Though I’ve been taking a bit of a break from the wild and wacky world of game development with the all too familiar story of ‘I need to eat’, I’ve stayed in the technical sector and thought it may be interesting to note some of the parallels. As I’ve spent most of my career doing the miscellaneous dredges that are never glorified in the ‘Be a Game Developer!’ recruitment posters, I thought it would be more fun to note those. Today, it’s going to be Customer Service.

In the past year or so I’ve developed some skills that are imperative, and often lacking, in quite a few developers. Let’s call these ‘social skills’. As I’ve worked on finishing up a degree or two, and settled myself into the I.T. Help Desk lifestyle, it has been brought to my attention that unless you are either a million dollar developer, or run your own independent game company, you can’t (as a rule) be a smartass to the customer. Social skills actually become an important part of the job as you find your lips glued to someone else’s ass for the majority of the time.

Let’s break this down with an example. We are going to look at exactly how important these skills are, no matter where you apply them.

Person A claims that Service B is Something C.

I.T. Sector:

The Client claims that their blade server is running slow.

Game Development:

The Player claims that their super rare +20 Orc-Raper is missing on the FluffyLoveKiss server.

Now, on the surface, these statements look quite different. However, upon slightly close inspection we can note two things:

1) They’re both probably lying.
2) You have to pretend they’re not.

This is where those aforementioned social skills come in. When working within customer service, the main goal is going to be the extraction of information. The difficult issue is getting this information without calling the user a liar.

In situation A some of the questions may look like this:

• What servers are you accessing that are having the problem?
• What users are experiencing this problem? Is it just you?
• When did the problem first present itself?

In situation B the questions will be similar, depending on the auditing your game has in place.

• Where was the item when you lost it? Vault? Bank?
• Are you missing any other items?
• —Internally you can check if this is a global problem…
• When did you last see the item?
• Did the item have any special attributes?

In both cases, while these questions allow you to gather more information, they more importantly allow you to exclude things. If the user says that their Orc-Raper was purple, and you know for a fact that the only purple Orc-Raper is on a different server, you can now determine that the user isn’t being truthful.

If all of the Orc-Rapers on the server are disappearing, and this isn’t an exclusive event, then the user may be telling the truth. Again, though, if the user is claiming theirs was purple, they may just be trying to exploit a bug for compensation.

All too often, non-issues can be escalated due to customer service’s inability, or unwillingness to delve deeper into an issue. A user may simply be having a problem with their internet service provider, but without the proper information time could be wasted ruling out DSN issues in an environment, instead of moving onto more important things.

Additionally, if a representative is unwilling to show an interest a user may sense spite, and if any accusations are made, will become extremely defensive preventing the representative helping them from differentiating the truth from the misconception, or sometimes the downright lies. Never underestimate the power of a pissed off user with a big guild.

Do you have any thoughts on the customer service end game development? Any horror stories you’d like to share?