当你成功推出了一款很酷的游戏，市场反应良好，玩家人数持续走高，看起来似乎大功告成，那么现在你可以开始高枕无忧，等它赚个钵满盆满了吗？答案并非如此，在这个讲究相对性的世界中，目标用户也会对你的游戏有所要求。倘若一招不慎，加上社交网站等媒体的煽风点火，你的游戏随时可能遭受灭顶之灾。可见，除了游戏本身质量，游戏的后期服务、技术支持、品牌意识、群众基础，甚至是游戏体验都可能决定一款游戏的生死。

social game

游戏运营公司必须以国际水准的服务来提高玩家参与率，培养玩家的忠诚度，在提高游戏质量的同时增加利益收成。但最大的难度在于，如何在有限的预算中实现这些目标？考虑到游戏运营公司可能面临的特殊挑战，在此我就游戏的后期运营问题，归纳了以下六点与各位共勉。

Tip1:建立自助客服系统

游戏玩家大量涌入后，游戏漏洞、程序错乱甚至是玩家异议，诸多如潮水般涌现的问题有可能让游戏客服措手不及，难以应对。在问题产生或可能发生之前，你就应该有所戒备，那就是建立完善的自助客服系统，这一招不但可以自保，提高游戏本身的“防御指数”，甚至还可能为游戏运营带来更大的收益。

你得建立一套完备而严格的问答回复机制、程序或者自助系统，以便玩家在任何时候遇到问题都可以自助获得解答。无论是采用建立问答知识库还是提供人工问答服务的方式，最好让玩家动动手指就能找到答案。想玩家所想，如玩家所愿，可以提高玩家对游戏的满意度，培养他们对游戏的忠诚度甚至是信仰，从而让他们引来更多新玩家入会。此外，这种自助服务系统不但不会给你添恼，而且还能有效控制成本。如果游戏要提供问答自助服务，还必须注意几点：

首先，建立问答自助系统，可以将客服人员从“键盘重启怎么用？”之类无关痛痒的小问题中解放出来，从而全身心解决自助系统无法回答的更复杂的问题。你应该建立多渠道的玩家沟通机制，以应对一些紧急情况，例如游戏死机的时候，以免玩家的问题被搁置或拖延，导致游戏客源流失。

其次，必须保证你所建立的问答知识库内容丰富，并且都是玩家遇到的常规性问题，使他们的方便快捷地获得答复。如此一来，你的公司就可以在游戏用户规模扩大的同时，有效控制客服团队的膨胀，节省开支。iWin公司的做法就是这方面的典型。当iwin公司从所谓的“高效电邮解决方案”向具有问答知识库、问答自助服务功能的自助解决方案转向时，该公司的游戏客服效率急剧上升。值得一提的是，该公司注册玩家的双倍增长，仅仅扩充了一名客服人员。iwin公司客服系统中的问答知识库内容海量，其首页有一个引导视频，引导玩家操作和使用自助平台。玩家只需通过输入关键词，浏览其中的文章、解答视频或者提交问题表格，不一会儿即可获得解决方案。

与此类似的还有IGN娱乐，它也是自助问答服务方面的成功案例。该公司的系统还可以评估客服效率对游戏销售的影响，而且该系统还帮助他们排除了原先预计的10人增员计划。自助问答系统不但帮助他们砍削了一大笔开支，而且对游戏品牌塑造、游戏体验提升都大为禆益。IGN公司自助服务系统的解答成功率为92%，其中有57%的玩家提交的问题可以获得非常圆满的解决。

如果想赢得更多玩家，游戏公司就必须保证玩家在离开时得到的是满意的答复，付出的是忠贞的眷恋。每一次服务沟通都暗藏用户增加的契机，这一点在玩家获得满意服务，在Facebook、Twitter、博客或者其他途径发表评论，为你背书的时候尤见成效。即时而规范的客服系统，对游戏产品的发展战略影响之巨，甚至波及游戏的市场销售和利益收成等方面。

