When you think about customer service, it’s easy to forget the fact that every one of these support tickets represents a meeting between humans and the world. At Keywords Player Support, we handle around twenty-two million support tickets a year and we keep this in mind. A customer support organization loves to talk about things such as automation and bots, but despite these technological difficulties, one of the most effective sales capabilities that a support agent develops is able to get empathy. We all like to think that we understand empathy and how it helps to build better relationships.But we weren’t all alike in our interpretation and expression of our emotions. That’s what we all think we’re capable of as empathy doesn’t automatically get us used to what we can do to give a better support experience to the players. That’s why we’re working together at Keywords Studios to get the most out of our customer support interactions. Empathy hardly always equals apology. A common mistake for inexperienced support agents is to apologise to players without prejudice. This is because the players have not thought they encountered a problem and they want to apologize. Players don’t contact us for commiseration, they want us to fix the problem. An apology too often makes an error to the narrative. It’s an insult to people who can act like groveling, which makes sense if they’re acting as a slap. It sounds false or wrong and so does our ambitions. An apology only if it’s justified or meaningful, i.e. when an error is reported or when a mistake is made. We should break out relationships into individual steps that we can manage with support agents. They’re: “You know what you want”
Listening Actively Building Connection Taking Action
Listening Actively Our active listening challenge is to understand what the player communicates and understands, from the viewpoint of his or her point of view. We can use some conversation techniques to listen to our response.
The actors describe the matter as a question of concern. Ask them what their problems are about. You can tell the situation in an outline. Clarify, by re-remediating the situation differently. Invite them to share their opinion.
Understanding the full context of the players, all this includes what are the next steps and what outcome the player wants to see, will help you to respond more effectively. This approach is useful for players to communicate a lot of messages, which requires time, but results to better result and make them feel better about the game and his developer. Building Connection When an individual can reach a customer’s service provider, then that person may start to think that they’re getting an automated response. Building a connection will only be true if it is clear to the player that response is from a fellow gamer who took the time to listen to their message so passionately. Even small gestures can help build connection, such as if a player reported a problem related to their Mage character, a proactive support agent may mention that they also played as a Mage this season. It might be a challenge for a supportperson with a very limited communication window to build that connection, but the small touches do a lot of work. Taking Action All the player who submits a support ticket wants to fix their problem immediately and pay them for the trouble. Unfortunately, this is not possible 100% of the time, but you’ll still want your response to convey some action. Ask for a more information is also an action. But you should always value the players time so you don’t ask them for those information that you can work out or look up yourself. As a matter of fact, it is necessary for the player to take action on their side. However, it’s important to understand why it helps. The player is already upset about the matter that they reported and don’t want to feel that they’ve even got a bossed reputation. In short, a response without action will almost always be disappointing. This could not appear contradictory to break down fundamentally human condition like empathy into action steps. When we coach empathy in a customer support environment, we aren’t trying to emotionally enlighten our support agent but rather to build on the same wavelength of the players they respond to quickly and consistently. The goal is to provide a more personal, better effective support experience for the player and the great interest of everyone involved in that exchange. Alice Murdoch has been a project manager with Keywords for the past three years. He helps teams grow in experience and success. What make him attractive is his role. In her former role, Deputy Community Manager, she combines the client experience with Community Management to find creative solutions.
