Creating a seamless gaming experience through self-service and personalisation

The gaming industry is experiencing significant transformation and growth, driven by the wider adoption of emerging technologies and the growing demand for interactive digital content. One company which is driving innovation in this space is the Icelandic video game developer CCP Games, which made its name in the early 2000s with the hugely popular game Eve Online. The company has been growing steadily since then, with its development studios in Reykjavik, London and Shanghai supporting its expansion across Europe, North America and Asia.

However, remaining successful in this rapidly evolving industry hasn’t always been easy and has meant that CCP Games has had to adapt continuously to the changing customer needs and market environment.

“As gaming is evolving, customer expectations are evolving too. Today’s gamers are expecting real-time customer support and a seamless gaming experience. Any issues that can interrupt the game need to be resolved rapidly or you risk losing customers. As a result, gaming companies need to provide more speed, convenience and personalisation to their customers”, said David Einarsson, Senior Project Manager of Player Experience at CCP Games.

Scaling up customer support to drive business growth

To deliver on these customer expectations, CCP Games partnered with Zendesk in 2014. The company needed a customer support platform that enabled it to scale rapidly its operations as it was looking to expand into new markets.

“We looked at several different providers at the start and compared all options based on cost, technical capabilities and customisation options. Zendesk came on top as it offers great scalability and the ability to integrate with existing business applications, which allows us to tailor customer support functionalities to our business needs,” said Reynir Guðráðsson, Customer Support Manager at CCP Games.

Reynir and his team are using Zendesk Support Suite, to drive efficiencies and improvements in their customer service operations. Currently the CCP Games customer support team includes over 55 agents offering customer support in English, Russian, German and Korean. The team interacts with customers over email, chat and on social platforms such as Facebook.

Driving efficiency with self-service and automation

Some of the most common customer enquiries that Reynir’s team has to handle include login issues related to forgotten passwords, billing questions and technical queries about the games. To minimise the manual handling of such common requests, Reynir and his team introduced self service capabilities through a dedicated Help Centre created using Zendesk Guide.

“The Zendesk Guide Help Center has been fantastic to have. It’s easy to use and it has very useful features such as the ability to flag relevant articles when a customer is sending a request.It also reduces our dependency on the customer service team, which is really important during times of increased demand. Before we first launched Zendesk we didn’t have a Help Center at all, so once we introduced it, ticket volume went down by over 50%, and average first reply times went down by 50%“, said Reynir.

Another functionality that has helped improve efficiency is the Zendesk integration with Slack. This has enabled agents to reference internal conversations and chat history in the tickets and resolve customer queries more effectively.

Reducing customer attrition and driving personalisation

Keeping existing customers is as important for CCP Games as attracting new gamers to their platform. This is why the ability to reduce customer attrition for new users has been a key priority for the business in the past couple of years.

“We started using live chat to specifically target the top funnel and reduce sign-up attrition. This allows us to reach out proactively to customers that may be planning to leave the sign-up process and improve customer acquisition. We use Zendesk to manage this chat and we’ve seen good results so far. First of all, our daily customer contacts related to registration and login issues have increased from approximately 80 to 180 after launching live chat support. We’ve also seen a reduction in attrition of customers lost from account creation to successful login by 9%,” explained Reynir.

This project runs alongside wider company initiatives for reducing customer attrition and improving customer experience, including a focus on personalisation.

“We categorise customer enquiries in different segments which correspond to different service level agreements (SLAs). This allows us to tailor the response to each type of customer request and offer an improved service. For instance, for the top priority tickets which represent 25%-30% of our ticket volume, we need to respond within an hour. So far our success rate in managing top priority tickets has been over 99%, which demonstrates that this approach really works” explained David Einarsson, Senior Project Manager of Player Experience.

Improving security and compliance with triggers and automation

Another important feature for the CCP Games customer support team was Zendesk’s triggers and automation functionality, which enables the automation of key processes required to resolve and escalate customer issues.

CCP Games has been using this feature to ensure compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which requires businesses to handle customer data in accordance with strict data privacy rules. CCP Games has been using the triggers and automation functionality to turn these rules into automated steps and processes that enable the customer support team to follow all compliance and legal requirements.

In addition the Fraud and Security team is using Zendesk to communicate with customers who have been blocked for suspicious activity and to resolve security issues. To do this, the team has set up triggers that detect and flag specific ticket subjects and keywords, enabling faster spotting of security issues and more efficient resolution of sensitive cases.

Looking into the future

The partnership with Zendesk has helped CCP Games improve customer engagement by increasing speed and efficiency of ticket resolution and driving more personalisation. As a result, the customer satisfaction score of CCP Games has increased from ~81% to ~92%.

CCP Games has also been invited to join the Zendesk Gaming Guild, a community of gaming companies created to encourage industry collaboration, which has helped Reynir and David build new industry connections and exchange best practices with industry peers.