Recipe: Setting up Zendesk Support for gaming


At Zendesk we have a lot of customers who use Zendesk for gamer support, and we work closely with many of them to understand how they support their customers and how to best set up Zendesk Support for gaming.


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At Zendesk we have a lot of customers who use Zendesk for gamer support, and we work closely
with many of them to understand how they support their customers and how to best set up
Zendesk Support for gaming.
Based on many Zendesk gaming instances, conversations with our gaming customers, and the
experience of our customer success and support teams who work with gaming companies, we've put
together a recipe of best practices to help you set up Zendesk Support for gaming.
This recipe is not exhaustive, but meant as a starting point. And there are many ways to set
up Zendesk Support, and many variables to consider, but hopefully this will inspire you and get
you going in the right direction.
This article covers the following topics:


Setting up channels where players submit
support
Adding ticket fields and ticket forms to
collect information about issues
Adding custom user fields to collect player
data
Setting up workflows for ticket
management
Building community in your help center
Extending Zendesk Support with
apps






Setting up channels where players submit support requests

Channels are the ways that your customers contact you for support. Players don't like
being interrupted in the middle of a game, and you want to get them get back to playing as
quickly as possible. So you can give players multiple ways to contact you for support.
Gamers tend to prefer interactive, immediate help that comes through social media and
community. These channels are especially useful for issues that affect many users or a
particular game. For more specific, individual issues, the bulk of tickets for gaming
companies come in via email or a web support form.
Channels:

Email is a popular channel for gaming companies. As a best practice, however,
you might consider pointing users to a web form with custom fields, as opposed to a
free-form email, so that you get all the info you need up front. You can set up
specific support addresses for different issues. Consider support addresses that
correspond to your groups. For example, Support@yoursubdomain.zendesk.com,
Refunds@yoursubdomain.zendesk.com, and
Abuse@yoursubdomain.zendesk.com. For information, see Adding support addresses for users to submit
tickets.


Web form is also a very popular channel for gaming companies. According to a report that
includes all Zendesk gaming companies, almost half
of tickets come in via a web form. Your support team
will typically need specific information from a
user, such as game title, platform, and version, to
help them with their issues. To avoid going
back-and-forth, point users to a web form with
custom fields. Consider setting up different
ticket forms for different games or for specific
issues, such as an online store issue, (this
feature requires the productivity pack Add-on or
Enterprise). For information, see Creating ticket forms to support
multiple request types.


X (formerly Twitter) is an active channel for gamers, although most Zendesk gaming
companies don't set it up as an official ticket
channel in Zendesk Support. Many gaming companies
have loyal fans who are super active on social and
manage the conversations that happen there. If
you want to monitor X and create tickets from
tweets, you can add X as a channel in Zendesk
Support. Then, set up a saved X search for each of
your games. For information, see Setting up your X (formerly
Twitter) channel.


Community is huge for gamers. Zendesk gaming companies put a lot of effort into
supporting strong communities in their help center.
A vibrant, self-serving community is important for
creating a player-centric culture and for deflecting
tickets. For information, see Building community in
your help center.





Adding ticket fields and ticket forms to collect information about issues

As a gaming company, it's important to get as much context for issues as
possible up front, especially if you are supporting multiple games
and platforms.
For example, if a ticket subject is "my game is freezing," it's
impossible to move forward until the player provides more specifics.
Why not capture as much information as possible up front. To get the
information you need in the ticket, and save time, you can set up
custom ticket fields and make them required.

Custom ticket fields

Game (drop-down field) is a list of all your
games.

Platform (drop-down field) is a list of possible
platforms.

Issue type (drop-down filed) is list of general
issue categories, such as online store, unable to
play, bug, and so on.

Offending / abusing player alias (text field) is
where agents can enter the player alias.

Abuse reason (multi-line text field) is where
agents can enter the reason for tickets that report
abuse.




Note:
As a best practice, include a link to your community in
your ticket received notification. That way
customers can visit the community and, potentially,
get help from other players who might have the same
issue. Simply modify the default trigger "Notify
requester of received request" with a link to your
community.


For information about adding custom ticket fields, see Adding and using custom ticket
fields.
You can set up ticket forms with predefined ticket fields for different
request types, (this feature requires the productivity pack Add-on
or Enterprise). This enables you to present multiple support forms
so players can choose the appropriate form for their issue.

Ticket forms
General Questions
Report a Player
Refund Request
Purchasing Problem
Performance Issue




Note: You can set up triggers to automatically assign tickets from
specific ticket forms to the right group, see Automatically
routing tickets with triggers.

For information about creating ticket forms, see Creating ticket forms to handle multiple
request types.





Adding custom user fields to collect player data

As a gaming company, you'll likely want to track specific information about your players,
including their spending history and gaming history. You can create custom fields to add
this information to the player's profile.

Custom user fields

Customer type (drop-down field) options might include Superfan or Disgruntled
as types.

High purchase history (checkbox field) indicates your big spenders. If you want
to give it a more interesting name, you might call it "Whale."

Lifetime spend (numeric field) is useful for seeing a player's lifetime spend
amount in their profile. You might consider applying special support treatment when they
hit a threshold.

Banned (checkbox field) indicates whether player has been banned.

Banned reason (multi-line text field) gives agents a place to enter the reason
if a player is banned.