TiP2:优化客服功能

建立了基本的自助客服务系统后，接下来要考虑的就是如何优化这项服务。如今的游戏玩家对“科技”一词甚为敏感，并对科技新产品了如指掌。他们使用最潮的手机，活跃于各大社交网站社区、博客、游戏论坛等场所。游戏公司想要最大范围地接触他们，就必须在这些领域有所作为。如果你在这些场所跟玩家进行广泛互动，你的游戏产品的就有希望吸引大量的玩家，提升游戏忠诚度，而这些最后都有可能转化成游戏增值空间。

你的客服系统回复是否及时，态度是否良好，玩家说了算。两天一回合的电邮答复?9到5小时内的自助平台答复?这些都不能满足他们，这就要求客服遇到问题时必须通过多渠道的服务机制，积极介入，即时解决。话虽如此，无论玩家多机灵，要求多高，要清楚的是他们并不一定都有带来利润的潜力，你得分清哪些玩家是VIP，哪些是游戏团体中的意见领袖，或者公会主席，谁掌握了游戏发展的话语权。你可能想为一些特定玩家提供人工在线服务，对另一玩家群体则提供其他特殊服务以取悦他们，让他们介绍更多新成员入伙，产生更大利润。

要采用这种因人而异的个性化服务策略，你得选择一个服务合作商或者找到一个内部支持解决方案，对多渠道的客服机制进行分流，前提是不能影响玩家游戏的体验。可以参考Saa(Software-as-a-Serivce)卖主模式，该软件在保持低成本、低投入的前提下，允许游戏公司在软件中添加更多功能，且与其他游戏管理系统无缝融合。iWin公司将自己的服务解决方案与SaaS相结合，取得了不俗的成绩，因为该公司本身没有其他IT开支，而SaaS又正好为其提供了扩大用户规模的机会。SaaS还能在低成本保证下，与家用客服系统、国际客服系统兼容。

但值得注意的是，选择SaaS软件一定要确保它会提供便捷的客服功能，而不是增加用户操作难度。一些客服系统软件可能带有一系列功能压缩包，用户若要整合这些应用软件则往往需要求助于第三方软件卖主。这里面就会涉及一些潜在成本，并且可能导致整合过后的系统操作更加困难。

Tip3:升级客服质量

游戏进入到开发周期时，必然伴生一系列新挑战，比如实现战略目标，制定聚集玩家的市场策略等等。MMOs游戏尤其如此，这类游戏要获得成功，往往要克服更多困难。MMOs游戏的制作成本一直居高不下，主要体现在开发周期冗长，资本投入巨大两个方面。在这个开发期内，游戏开发商往往易将客服和技术支持的考虑置之脑后，这其实是一个致命误区。

当玩家数量上升而客服质量却没有等比例提高时，客服团队面对堆积如山的问题就会疲于奔命，这将导致游戏产品自砸招牌，客源流失，玩家也会怨声载道。市场销售目标当然重要，但忽视客服对此目标的影响则是大错特错。游戏开发公司在制定市场策略的时候，一定要将客服解决方案考虑入内。但要注意把客服成本控制在公司可承受的范围内，更多的客服人员并不意味着更优质的服务，只能说明你的公司正在拿钱打水漂。

如果你还在利用电子邮件或者有限的内部电子数据表来进行客服管理工作，建议你考虑自助服务解决方案，因为这更容易为玩家释疑解惑，控制成本，选择一个服务外包商或者设置客服自助系统，都能帮助你的公司用更少的客服人员，解决更多玩家所提的问题。

