Electronic Arts Relies On RightNow® To Cost-Efficiently Support Global Growth And Brand Dominance
“ RightNow’s technology and people have been extremely important to EA as our business continues to grow and change. ”
Goals
- Provide effective support to millions of customers worldwide across hundreds of titles
- Handle growing incident volume generated by new online titles
- Seamlessly link multiple offshore outsourcers and internal resources
Achievements
- Handled 50 percent increase in incidents despite 10 percent budget cut
- Delivery of premium service levels in support of premium brand
- Awarded the 2007 Gartner CRM Excellence Award
- Global visibility into service processes enables continuous improvement
- Tens of thousands of incidents answered within 24 hours
- Unified environment for incident tracking enhances the customer experience
As the world’s leading independent producer of electronic games, Electronic Arts (EA) has some serious customer service challenges. Millions of customers all over the world play EA’s numerous games on a variety of gaming platforms. They can have questions about everything from game rules to sound card configurations. They may pick up the phone to ask their questions, or seek their answers online. They may ask their questions in Japanese or Czech. And, as the online gaming market expands, the number of questions they’re asking is growing faster than ever.
But with RightNow’s uniquely effective and adaptable on-demand contact center technology, EA’s customer service organization has been able to cost-efficiently support the company’s continued growth and global market dominance. In fact, over the past two years it has successfully handled both a 50 percent increase in incident volume and a 10 percent budget cut—while still delivering the first-class support required for the company’s premium brand.
“RightNow’s technology and people have been extremely important to EA as our business continues to grow and change,” says Boyd Beasley, EA’s senior director of customer support. “They’re an extremely responsive partner I can count on to work with us as we face the challenges that come with being a market leader on a global scale.”
And thanks to the help of RightNow's call center solutions, Electronic Arts was recently awarded the Gartner CRM Excellence Award - an award given to a company that most clearly demonstrates excellence in their customer relationship management (CRM) initiatives.
Unifying A Multi-Organization, Multi-National Support Team
RightNow’s web-based on-demand delivery model has proven to be ideal for EA’s globally dispersed, partially outsourced contact center operations. Over 80 percent of the company’s first- and second-tier phone and email support is handled by outsourcers around the world. Third-tier support is handled in local territories in strategic locations, with the management team located in Redwood City, California.
Because access to RightNow's contact center technology is provided via the web, everyone everywhere shares a common incident management system. This allows EA to dynamically assign responsibility for specific games or tasks anywhere in the world as appropriate to meet fluctuating demand, without having to worry about provisioning additional servers or installing software on an outsourcer’s end-user desktops. RightNow’s hosted model also means that EA doesn’t have to own or manage any additional IT infrastructure to keep its global contact center operations up and running. RightNow takes care of all the hardware, software, and data protection associated with the system.
This hosted environment also gives EA managers full visibility into all support activities and metrics. They can see how all incidents are handled, perform Quality Assurance and monitor outsourcer performance. They can track all key performance indicators (KPI), pinpoint process bottlenecks, and quickly spot emerging support issues. They can also run reports on all individual contact center staff members in order to award performance-based bonuses.
By adding a custom field to RightNow's call center solutions, EA is able to track issues with added granularity. The insight the company gains from this data has been very useful for ensuring the technical quality of its products and the subjective quality of its customers’ gaming experience.
“RightNow enables us to transform all the customer feedback we get from every customer touch-point into actionable customer insight,” says Beasley. “That insight is invaluable as we seek to strengthen brand loyalty and make customer service a competitive advantage.”
Effective Support For An Interactive World
One of the primary challenges for EA has been supporting the new generation of online multiplayer games. A few years ago, these games comprised less than 20 percent of the company’s business. Now, more than half of EA’s customers are playing online games, and EA anticipates that number to significantly increase as new products take advantage of online features.
The problem is that online games generate about ten times as many incidents as their conventional counterparts. Because the quality of gameplay in the online space is dependent on real-time interaction with other players, customers are more prone to ask for support as soon as they encounter an issue—and they’re much more likely to want an immediate answer. Online games have also created a whole new class of issues, as players who behave inappropriately can disrupt the gaming experience for others.
RightNow’s streamlined incident management and highly effective self-service knowledge base technology have been instrumental in helping EA cope with this exploding workload. Gamers can access the knowledge bases directly from within some of the games—enabling them to get fast answers to their questions with minimal impact on their gaming experience.
As a result, the knowledge bases—which serve up millions of answer-views per month—have relieved EA’s staff of having to handle routine questions, freeing them up to handle other issues.
For example, when EA scored a big hit with Battlefield 2, it received several hundred thousand hits on the game’s self-service knowledge base during launch week—enough for every player to have looked up at least one answer there. EA took the added step of promoting the knowledge base in the “hold” message for its phone queue. This significantly reduced the contact center’s workload, thereby reducing both costs and wait-times.
“Self-service is an extremely important support channel for us, since our customer base is very web-literate,” explains Beasley. “With RightNow, we can make optimum use of that channel across all of our games in 10 key languages—with plans to double that number within the next six months."
