Weekly we have CS staff meetings with the management team to discuss the current happenings of the CS department.  The upcoming promotions, game updates and services that we need to support and we also trade off with each person taking a turn in presenting a topic in regards to customer service, management and leadership.

This week, one of our tech support supervisors presented a topic discussing the differences in how we all perceive things; especially how it relates to the service we receive from companies.  In summary it details how people perceive quality in many different ways, and that regardless of how good you believe your offerings or projected solutions are, your clients and customer will be responding to ‘quality in perception’ even more than ‘quality in fact’.

This is so true in the support of MMO gaming business.   If you look at “quality in fact” that we provide at SOE, we are constantly working to maintain and improve quality.  We are constantly looking at our customer service offerings to see what we can do better.  We look at our competitors to make sure we are in-line or better, and we look at what we believe are the customer expectations to make sure we are in-line or better.  We have supervisors that are constantly monitoring the quality of the agents and GMs, as well as a quality assurance group that does nothing but reviews of tickets to make sure they are to quality standards with an in-depth matrix of critiria.   All of this is reported back to the individual agents as well as the management teams so that good work can be rewarded and improvement plans can be created for deficiencies.  This is one of the key performance indicators that we look at daily, weekly and monthly and constantly work to improve.

But this ‘quality in perception’ can be very difficult to identify and address.  One is good service from one customer is not always good service to another.  We have many different kinds of customer, with different opinions and expectations.

Let’s just look at this last weeks highlights:

We have customer complaints because of things that are outside of the Customer Support realm of influence (i.e. do you really think CS is responsible or participates in the gold farming/selling?  If that is a multi-million dollar market, I have say I have yet to see any GM quit and move to the Bahamas just because they can, or for that matter drive anything into the parking lot that resembles an Italian or German car, we are strictly American or Japanese economy cars here folks).

Some customers hold CS responsible for their own actions, but demand resolution according to their set of standards.  For example, customers will complain that they received no help from CS after they have been banned for using hacks and 3^rd party software repeatedly, gaining unfair advantages in games, or customers will complain that they received no help from CS after being suspended for shouting vulgar and obscene language in public chat channels and claiming it was their cat walking across their keyboards.  While I know there are some talented cats out there, and I believe that everyone deserves a second chance, our actions have consequences and interfering with the play and entertainment value of others always needs to be taken into consideration.

Some customers hold CS responsible for not being able to change the laws of logic, physics, and minimum system specifications: 

• Yes, when it says “Internet Connection Required” and “Additional Subscription Fees Required” on the box you purchased from the store, that is what it really means.  We can’t flip a switch and make it a one player game with no need of an Internet connection, and we can’t flip a switch and make the game have no subscription fees (well okay maybe we can do that one, but our finance group doesn’t like that.) 
• No we can’t guarantee that you will be able to install and play Vanguard on the computer you just found at a garage sale that is running Windows 95 on 512K RAM, a 20 MB Hard Drive, a CD ROM player right above the 5 ¼  inch floppy drive, and that it might have a video and sound card but you’re not really sure.
• Ditto for both examples above, even if the guy from Wal-Mart said it should work fine.

“Quality in Perception” is addressed in part by the customer satisfaction surveys that we send out after someone has contacted our support group.   I am sure many of you have received one of these, and provided your insight in how we can do better.   We also provide “feedback” categories within the ticketing system whereby you can submit feedback.  After all no matter how good we think we are or are not doing it is the customer’s opinion that really matters.   I personally read the surveys each week to see what the customer is thinking, and what may have been experienced that is outside of my ‘perception’.   It is a very valuable tool.  I enjoy hearing what we can do to improve our customer service, and for that matter our games, which we will promptly accumulate, categorize and pass on to the respective development team.

Data from such surveys and the feedback are then reviewed and acted upon so we can improve this ‘quality in fact” and  ‘quality in perception’.   

The bottom line is we are here to assist you in making sure gaming experience is as fun and entertaining as it can be.  Every contact that we have with each customer, and every decision we make is in good faith and with good intent to the customer.  You can’t please everyone, all the time, but we can sure try. The next time you contact our support team; don’t hesitate to let us know how we are doing.

Brad “Mutato” Wilcox

Executive Director of Customer Service