Online game companies are facing greater competition from other game companies and from streaming media companies, both of which seek the attention of users. Sony, Microsoft, Apple, Google, Epic, Steam, Nintendo, and many others compete for gamer attention and dollars – as are Netflix, Hulu+, and YouTube.
An excellent Customer Experience and stellar Customer Support has become table stakes to attracting and keeping customers. Gamers expect responsive and knowledgeable support and quick resolutions to questions and problems. All of this is now expected in-game, without requiring a gamer to ever leave the platform.
Modern conversational AI can enable game companies and their support teams to dramatically improve the player experience with minimal training and using historical interaction data. Game companies that adopt intelligent and effective conversational AI will gain an unfair advantage in the fight to win, delight and keep customers.
The Churn Dilemma for Gaming Companies
Across all subscription services, churn is constant and rapid. Mobile games achieving more than a 4% retention rate after 28 days are doing a great job, according to GameAnalytic’s Mobile Gaming Benchmarks report.
Respondents frequently cited having a poor experience or service issues as a key driver in decisions to abandon their subscription. Add to this the reality that signing up for a new trial subscription elsewhere often takes less than a minute, and barriers to churn have never been lower.
In today’s fragmented landscape where people’s attention is fleeting and ever more valuable, games with better support will do a better job of keeping customers, incentivizing them to recommend the game to friends and to post praise for games online. Games that fail to adequately support and sufficiently delight customers also lose revenue; poorly served customers spend less and tend to leave faster. However, providing great CX is hard for gaming companies.
Video Game Companies Struggle to Deliver Awesome Customer Support and CX
The online game industry faces the greatest customer service challenge for any industry in the world. In no other sector would a company face, quite literally, the rage of hundreds of thousands of angry customers, simultaneously, magnified in the echo chamber of social media platforms.
There are significant structural reasons that make delivering stellar customer support and a consistently excellent customer experience exceptionally challenging for game companies, including the fact that gamers often support each other in outside forums. Additionally, game experience is dependent on underlying technology systems like cloud computing and the global Internet. Another challenge is that bugs in the code can’t be quickly and easily fixed in every instance.
These are just some of the numerous challenges faced by game companies as they struggle to maintain high Customer Experience and Customer Support standards.
The Opportunity to Adopt Conversational AI for Gaming Companies
Gaming companies are starting to use Conversational Artificial intelligence (AI) technology to transform their customer experience and support. Based on Deep Learning and modern AI that is continuously learning and improving the way it responds to customer feedback and requests, newer AI systems can eliminate the majority of repetitive work for support agents, address many somewhat sophisticated queries, and allow human support agents to only focus on the most complex case for faster resolution of the thorniest problems faced by noisy and VIP customers.
Modern Conversational AI differs from first-generation bots that many gaming companies have deployed. Simple chatbots can answer questions triggered by keywords or by giving users a menu of topics. In contrast, modern AI that actually uses NLP looks beyond keywords and syntax to richer patterns and combinations of words to better comprehend actual intent. Rather than being rule-based, these newer NLP systems are trained from hundreds of billions of data points. This results in a much more meaningful interaction that resolves players issues in the moment.
Conclusion: Uplevel Your Customer Support To Win The Game
In our new eBook, we touch on the pressures facing game companies to deliver stellar CX. Modern conversational AI technology can improve players’ CX and support experiences significantly, offering immediate resolutions to a range of issues within the game itself. This effortless support plays a key role in retaining gamers, at a time when competition has never been more fierce.
Download your copy of Pleasing A Tough Crowd: Online Games and the New Imperative for Customer Experience today!