Tip4:留住玩家才是硬道理

对大多数游戏公司而言，多多吸引玩家在自家地盘上逗留是大家的首要目标。玩家呆的时间越长，他们积累的游戏体验就越多，游戏的市场反应也就越强，从而也就越容易对新玩家产生聚集效应，最终也就越容易将游戏人气转化为市场赢利。这就是说，当玩家有问题找客服时，你得保证他们在游戏程序中就能获得答案，而不是退出游戏才能与客服联络，否则极易招致玩家的抵触情绪。因此，你在设置客服管理平台或者重新调整客服解决方案的时候，请一定站在玩家的角度考虑，就像你考虑市场赢利目标一样用心，记住尽量让玩家保持游戏状态而不是中途退出。

iWin.com网站也提供一些免费的游戏，但免费并不意味着无利可图，这些游戏可是嵌入式广告的优质平台。从这一点上看，要获得收益，首先就得保证玩家的游戏体验免受影响，不被中断。玩家呆的时间越久，广告的推广率就越大，游戏公司获得的收益也就越大。一些服务外包商会提供游戏内置客服系统，玩家不退出游戏就可以迅速获得问题解答，因此内置式的游戏客服语言框、问答知识库和提问表格是游戏公司客服系统的首选。要注意的是，选择一些跟你的游戏产品风格、功能较为接近的内置客服系统，可以避免客服系统与你的游戏产品格格不入，徒显突兀。

Tip5:提供多渠道的服务选择

社交网站和手机网站这些新媒体的问世，对所有的产业发展都是一个不小的考验。在这个信息化大潮中，只有善于利用新媒体渠道的游戏公司才能成功淘金，逆流而动者则将惨淡经营，难以为续。必须树立品牌管理意识，巧用玩家在Facebook贴子、推客微博等媒体上对游戏发表的好评，并将这些信息发布到你的客户可以看到的地方，这样你就能察觉到该游戏品牌的推广成效，并通过后台程序进行监控和管理，同时还可以让客服团队的工作更加高效。

客服工作必须兼具强大的业务应对能力和多渠道的沟通方式，这可以参照网页聊天系统，以及像Facebook、twitter这样的社交网站媒体的做法。游戏客服系统最好同时具备这样强大的功能，同时还要携带简便易操作的问答知识库，方便用户自行解决问题。除此之外，你还可以在一些本地社区网站、论坛、手机网络开通这类游戏客服。IGN、柯乐美（Konami）公司亦是如此，足见开通客服新渠道与控制人工客服成本并不矛盾。通过新媒体渠道，还可以方便地搜集到一些用户的智慧解决方案，充实你的自助客服问答智囊。没有一个游戏公司可以为所有玩家提供所有的满意解答，但社交网站等新媒体可以让这项工作事半功倍。新媒体并非万能，它们提供的方案不一定都对，但游戏公司可以在这些得失之间不断积累和成长，并最终在本行业中脱颖而出。

如果你走的路子对了，游戏品牌形成气候，游戏市场反应良好，那么这些优势最终都会反过来为游戏本身加码。可以将玩家的游戏反馈中最具价值的信息筛选出来，在制定下个发展计划时将其考虑入列，这不但有助于完善该游戏产品，巩固其市场地位，而且对推出新游戏产品亦有重要的参考价值。

Tip6:擅用“地利”、“人和”因素

即使你的游戏产品已经利用新媒体工具全副武装，你也还是需要有个活人来负责策划、执行相关事项。无论是选择产品经理、市场负责人、品管人员还是客服人员，总之你得至少指定一个总负责人，协助制定游戏改良策略和负责项目执行。一个成功的游戏改良方案必须具有跨领域操作性和全局性思维，这样才能保证方案执行的有效性。

如果你已经制定了一个游戏改良方案，由谁组织执行并不重要，关键是该方案必须在游戏所在的社区论坛中展开执行，这样比较容易看出成效，考查出游戏用户参与率是否提高，游戏利润增加多少，新玩家涌入数量等等。

结论：

社交网站是一把双刃剑，尽管充满挑战，但如果使用得当，仍然可能为所有产业，尤其是游戏产业带来空前的收益。游戏公司当前迫切需要解决的问题之一就是破解、建立和执行针对社交网站的游戏改良方案，因为像Facebook这样拥有庞大用户群体的社交网站，正是培养玩家的游戏忠诚度、提高利润转化率和开展游戏口碑营销的关键平台。

总而言之，游戏公司完全可以克服重重困难，在成本控制前提下，为玩家提供丰富而有效的客服渠道。要诀就在于，让你的玩家在游戏中久留，为他们提供随时随地的客服解答方式（比如在游戏中或者在社交网站平台上），同时还要多管齐下，开通传统交流工具的客服，包括电子邮件、网页、电话等。

