Outsourcing Customer Service: Good Idea or Wasteful Boondoggle?

Panelists: Matthew Gutierrez, CEO GCSA (Consultant)

John Erskine, Director of Studio Services, NCSoft (Tisirin’s Boss)

Sven Hindman, Director of Customer Relationship Management, WEBZEN America

I attended the panel about outsourcing to try to get a feel for how the game companies feel about outsourcing and their strategies with outsourcing. One thing I found interesting was that they never addressed the minimal level of quality of service they can provide their customers before they leave. Instead they mainly focused on how to find and contract a good vendor and the perils of handing off a large portion of your company’s “baby” to a third party, which can always be scary.

All of the panelists agreed that outsourcing, when done properly, can be a very useful and cost effective tool for providing customer support. They all stressed that the history of the vendor is key in determining whether or not to enter into a “marriage” with a customer support company because farther down the line, it is way more expensive to retrain and switch companies if they do not work out for the company or their customers, which eliminates the low cost of that support, which is of course, the whole point of outsourcing.

The major perils the panelists outlined from outsourcing stem from either starting outsourcing too late in development, organizational chaos within the company when they have to document their processes for somebody else because game companies are in large part organic entities, or security concerns. Ideally your in house CS staff should be very thankful for the job the outsourced people do and if that does not happen or you have to change your support system it can build up animosity on your home team if you do not handle outsourcing properly.

The NCSoft guy described the model that they use for their outsourcing of both in-game petitions and e-mail support. Their first tier is completely outsourced because the vast majority of “calls” that come in are either blank, complete nonsense or routine. He said that maybe 20-30% of the calls they get are tricky and need to be handled by somebody in the home office who is better versed in the game and company policies. I almost broke out laughing at this point because I remember when the support for Lineage II was ABSOLUTELY HORRIBLE and it was extremely frustrating trying to even get to a real GM and not a “CS representative” who really isn’t a GM but is a guy in India who has no idea what you’re talking about. However, I do have to admit that they have vastly improved their process for having the first tier GMs handle only the calls they are trained for and supposed to handle (spam and Erskine deserve credit for the vast improvements they’ve made in the past year or so). I imagine as a second tier GM or HGM at NCSoft they are very thankful for their first tier because they essentially act as a filter so that only the calls that matter get answered by the NCNA staff, which is as it should be. If you’ve ever sent an e-mail to support and gotten a first response from a “CSR rep,” I believe those are the ones who are outsourced and filtering/directing your call to the appropriate office.

I was actually sitting next to spam (the Lineage II CSR Lead) throughout the talk and afterwards I had the chance to speak with him a little bit more about how it works in Lineage II and the different models available. I wasn’t sure if it was actually him because he cut his hair since E3 but the power of the name tag and cigarettes prevailed. Anyways, in Korea, there is no in-game petition system. Instead, when you submit something through their in game system it actually sends an e-mail and that way the out of game support is tied to the in game support system. Unfortunately, I forget what its called. In North America, NCSoft employs the Knowledge Base system so that players can in large part, find the answers themselves. Of course, most people (in my opinion) don’t really use this system for anything beyond the trivial, but I suppose that is what the system is designed for. To answer the basic questions and reduce the number of “routine” calls.

That is why most customers for NCSoft who actually do send in submissions to support or petition in game get extremely frustrated when they feel like they’re getting an automated response. If they wanted an automated response, they could have gone to knowledge base; however, they sent in a submission to actually talk to someone, not to get a pre-programmed response. But that was all part of my discussion with spam after panel, so meanwhile, back at the panel….

The guy from NCSoft also related that outsourcing the first tier of support gives companies who support multiple games the ability to transfer their home staff to the games that require it during peak times such as a new expansion coming out. His example was with NCSoft releasing CoV, they have dedicated many of their resources, including NA support, to that game. Once the peak from the release dies down, the resources will be scaled back and return to normal. Similarly, he anticipates another shift towards another game (possibly the release of Chronicle IV in NA?) in six weeks. Maybe he was just making up numbers, but the timetable makes sense to me so right now based on his support shifting and numbers, I am guessing that we see the C4 PTS in about 6 weeks and that it will be released in January of next year. If I am wrong, feel free to tar and feather me, but if I’m right (or even close to right!), I want a muffin. So don’t rip me a new one if I’m wrong unless you’re prepared to give me a muffin if I’m right.

The general feeling from the panel that I got is that outsourcing will continue and as players there is nothing we as players can do about it beyond raise the flag and complain when the outsourced people are not doing their jobs properly. The companies should then do what NCSoft did when the community outcry arose from inadequate response and retrain their outsourced support teams to correctly identify the issues that they can and are supposed to handle because it is disastrous to customer relations when that first tier tries to handle an issue they are not supposed to handle. So if you are unsatisfied with the support you’re getting from a CSR, you must raise the issue to the attention of the managers so that they can address the problem and correctly train their staff to provide you the support that you desire and as a paying customer, are entitled to. Yes, even in the world of MMORPG support, the line “let me talk to your manager” can be quite powerful.

So yeah after the panel I talked with spam for a while about the history of Lineage II and its support, the GM team, the problems with running a legitimate community site and a whole bunch of random crap. I didn’t have caffeine in my system so I wasn’t prepared to run the gambit of complaining about bots very much, but he assured me they are still banning them regularly, which personally I believe because you really can tell the difference on certain days of the week. When I told him I had pretty much given up reporting them, he agreed that its not even something I as a customer should have to deal with because his team should be doing all of that on their own.