By Neal - 8/16/2021
As a business in the gaming space, we decided to replace our customer support area with a help center. We believed that by doing so, we would simplify operations or minimize the number of support tickets we regularly received.
However, we soon learned that using a help center by itself failed to resolve our customers' concerns because users could not get the information they wanted with any guarantee. Furthermore, most of our customers became disenchanted with our help center, as they were unable to contact a live person.
We discovered that customers wanted to feel assured that a real person could address a complaint or answer a question, whether they communicated by email, chat, or the phone.
Consider this fact - the elimination of our help center from our game company's website resulted in a 12 percent boost in customer satisfaction. Therefore, a help center simply by itself was not effective to address customer requests or concerns.
When we moved from a help center to human support, we were able to react to client inquiries, on average, within two days. Doing so resulted in enhanced customer satisfaction, which soared from 65 percent to 73 percent because of this change. We couldn't have been happier. So, we tested our method further.
The score increased to 78 percent when support representatives replied within 24 hours, and to 82 percent when replies were returned within two hours. When we included customer chat, the score suddenly leaped to over 90 percent, exceeding all expectations.
Anyone playing our FreeCell game, in this instance, was able to continue to enjoy the game because they felt certain that they could depend on our customer support team to help them with any future site issues.
In our daily interactions with consumers, we also gained more insights on what troubles they experienced. In particular we learned that users:
Addressing these newfound issues was a major game changer. It immediately improved our retention rate fo subscribed users, increasing subscription revenue over 12%. We also saw overall engagement improve because there were less bugs in our games.
With only a help center, we could not identify and address the issues that led to our user abandoning ship. That’s because we had no clear outlet for them to convey their issues.
To improve our retention rate, we learned that it is essential to place a strong emphasis on customer service. Paying users want to be able to talk to someone, and users who might become paying ones want to know they will have quality customer service
Ultimately, our customers wanted their issues to be resolved immediately. To that end, we added a page where customers could cancel their membership on their own. We also added a call-to-action so consumers could inform us why they chose to stop using our service to ensure we have an open dialogue with our users.
By relying on actual people to respond to our customers' problems, we stayed on top of customer qualms or worries at all times. However, this comes at a cost. You have to pay for your customer service team.
Today, we have a hybrid approach. We have a help center, but we make it very easy to get in contact with us. We know that when it’s simple to get in touch with a company, it can increase our bottom line.