多渠道客服系统看似复杂，但实际操作时仍可参考iWin、IGN等公司的经验，因为它们的客服解决方案都是有效控制管理成本、培养玩家忠诚度、提高玩家参与度、高效解决用户问题等方面的成功范本，希望本文所列要点及案例对你的游戏运营有所启发。

声明：本文中文内容为游戏邦翻译，英文原文采用gamasutra，转载请保留版权信息，谢谢。

Service in the Age of Social Media: The Next Frontier for Gaming Companies

You’ve built an amazing game and brought it to market. Reviews are favorable, and player adoption is increasing. It would seem the heavy lifting is done. Rest easy, and watch the revenue pour in, right?

Nope. Not in today’s collaborative world where your target audience has increasing expectations of your business. Get anything wrong, inside the game or otherwise, and thanks to social media, bad news spreads like wildfire. This creates new competitive challenges for you that go beyond the quality of your product. Instead, they speak to a level of service and support, affecting brand perception, fan bases, and even the gaming experience itself.

Gaming companies need to support games with the kind of world-class service that raises customer acquisition rates, builds customer loyalty, enhances game quality and promotes new monetization opportunities. The challenge is doing just that without draining budgets.

Here are six tips for gaming companies looking to determine a service strategy that takes into account all of today’s unique challenges.

Tip 1: Put Structure around Your Service

As myriad new players with their own unique needs happily crowd into your game, game weaknesses, programming quirks, and simple experiential differences of opinion will begin to be uncovered.

Service requests and feedback will be varied and potentially overwhelming.

You need a strategy to deal with all that will happen or even may happen after your game goes live. Protect yourself — and enable even higher levels of business success — by putting structure around your service.

Begin by setting up strict response rules, processes, and automation that allow users, whenever possible, to resolve their own issues. Whether that is through access to an in-game knowledgebase or the ability to chat live with a customer service representative from within the game, you need to provide answers and service resolution at your players’ fingertips.

It’s what they expect, and keeping them satisfied will lead to longer play rates, and foster a sense of loyalty and evangelism that brings new gamers to your game. Plus, it will help you from being overwhelmed by noise and escalating costs.

In providing automated self-service, there are a few things that you can and definitively should consider.

First, establishing automated responses to inquiries for things like password resets will free up customer service representatives to focus on higher priority requests that cannot be automatically resolved.

You can also build out mass response communications for critical moments that can lead to lost customers if issues are left unaddressed or unresolved, like when your game goes down. This, in turn saves money.

Second, make sure you put in place a rich knowledgebase that provides a branded experience where players can self-serve. You’ll experience the additional cost benefit of smaller CSR teams, and halt the need to grow your CSR team as your game scales.

iWin’s customer care team did just that. When iWin switched from what they called a “glorified email solution” to implementing an end-to-end self-service-focused solution that included a knowledgebase and automated responses, iWin was able to improve ticket response times from one to two weeks to only a few hours. Also, as the company’s subscribers doubled, they only needed to add one new service representative.

The company’s CSRs maintain a rich, updated mix of resources for portal visitors through a knowledgebase. On the welcome page, an introductory video guides subscribers in how to use the support center. Players can search by keyword, browse a library of articles and how-to videos, or submit a ticket. At times, CSRs push out specific videos in response to ticket inquiries.

IGN Entertainment also offers a great example of a company that employed service best practices via automation and process rules. They were able to scale their service efforts to the growth of their game-selling service Direct2Drive, while avoiding what would have previously added, by their estimates, ten additional staff members.

That’s a huge cost savings, and, automated communications resulted in a more positive perception of their brand and gaming experience. The company has achieved self-service issue resolution at 92 percent, and 57 percent of all their logged tickets are satisfied with auto-responders.

Slick branding is still important — the “cool” factor remains crucial in the gaming industry — and, traditional and online marketing demand generation still play an important role. But, today’s gaming company looking for mass adoption needs to make sure customers walk away from an interaction satisfied and loyal to the game.

