MMO Development Lesson #5
Your company’s reputation matters. Really, really matters. With the amount of involvement communities of players have with one another and with communities of other players, every time you take a reputation hit it reverberates throughout a huge chunk of your potential user base. How do you preserve your reputation? Don’t do things that are disreputable. It’s as simple as that. The internet has a permanent memory, so anything you do that can harm your reputation will not be forgotten, whether you like it or not.
MMO Development Lesson #5
On a micro scale, good customer service organizations observe “the rule of five”:
For every negative transaction with a customer, it will take not one, but FIVE positive transactions to bring the customer back to a neutral opinion of your product/service.
Think of it this way: on your way to work, you encounter dozens or hundreds of other commuters. Who do you remember? The jerks who cut you off, jumped the line, etc. The same is true for CS. It only takes one or two negative transactions to lose a customer for good.
Customer service is the face of your company. They are the people that your customers interact with on a daily basis. They have the most direct impact on your customers’ success with your product. Too many companies have skimped on customer service, viewing it as “necessary overhead”, and paid the price in reputation as a result.
/agree
It is totally true. If something bad happens to you by the end of the day you have probably told at least 10 other people. If not more. That is in person. When it comes to the internet the amount is increased by the thousands, and of course all those people tell everyone else.
When something good happens you may mention it once if someone brings up a topic that reminds you of it.
People remember exceptional service, and talk about it. They don’t notice good service, nor should they because good service is the bare minimum a company should execute on as a principle. Poor service should be pointed out where ever it is observed.
If I get treated poorly by a company, I make it a point to tell 5-10 people about the company and how poorly they did. I think consumers have a bend over and take it attitude these days with regards to CS, where it is at the bank or on the phone with their MMO.
I also, think Ryan is correct about MMO company reputation. Sony was nothing but good to me when I played EQ, but I still have impressions of evil people in board rooms conspiring against their player base, because of all the tall tales of poor service and players getting screwed by CS. Most of it was probably bullshit, but impressions of poor performance linger, while the expediant charachter recovery or account restore, are quickly forgotten.
Hehe! Yeah I have never been screwed over by SoE either and have had very good CS. Once my hubby actually deleted my character on SWG because he got mad at me, and I cried and cried (seriously) and called customer service and they were very nice and replaced my character. OMG I have never been so upset in my life. But still when I hear SoE one of the first things that pop in my head is “evil” because people are always putting that with their name!
To what extent does a company really have control over its reputation? As people have noted, SOE seems to have a bad reputation, but how much of that is deserved and how much of that simply comes from being well known in the industry?
Another thing I have noticed is that people get burnt out on negativity - while it is correct that people tell their friends about bad experiences, given the ease of communication on the intranet, one encounters a situation where everyone has bad things said about them. That is, one is overwhelmed by negative experiences to the pojnt where it ceases to matter a whole lot. Negativity is the norm, and thus a less useful measure of actual company perofrmance.
Reputation is important, but there are many things that are much more important than reputation for a game company. Having a popular game forgives a lot of sins.
Consider that every popular online game has had consistently “shitty” customer service. UO’s “I cannot help thee with that,” to the reputation SOE has despite some people having positive experiences. Even WoW had (has?) awful customer service: One time I accidentally sold off a bunch of my bagged equipment instead of repairing it. This was back when you could only buy back one at a time from selling. Needless to say, I was frustrated. I petitioned and someone got back to me a few days later. When they created my equipment, they couldn’t create the specific attributes (like “of the owl”), so I had to put up with getting stuff that wasn’t useful.
Somehow, this level of CS and negative reputation hasn’t hurt WoW’s sales as far as I can see….
Even long-term reputation means little. Battle.net was notorious for cheating and hacks aplenty. Most people I knew wouldn’t play on Battle.net since it was accepted that it was a cheater’s paradise. Yet, this didn’t stop people from buying Diablo 2 or WoW when it came out.
The lesson is, if you make a popular game, it really doesn’t matter what your reputation is like. It might hurt you down the line, but not as much as trying to compete with the 800 lb gorilla of the industry will.
My thoughts from years of observation.
I’m assuming that Lesson #6 will be about how no matter what you do, you’re always going to piss off someone?
