With more than 30 years providing unrivalled customer experiences to leading industry innovators, such as Mr Green, White Hat Gaming, Leo Vegas, Riot Games, Big Fish Games and more, Zendesk believes the need for gaming operators to establish strong and positive customer service processes is more essential than ever. Chams Ejjaouani Director of Marketing for the renowned customer service software company, explains how AI is shaping the experience of young players, their new gaming industry Roadshow in Malta and why Zendesk’s Omnichannel Customer Service platform is ‘beautifully simple’…

How is Zendesk developing its customer experience expertise within the gaming industry?
At Zendesk, we help our clients to deliver the best customer experiences. This is mainly done through our Omnichannel Customer Service platform. In our co-founder’s words, they wanted it ‘beautifully simple’ to make agents, managers and customers lives easier. When it comes to the gaming industry, we are already working with the best in class in term of Customer Experience to help them build the best gamers experiences. In a fast growing and evolving business world, Zendesk platform has been built to be open and flexible to adapt to every company’s need and avoid hidden developments costs and evolve when scaling a business.

What is the relationship between strong brands and positive customer experience – do you have to have a strong brand to deliver a positive experience? 
You can have a strong brand, but you can destroy it with a bad customer experience in few minutes. This, in turn, will have a big impact on figures as clients will choose to go to that brand’s competitors. Once this happens companies can’t fight it and only time and heavy marketing investments can then rebuild brand awareness and customer trust.
These days, we can say that strong brands are strong because they propose a great customer experience. Digital Native and fast growing companies understood that quickly. They built their success around putting customers in the center of their interest since day one of their creation. With firms like Netflix, Uber, Airbnb, you can guess how their success is linked to their capacity to offer the best customer experience and keep their clients loyal and happy. This becomes even more key when scaling a business as if brands don’t use the accurate tools to support growth, things can quickly turn into a nightmare. What follows is managers, clients and agents suffer, as does turnover and retention.

Is it much harder to deliver a positive experience in a digital environment where no one actually physically interacts?
I actually believe it’s completely the opposite. Before digital, we could only interact with a brand by sending a courier, calling or going to the shops which is time consuming. The digital environment gives the opportunity to deliver greater experiences because businesses can now offer customers new channels to interact with and get quicker answers to their questions or requests. New tools like messaging apps, social networks and email offer the ability to quickly solve problems and moreover, they also allow customers to contact anytime, anywhere through their preferred channels.
When it comes to younger generations, such as millennials, our internal benchmarks showed that they generally prefer not talking to an agent but instead expect more interactions digitally giving them access to information easily. It’s what we call self-service. Sometimes, building a strong knowledge base alongside clearly optimised service and FAQs will allow a brand and its customers save time and money.

Gambling is a promiscuous environment where there is little brand loyalty – can you address this through delivering a good experience?
We become loyal to a brand when we have a good experience and the feeling that somebody is taking care of us. Both can be achieved by proposing a better experience, for example by reducing first time replies to an interaction (ticket). This shows customers that somebody is listening to their pain and is in the process of solving it.
A good customer experience will have a positive impact in reducing churn and retaining clients which is often made possible by giving them first the right channel to interact with a brand. By reducing First Time Reply and Ticket Solving, those will be having a positive impact on Customer Satisfaction and then Customer Experience.

What are the essential components of a positive customer experience?
There are many ingredients but one of the main points to begin with is embracing Omnichannel allowing customers to reach a company when they want. If a brand believes managing a series of different channels is too much, Omnichannel allows all those channels to be fully integrated as long as there is strategy in place where all parties rely on Self-Service. Building and proposing a strong knowledge base is one of the examples for self service. As much as a company may receive high volumes of tickets, it becomes more and more logic to have a closer look at Artificial Intelligence for Customer Service. AI shouldn’t be scaring brands. It’s something they should be incorporating to their Customer Service process to make agent’s life easier and focused on complex requests. By implementing AI, businesses will allow agents not to answer repetitive questions and tasks which is perfect for a fast moving industry like gaming where it’s mandatory to keep platforms open and flexible. This might sound obvious but think about all the costs that can be linked to any additional development or all the constraints inherent in a company’s inability to change aspects of their Customer Service platform. To deliver a positive customer experience, an API and App friendly platform is essential.

In your opinion what brand is the master of the positive customer experience – where can we find best practice?
In recent years there is a growing list of companies proposing exceptional customer experience with the majority being digital natives and apps. Brands like Uber, Airbnb, Deliveroo, Evernote and many others are successful in proposing a seamless customer experience because since the creation of the company, they put the customer at the center of their interest. Being customer centric gave them this competitive advantage and success we all know.
In the gaming industry, we also see some best-in-class brands including Mr Green, White Hat Gaming, Leo Vegas, Riot Games, Big Fish Games and many others. We are really proud to work with them as they all put the gamers at the center and we are happy to help them offer their gamers the best customer experiences. For example, Big Fish Games has reduced wait time by 16% in recent months whilst also seeing a 40% ticket deflection since using Zendesk.

How do you measure the impact of the customer experience – is it exclusively about retention and spend or is there more to it? 
Many KPIs can be followed to improve customer experience with the most common being Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), First Time Response and Time to close a ticket. These maybe the most common but the most important thing is to define the ones that are suitable for each individual company.
For example, Mr Green has increased their CSAT by 8% after implementing an Omnichannel (Chat, Knowledge Base, phone and support) Customer Service strategy through Zendesk. That’s really huge and so it’s clear the impact can be direct by only tweaking certain areas of your customer service.

Can you tell us more about the event you are staging in May – what can people expect from it?
Our business is growing in Malta and especially in the gaming industry. We will be hosting our Zendesk Presents: EMEA Roadshow in Malta for the first time. This event will be a great opportunity to listen to the best-in-class client testimonials from our leading roster of clients and discover how they are acting on a daily basis to offer a better customer experience.
The Roadshow takes place on 7 May, 2019 and will finish with an afterwork to give the opportunity to industry experts networks and share knowledge with their peers.

To register for the Zendesk Presents: EMEA Roadshow in Malta, visit: https://joinevents.zendesk.com/profile/form/index.cfm?PKformID=0x52726abcd