Every service interaction is an opportunity to add another member to your game evangelist army who will spread the good word on Facebook, Twitter, blogs, and more. Fast, structured service enables a new kind of customer marketing that we are only beginning to see. Viewing service as a key component of your marketing strategy will lead to increased sales and revenue for you.

Tip 2: Individualize the Service Experience

Now that you’ve got some basic structure around your service interactions, optimize by providing a rich “service experience.” What does that mean in today’s world?

When it comes to technology, gamers get it. On a whole, they are technologically savvy. They walk around with the latest and greatest phones, and participate often — and loudly — in social media communities, blogs, and gaming forums. Gaming companies need to interact with gamers where they play and communicate. Once they do, gaming companies experience increased loyalty, improved retention and higher play rates, which increase player monetization opportunities.

When it comes to providing high-quality support, the timeline and manner is chosen by your players. Two-day email inquiry turnarounds and 9 to 5 support center hours don’t cut it, nor do canned email responses for every component of your support structure.

Customer service needs to occur instantly, dynamically, and through the multiple communication channels currently available to gaming customers.

Yet, however savvy your gamers are, they do not all have the same revenue potential. Break down your new multi-channel approach and set your service metrics by type of players. Ask yourself who is a VIP, a leader, or running a guild? Who has and should have a say on development?

For example, you might wish to provide live chat as an option for certain players, and offer different service options as a way to coax players into raising their subscription level, and consequently, generate additional revenue.

To enable this individualized service strategy, choose a service partner or an internal support solution that allows support to be conducted through multiple channels and enables rich and customizable experiences.

Take a look at Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) vendor models. They will keep costs down and require little up-front investment. This model also allows gaming companies to add more functionality and integrate with other systems like gaming operations as needed.

iWin opted for a SaaS model with its service solution because the company has no other IT costs and the SaaS model gave the company a chance to scale as it needed. It also meant that it could have home-based and international CSRs, which would keep costs down.

Just a word of caution, however: be sure that SaaS vendors can customize if required. Some solutions come packaged with set functionality and users wishing to combine additional features and applications need to look to third-party vendors. That’s a hidden cost which can rise unabated and provide a composite system that is difficult to use.

Tip 3: Make Sure Service Can Scale with Game Adoption

When games are in development, there are a lot of challenges — from meeting project milestones to setting a sales and marketing strategy that leads to quick and widespread adoption.

In particular, MMOs often present huge obstacles that need to be overcome to release a successful game. They are incredibly expensive to make — with the development time long and the investment huge. During this development process, gaming companies often put customer service and support plans on the back burner.

However, they do this to their own detriment.

When MMO adoption occurs and there is no service scalability plan in place, the service team begins to struggle to manage the rising number of inbound service requests. The result is lost customers, brand damage, and missed customer acquisition targets.

Sales and marketing scalability goals are crucial, but failing to recognize the impact service can have on marketing and sales is a big mistake. Gaming companies need to integrate service scalability plans into the whole development process.

Make sure you have a plan to grow service affordably. Adding headcount in the form of more CSRs does not equate to better service; it only means your company is shelling out more money.

If you are still running your service operations on email or a limited spreadsheet built in-house, then you have an opportunity to determine a new, automated real-time strategy that meets customer expectations and controls costs.

Pick an outsourcing partner or implement a customer service solution that can handle massive adoption and will scale quickly to meet your needs, without escalating headcount.

Tip 4: Keep them in the Game

For most gaming companies, engaging players and keeping them in the game is the chief objective of their sales efforts. The longer players stay in the game, the more likely they are to have a positive and rich experience, which results in positive reviews, which drives more new customers to play. Keeping players in-game is also going to increase monetization opportunities.

We know this, so, why then, do many games require the player to leave the game in order to interact with customer service? It seems counter-intuitive.

When setting up your service operations or retooling an existing solution, approach your support operations with the same mindset as you approach your monetization strategy: think about how long you can keep your players in the game.