The funny thing about the internet and games today is that second-hand knowledge is more deadly than first-hand experience. Anyone can repeat what others say, and oftentimes it becomes much like the Chinese Phone where original meanings get twisted into something alltogether different.
Then again, some of the silliest reasons can make a company ‘evil,’ such as having instances and zones rather than a seamless world. And all along, I thought it was just a preference in gameplay and not a turn towards the dark side.
With regards to customer service, I see a disconnect between customer expectations and the power of CSRs. This difference in expectations versus ability leads to a number of the negative perceptions of CSRs.
To correct this, companies should accurately and consistently communicate to players what forms of support are available and what things different types of support are capable of doing and how long it will take for a ticket to be addressed.
Exactly. The difference between Adele’s character replacement and Psyhcochild’s item replacement may not have even been a problem of CS, but one of infrastructure. (Maybe Adele’s info had been backed up & was retrievable; Psychochild’s wasn’t.) Good CSRs do the best they can with the tools they are given. Psychochild: Would your perception of WoW’s CS be higher if the CSR had taken the time to explain why they did what they did? Was it just this event that soured you, or were there more?
Lesson #6 isn’t about being unable to please everyone, but that’s coming at some point.
Thermoses wrote:
Would your perception of WoW’s CS be higher if the CSR had taken the time to explain why they did what they did? Was it just this event that soured you, or were there more?
Keep in mind that CS goes beyond just interacting with a person. It’s also the process and what tools are dedicated to the process. I’m also a developer, so I can imagine why the CSR did what s/he did, but that doesn’t mean it made me happy as a player.
My complaint goes pretty deep into all aspects of the encounter. Before I go on a complete rant here, let me point out that I still played the game for quite a while. But, this is more because I was playing with friends rather than the CS event not being a big deal. I just took extra steps to not have to deal with CS again. For example, I didn’t repair my alternate set of armor when I was tired.
The first problem was that Blizzard’s CS tried to contact me via email instead of the in-game mail. I expected to try to be contacted in-game since everything else was in-game. When signing up a I used an email address at my domain; I rarely use that address anymore because it’s filled with spam on a regular basis. But, that’s how they tried to contact me.
Now, I’m sure the CSR wasn’t being malicious in not exactly replacing my items. I figure the tool to spawn items wasn’t that full-featured to allow the creation of specific magical types of armor; rather, it just created a generic magic type. On the other hand, the CSR could have perhaps tried to create a few types of items to try to get me something that I could use, instead of getting 3 or so pieces of equipment that were worthless to me.
(To be fair, I did get an item that was better than what I lost in terms of stats, but that was a happy accident it seems.)
Now, I know the plural of “anecdote” isn’t “data”, but you can pretty much assume that my encounter didn’t happen in a vacuum. I’m sure other people experienced the same frustration. I’m sure of it, in fact, since the developers eventually made it so you could buy back any items you had sold off.
It comes down to the fact that few people really have to interact with CS. Most of the horrible reports from earlier games were second-hand information. Vocal people got what they felt was the short end of the stick, so they complained. It’s interesting that while SOE has a negative reputation, many people haven’t had any first-person experience with the negative aspects of the reputation.
So, my point remains: a negative CS encounter which was most likely typical for the experience of most people hasn’t exactly hurt WoW’s sales. So, there are aspects of the company that are much more important than reputation. As I said, having a popular game can forgive a lot of sins.
My further thoughts.
I know that this response is late - I have gladly only just found your blog. I have such a strong view on this topic i felt compelled to contribute.
I have only one experience on which to base my view - the Combat Upgrade and NGE in Star Wars Galaxies. There appeared to me to be such limited warning and consultation with the player base.
To literally wake up one day and find that your maxed out toon no longer worked the way it always had and that some of it’s recently purchased gear was now innefective - it was HEARTBREAKING. It is not that the change occured - it is how it occured that I found difficult.
This will forever taint my view of that corporation - and in fact I took some serious convincing to get involved in EQII as a result of that experience. All the wonderful enjoyment and entertainment I have had out of EQII will NEVER negate the dissapointment with SOE over Galaxies and I still see this mentioned from time to time. Not the most glorious episode in SOE’s past.