Austin Game Conference 2006 in Depth 21
New games site OGX has up an overview of last week's Austin Game Conference. The piece touches on the big talks (Rob Pardo, Jon Landau, Vernor Vinge), and gives some informational tidbits about the always-interesting panel discussions. From the article: "Community was also a topic that was frequently the primary driver behind a panel, or as a secondary topic that rose up in relation to the topic at hand. Gordon Walton, Studio Director for Bioware Austin held a particularly radical presentation entitled 'Rethinking Service Offerings.' Walton noted that the player perspective about customer service amounted to 'No matter how we do service, we suck.' and questioned why companies spend energy on a perception based challenge that they have not been able to overcome. Walton's premise was that since the customer service infrastructure for a MMORPG eats the most revenue and generates less than favorable results, it may be entirely possible to cut customer service offerings down entirely to a set of automated tools and save the money spent designing for satisfied customers."
Satisfied customers? (Score:3, Insightful)
Customer service's job is to turn unsatisfied customers into satisfied customers. Since everyone will eventually have some issue they need customer service for, and most everyone hates automated systems, this sounds like a great way to guarantee failure.
Re:Satisfied customers? (Score:3, Insightful)
As a matter of fact, it isn't CSR's job to turn customers. I'm not sure what industry you are talking about, but this is about MMORPG CS. MMORPG Customer Service is about mitigating customer expectations. Outside of a cancellation call, a CSR is dealing with a satisfied MMORPG customer that has expectations outside of the norm or is dealing with an irregular event. This is what MMORPG CS data has shown. Saying reality is something else (something about serve every customer or lose them), doesn't change it, nor is it justified.