityMogul]

One of my biggest complaints about Ultima Online was that they never sent out any notifications that your subscription was about to expire. They just left it to you to remember to pay them more money as needed.

I wasn't a hardcore gamer so I would easily forget about such things as I did have many other aspects of my life that didn't revolve around the game.

It always bugged me that they couldn't bother to setup a small machine with a 20 line perl script to churn out e-mails.

A year ago I forgot to pay and when I went to logon my account was dead, so I just said screw it and uninstalled it. The in-game problems were enough to make me want to quit, but that was the straw that broke the camel's back.

The real culprits

[lightspawn]

• Buggy, exploitable software
  
• Developers unable or unwilling to fix bugs
  
• Servers shut down either periodically or permanently (hi SEGA)
  
• Boring, repetitive gameplay
  

Re:The real culprits

[Ty]

Developers unable or unwilling to fix bugs

While many online games are very slow to fix bugs, you should not directly blame it on the developers. SQA's are usually in control of what (if any) bugs are fixed. At times, in large companies, the development team may not even know a bug exists.

For example, we had a major exploit in PvP in Everquest on one of the servers with special rules for combat. Two years went by without it being fixed. The actual dev team didn't learn of the exploit until they doing Q&A with a public audience, and were confronted with it. The devs claimed the SQA team had never notified them. However, the exploit was patched shortly after.

PHBs

[pmz]

Until corporate accounting evolves to properly label customer service as a means for profit rather than expense, this will always be a problem.

On rare occasion, I've had a company blow me away with tremendous customer service, and that almost guarantees I'll be a repeat customer. At least, I'll think of that company, again. Customer service really should be viewed as advertising, where it is the company's chance to define their image to customers. Even though the total number of people exposed are few, the power of word-of-mouth should not be underestimated.

The last couple of times I've bought from lesser-known retailers listed at Pricewatch, I'll do a google search for "company-xyz sucks OR 'poor service'", for example. The results can be suprising and help me determine whether a vendor is an acceptable risk.

Re:Quite true

[achacha]

Casual PVPer is like saying a casual serial killer. The only benefit to the MMORPG is that they can be used as a self policing aspect when reputation system is inadequate.

PvP is the scourge that prevented UO from growing and why EQ has over 300,000 subscribers. PvP is a small subset of players that somehow feel that they need to be supported while they drive away many of casual gamers. And there are 50x more casual gamers than hardcore gamers, from the financial point of view, the companies would rather cater to the casual gamers rather than the hardcore ones. Casual gamers still pay the same amount per account and play far less reducing the load on the servers and in the long run reducing bandwidth costs of a hardcore player. Hardcore players are actually financially the worst type of a customer they use up way more resources than their monthly payment "allows".

Most PvPer tend to be griefers, PKers and generally annoying people. Having played UO, I was unable to do anything in the game without someone attempting to kill me, the game became 1 domensional, leave town and run hoping you don't get killed. The only option was to become a PKer and prey on the clueless newbies and ruin their experience, and I chose not to do that.

If people want to PK then they should be playing Quake/Halflife/etc. where the environment is set up for them to kill each other and leave the rest of us MMORPG players to explore the world, group up, research, tradeskill and try to have a good time.

What a surprise!

[PapaZit]

Check out the "So what can I do?" section. The answer: "an out-of-the-box subscription management solution". Other tips: don't do it yourself, expect it to take time and cost a lot of money.

Now, skip down to the bottom of the article:

Dale Munk is CEO of subscription management software provider Sandlot - www.sandlot.com

A subscription management software provider recommending that people spend a lot of money on subscription management software. Who'd have thought?

Surprised this isn't a repost

[Dachannien]

Problems with Customer Service in online games are nothing new. The several people above complaining about CS in UO, of all games, should indicate that.

But the real problem is that CS in an online game is, believe it or not, hard. Reasons for this:

• Customers asking for things they cannot have due to regulations governing CS. These are games, they have rules, and they have to be fair for everyone. If CS grants certain favors to some players and not others, those other people complain. Ironically enough, if CS doesn't grant those favors to some players and not others, the some players are the ones complaining.
  
• Customers asking for immediate gratification through immediate information, even when the knowledge will not gratify them. So the servers are down. "Why why why?" "OMG wehn will tehy b bakc up!!!!1" If you've ever been in an online game's out-of-game chat when the servers were down, you've probably seen your fair share of this. The problem is, there are tons of people asking why, there are tons of people complaining, and many of them will not be sated by the truth anyway. Yes, the servers are down, and the players have reason to be distraught, but unless the company is completely slacking off, someone is working on the problem.
  
• There are usually not enough CS staff for the number of players. This is exacerbated by two factors: one, a small portion of the player base makes an inordinately large portion of the requests received by the CS staff; and two, CS is notoriously underpaid in the MMOG industry. (For reference, EverQuest GMs used to be hired initially as temps, and after the temp agency took its cut, they were making about $8 per thankless hour, while living mostly just north of San Diego.)
  
• Customers suck. Yeah, that's not a very polite way to say it, but drawing from some of the earlier points I made, this summary can be obtained: an inordinately small portion of the customer base complains both constantly and quite rudely to an overworked, underpaid CS team about issues beyond CS's control. Players blame CS for everything, because CS is the front line for a lot of their problems, regardless of where the request should go. CS generally doesn't handle tech support (though this depends to some extent on the company). CS certainly is not in charge of making design decisions. CS has a very limited scope of action, yet customers who do not (or refuse to) understand this continue to levy their complaints against the first people they see - customer service.
  
• Lawyers suck even worse. Ever since the AOL lawsuit regarding volunteer workers, MMOG maintainers have been scared shitless of the implications of being sued. EverQuest was and is, to my knowledge, the only professionally-published online game still to make use of volunteer customer service personnel. While the Guide Program was not the perfect solution to the customer service problem, it provided advantages in terms of cost to the end-user which are unavailable when all of a company's CS staff must be hired. Yes, a company should absorb the costs of customer service when they are making money hand-over-fist, but realistically, no company is going to cut the bottom line to make the customers happy when they have a parent company (with shareholders) breathing down their neck. (Alternatively, shareholders and parent companies suck and will be a thorn in the side of customers until their expectations on return can be brought to a more reasonable level.)

So, yes, CS is hard. Everyone hates you - the customers, the pencil-pushing-penny-pinchers, everyone. Do companies owe us good CS for our money? Yes, of course. For our $14.95 a month, we should be getting the same sort of CS we get from the phone company, the cable company, plumbers, banks, mechanics.......

...and hopefully the irony there was lost on no one.