Challenge
Worldwide, 2.5 billion people play computer games. And hundreds of millions watch professional esports tournaments. Challengermode’s user base was expanding rapidly. And their customer support demands were keeping pace. Challengermode saw two issues here. First, they thought they’d need to hire and train new customer support agents to keep up. However, they wanted to maintain the same level of quality. Finding a suitable solution required some innovation on their part.
Challengermode set out to reach these goals:
- Maintain the same quality of customer service without hiring more customer support agents
- Integrate an automated support solution that would set a robust foundation for rapid future scaling
- Give their customer support team more time to answer unique technical questions about the platform
Solution
Challengermode decided to forgo chatbots. They opted for a more holistic solution that also ensured easy onboarding. They trialed Zowie with a few of their most repetitive questions. This tested both workflow and results and eliminated the possibility of any glitches. Once satisfied, they went ahead and began automating all their repetitive questions.
Here’s what their Zowie-supported CS results look like:
- 50% of chats automated in a week
- 86% of replies to incoming chat requests are currently automated
- 0% increase in customer service team despite company growth
Challengermode Wanted a Customer Support Scaling Solution that Kept Pace with User Growth
The team’s journey with Zowie began in April. The number of users was climbing exponentially. It became clear to Challengermode that they wouldn’t be able to sustainably scale their customer support in tandem with user growth.
At the time, the customer support team was able to handle the levels of ticket deflection needed to provide a great customer experience. But they knew that the game would soon change.
“We knew we wouldn’t be able to grow as fast as the amount of traffic in terms of customer support. And we got a lot of inquiries that could be automated, things that are questions regarding the platform that just need a simple answer without human interaction.”
— Mikael Lidström, Organizer Success Team Lead
So they set out to future-proof their customer support team. They researched solutions for automating repetitive questions while their team still had a handle on them.
"We wanted to gateway those repetitive inquiries to make our team more scalable for what was to come in the future—without hiring a lot more people.”
— Mikael Lidström, Organizer Success Team Lead
Seamless Onboarding Helped the Team Automate 50% of Chats within a Week
Letting the team scale customer support wasn’t the only goal. Automating repetitive tickets also gave Challengermode’s agents more time to spend on complicated issues. These require more in-depth knowledge. Since gaming is so complex, training customer support agents in this field is more time-intensive than in other industries. This increases the value of keeping hiring demands down.
At first, the solution wasn’t obvious. The team was wary of the usual tools at hand. Agents were skeptical of chatbots and other integrations. They thought it would be difficult to maintain the high level of customer support that their team wanted and users expected.
“Figuring out how to set up an automated customer support solution tends to be scary because you don’t want it to go bananas on the user and hurt the quality of their experience.” — Mikael Lidström, Organizer Success Team Lead
Zowie’s Pricing and Feature Set Persuaded Challengermode to Test the Tool over Well-known Options
Enterprise solutions turned out to be too pricey at that point in the startup’s journey. Challengermode had little room to test different systems for their specific purposes.
After evaluating a few well-known options, Zowie’s pricing and feature set persuaded them to test the tool. Providing a stellar customer experience was an absolute must for the team. That’s why they began integrating automations very carefully.
During the trial run, Challengermode continuously watched out for any issues or malfunctions. They made sure that Zowie’s automated answers brought the high level of service that the team wanted and users expected. The experiment panned out – today, 86% of replies to incoming chats are automated.
The team was greatly satisfied with the quality of support that Zowie’s automation engine brought. Zowie also saved Challengermode a lot of time since no new teammates needed to be onboarded. Maintaining automations was another benefit of the tool.
Within a week, 50% of chats were automated. Handing off automation updates to the Customer Support team took less than an hour of onboarding. System maintenance requires about 1-2 hours every other day.
“It was the first time I experienced a successful continuous onboarding process, with follow-ups that were actually meaningful. It’s a concept that a lot of companies try to achieve both sales- and support-wise, and I think you did it really well.”
— Christopher Teljstedt, Co-Founding Engineer & Head of Growth
Customer Service Automation for Technical Solutions Can be Scaled with Accuracy
Customer support automation is the linchpin of successful growth in gaming. It is an experience-based industry. You can have millions of users logging in to your platform from around the world every single day.
It’s difficult to keep up with the pace of scaling due to the sheer number of users. Also, hiring and training customer support agents in a highly technical industry throws another hurdle in your way.
Zowie provides an industry-agnostic solution for companies like Challengermode. Even if a business operates in a niche field like gaming, Zowie can help. Challengermode’s team has been able to maintain quality without hiring and training new agents.
“Zowie is an excellent addition to the support team. It’s not a replacement for Customer Support agents, which we never expected, but it works exactly the way it was sold, as a perfect helping hand for our team.”
— Christopher Teljstedt, Co-Founding Engineer & Head of Growth