Free games at iWin.com are offered in exchange for delivering targeted, relevant and compelling in-game advertising. For that reason, revenue depends on keeping gaming customers playing without interruption. The longer the players stay in the game, the more ads are delivered, and the more revenue the company generates.

There are solutions and service outsourcing partners that provide in-game support interaction, so your players can rapidly resolve issues without ever leaving the game. Look for solutions that offer support for in-game chat, knowledgebase access, and trouble-ticketing.

What’s more, look to in-game service solutions that can offer portals that are custom-branded just like your game, so there’s no disconnect in the gaming or branding experience.

Tip 5: To Grow your Player Pool, Put Service Where Your Players Are

The newness of social and mobile media channels is challenging every business in every industry. We’re in uncharted waters. Quite simply, gaming companies that figure out how to make the new channels work for them will thrive. Those that fail may not survive.

Brand management encompasses service today, so operationally, you should be able to consolidate all the input of support tickets, Facebook posts and Tweets into the same place for your agents, so you can respond, monitor and manage your brand through a service desk on the backend. This also makes your CSRs more productive.

I mentioned scalability before. Realize that today’s scalability means integrating growing service capabilities into multiple communication channels, such as web chat, and social media such as Facebook and Twitter.

Be sure you have an option for integrated IVR capabilities as well as access to easy-to-use knowledgebases that can be searched so players can service themselves. In addition, look for add-on or native community and forum management capabilities as well as support for the mobile channel.

Again, calling to mind examples of gaming companies with best practice service like IGN and Konami, it is possible to be in new channels while also controlling demand for costly one-to-one interactions.

Today, you can approach new media channels with great confidence, and pluck greater insights from your high-value customers, without fear of being overwhelmed by your total audience.

No one has all the answers, but one key to success is clear: approach new social media channels openly, and with a willingness to experiment. Do not make risk mitigation the chief objective. Some things will work, others will fail, but, over time, you will continually evolve and improve, and, in the end, emerge as a best practices player.

Get it right and you will build your brand and gather valuable feedback that enhances your games. Implement player feedback loops that combine and analyze information from service interactions, social network and community monitoring and filter it into your development process so you can bring to market better games and improve existing ones.

Tip 6:  Designate an Owner and Define Policies around Communities and Social Media Networks

Even though new media channels touch every part of the organization, someone does need to be in charge. Whether it is PR, marketing, product management, or customer service, pick an owner. That way, someone is responsible and can help forge a cohesive strategy. One critical success factor, however, is that regardless of who owns your strategy, identify stakeholders across your organization and get their input. A successful strategy must be cross-operational and cohesive in order to be effective.

Also, be sure to establish clearly defined policies for communities and social media networks. In the gaming industry, there is much discussion about who owns the communities and forums.  Part of the purpose of communities is to empower your players to empower themselves, but gaming companies cannot let communities be entirely unmoderated. The effect on player perception can be disastrous, and a message left without a response never results in anything good.

Once you’ve got a strategy, and no matter who is running it, be sure you can execute on service inside those communities you choose to engage with, and you’ll see higher retention rates, additional revenue and a gamer community that brings armies of new players to your game.

Conclusion

For certain, social media is here to stay. With its challenges also come a slew of unprecedented benefits for every industry, but especially the gaming industry. Among the challenges that gaming companies need to address is how to decipher, establish and execute on a social media strategy that cultivates the gamer relationship in ways that build loyalty, increase monetization and create more word of mouth referrals through social media platforms like Facebook.

Increasingly, gaming companies need to be laser-focused on providing a rich and dynamic customer service experience are able to meet those challenges, while keeping costs low. The key is to keep your players in the game and service them in the channels where they live — in the game and on social media platforms, as well as offering them communications through traditional channels like email, web, and phone.

Although multi-channel service approach may seem complicated, look to the tips laid out in this article, and best practice gaming companies like iWin and IGN Entertainment. These companies have figured out how to use their service operations to not only resolve issues, but foster a sense of customer loyalty while raising acquisition rates and keeping operational costs low.(source:gamasutra)