Note: If you are storing player data in another system, you can build an app to pull this
data into Zendesk Support. You can make this player data available for your agents in
tickets. See Creating custom
apps.

For information about adding custom user fields, see Adding custom fields to users.





Setting up workflows for ticket management

You can set up groups to organize your agents and facilitate ticket handling. Based on your
groups, you can set up business rules to automatically route tickets and views to manage
each group's ticket queue.


Creating groups to handle tickets

You should be able to take a simple approach to groups, and set up a limited number.
You'll probably need some specialized groups to deal with specific issues around refunds
and credits and abuse and banned players.

Groups

General support and Advanced support gives you a two-tiered approach
to support. You'll probably get a lot of tickets about common game issues that can be
handled by your first line support agents. More advanced issues that fewer players
encounter can go to your second level agents. Of course you can give these groups more
interesting names, if you want. Depending on your team and the games you support, one
support group might work for you, instead of a tiered approach.

Store can handle all your purchasing and download issues, if you have an
online store.

Refunds can handle refunds and credits.

Fair play is for issues around fair play, terms of use, and reports of
abuse.

Dev is for bug escalations. Alternatively, you could just call this group
"Bugs."


For information about setting up groups, see Creating groups.



Automatically routing tickets with triggers

You can create triggers to automatically route and assign tickets to your groups. For
example, if a ticket is asking for a refund, it can be assigned to the Refund group.
Consider setting up triggers for tickets that come in through email and your web form, as
the bulk of your tickets will probably come in through these channels.
For email, set up a trigger for each support address or based on keywords in the email
body. For your web form, if you are using ticket forms, set up a trigger based on the
selected ticket form. Otherwise, you can use keywords in the ticket comment to assign the
ticket to the right group.


Triggers to route tickets to a specific group based on a support address:
Conditions Ticket is created and Ticket is received at
<supportaddress>


Action Ticket group <groupname>
For example, you can assign tickets sent to
refunds@<yoursubdomain>.zendesk.com to the Refunds group.


Triggers to route tickets to a specific group based on keywords:
Conditions Ticket is created and Ticket comment text contains at least one
of the following words <keyword>

Action Ticket group <groupname> For example, you can assign
tickets that contain the word "refund" to the Refunds group.


Triggers to route tickets to a specific group based on the ticket form:
Conditions Ticket is created and Ticket form is <name of ticket
form>

Action Ticket group <groupname> For example, you can assign
tickets from the Refund Request ticket form to the Refunds group.


For more information, see Streamlining workflow with ticket updates and
triggers.



Creating views to organize your tickets

Views define a collection of tickets based on a set of criteria. You'll probably want to
set up some global views for each of your groups, so that agents can easily see all the
tickets in their group.
There are many other ways you might consider organizing your tickets into views,
including by game title, common issue, or language.
Views for tickets based on group:
Conditions Ticket group is <name of group> and Ticket status
less than closed



For information about setting up views, see Using views to manage ticket workflow.




Building community in your help center

Community is huge for gamers. Most Zendesk gaming companies put a lot of effort into their help
center and consider it a big part of the player support experience.
Your help center provides a great way for players to self-serve and
to help one another.
You can customize your help center by adding icons and imagery from your games so that players
feel right at home. And to organize your content and community,
you'll probably want to create different categories for different
games.
Building your community gives players a place to share tips about games or to get help with
problems and outages. Players can usually get quick answers in the community, instead of
filing tickets and waiting for support. Players can also share their gaming experiences with
other players who play the same game.
For some tips for driving traffic to your community, see Best practices for driving traffic to your knowledge base
and community.
As a gaming company, you probably have a large number of loyal fans. You can leverage their
passion in the community by creating a moderator program for your most experienced and
helpful players. These players volunteer time in the community to share tips and help other
players. You can reward these players by giving them special avatars, swag, and a direct
line of communication with team members, among other things.





Extending Zendesk Support with apps

Apps can help streamline your support workflows and bring valuable information into
Zendesk Support.


Using Zendesk Support apps

There are many Zendesk Support apps that gaming companies might
find helpful. Specifically, consider using these apps:

User Data displays user and organization
details in a ticket, such as tags, ticket
activity, and contact info.

Show Related Tickets analyzes your ticket
subject and searches against all other tickets to
return any tickets with matching terms.

Answer Suggestion searches your knowledge
base content to suggest articles relevant to the
ticket you're working on, based on ticket's
subject.

Text enables you to put any text you want
on a ticket page. You can use this as a cheat
sheet for your agents to display reference
information, such as player tiers or gaming
levels. You might also use this app to alert
agents about outages, upcoming maintenance, or
common issues.


﻿You can browse through all available apps in the Zendesk Marketplace.



Building a custom app to show player data in a ticket

Most likely you have a separate system for storing your player profiles, and this
information is important to your support team to better serve customers. Many Zendesk
gaming companies have developed custom apps to retrieve this customer information from
their own systems and display it in tickets.
You can use data from Zendesk via the API to generate events based on user profile data.
For example, if a player has reached a certain threshold of spending in your game, you can
automatically tag their profile in Zendesk and set up workflows to give them special
privileges or send them promotions based off their achievements.
In addition to pulling player data, you can build functionality into the app to run
actions on behalf of players. Actions might include:
Resetting passwords
Banning players
Recovering accounts after outages
Issuing refunds


For information about building your own custom app, see this app tutorial series Building your first Zendesk app.





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