Making The Email Channel Work
Because EA customers are so internet-oriented, the company has a very active email communications channel. On a typical day, it receives tens of thousands of email messages. That number can spike more than five-fold when a new game is released or a new gaming platform hits the market.
EA’s support staff, however, is able to plow through these emails with remarkable speed. In fact, they reply to most customer inquiries with a click of the mouse. That’s because the overwhelming majority of those inquiries center around a few basic technical issues revolving around the configuration of players’ PCs.
Support staffers simply click on the relevant knowledge item in the RightNow knowledge base—which has been organized into folders for easy navigation—to quickly provide the appropriate answer. They can also immediately see if there has been a prior email exchange, so they can easily avoid giving the customer redundant information.
Many configuration issues require a two-step process. When customers first notify EA with their sound or video problem, the first step is to capture the relevant PC configuration data. The customer then transmits that data file to EA by email, allowing the support staffer to quickly pinpoint the specific driver needing to be updated. In fact, customers are usually given the actual URL for the necessary download.
Thanks To This Call Center Technology
Less than 10 percent of emails received by first-level support have to be escalated. Of the escalated emails, almost all are dispatched in a matter of minutes. Customers rarely wait more than eight hours for an email reply, and greater than 99 percent are answered within 24 hours
RightNow also makes it easy for EA managers to continually monitor the email queue to make sure response times don’t drop below service-level targets.
Unifying Email And Phone Communications
After its initial successes with the email channel, EA began migrating management of its incoming phone support from a home-grown application it had been using for years to RightNow's call center solutions—starting with its North American, English-speaking contact centers serving Australia, the U.K., and the U.S.
The capture and management of all email and phone incidents in a single call center technology system generated many benefits. For one thing, it enabled support staffers to view the complete history of communications with each customer. So if someone called the company after a series of emails, the staffer could refer to those earlier emails to provide more personalized service and avoid wasting time talking to the customers about things that had already been covered.
In fact, it’s not unusual for customers to contact EA by both email and phone at the same time—in an effort to get a response via whichever channel is fastest. Before RightNow's call center solutions, that customer behavior would create duplicate incidents for EA to manage. With the new unified service environment, support staff can instantly see and delete the extraneous incident.
Unified management of the two channels also means that EA can now perform unified reporting on all support activity. This reporting is important for a variety of reasons, including charging contact center costs back to specific products and prioritizing technical enhancements. Because phone calls account for about 20 percent of EA’s support volume, reliance on email statistics alone would obviously compromise the accuracy of its reports.
“By providing us with a common environment for tracking email and phone support, RightNow improves both our productivity and our market insight,” says Beasley. “It also enables us to deliver a more consistent customer experience across all channels.”
A Critical Partnership For Customer Service
Beasley values RightNow’s responsiveness and expertise as much he does the technology itself. “Because customer service departments are cost centers rather than profits centers, we tend not to be a priority when it comes to IT budgets and project lists,” he observes. “With RightNow, on the other hand, we are treated like a valued customer and can escalate any issue we have as high as it needs to go.”
Beasley also gives RightNow’s professional services organization very high marks. EA contracted for a RightNow technical account manager (TAM) to work on-site for several months. During that time, the TAM met with EA’s staff, observed how they worked, and came up with recommendations for process, policies, and software configurations. “It was great to work with someone who had so much experience with customer service best practices, so much knowledge about the RightNow product, and such sensitivity to our political environment and culture,” Beasley says. “We would not have been as successful as we are without that added dimension of professional services.” In fact, having the TAM on site was so successful that EA recently included this in-house resource in their most recent contract.
Beasley is also a strong proponent of RightNow’s on-demand delivery model. Thanks to that model, EA didn’t build a lot of internal IT infrastructure to support its global contact center environment. The company doesn’t get wrapped up in the ongoing management of that infrastructure or the application itself, and it doesn’t have to worry about whether it has enough capacity to cope with sudden spikes in traffic.
“If we owned our own RightNow servers, we’d have to invest a significant amount of capital in hardware to handle periods of peak demand—even though that hardware would basically be sitting idle the rest of the time,” Beasley points out. “By going with a hosted, on-demand solution, we’ve offloaded all those capacity planning issues on RightNow.”
Five years into its engagement with RightNow, EA’s implementation continues to evolve and expand. It is adding tips and hidden tricks (known to game enthusiasts as “cheats”) to its knowledge bases, even though these have historically been left to unauthorized, third-party websites. By doing so, EA hopes to keep customers returning to its websites and further promote the use of online self-service. EA is also planning to use RightNow’s marketing automation solution to provide more pro-active support and strengthen its relationships with its customers, and recently launched RightNow’s voice automation solution to give customers another option for quickly accessing the information they need.
“The great thing about RightNow is that it has kept growing with us as our business needs have grown and as we have set higher goals for ourselves,” says Beasley. “That’s exactly the kind of partner you need when you’ve been growing faster than the market—and when you plan to continue doing so for the foreseeable future. We could not have recieved the Gartner award without RightNow”
Electronic Arts Support Site | Electronic Arts Homepage
About Electronic Arts
Electronic Arts is the world's leading independent developer and publisher of interactive entertainment software for advanced entertainment systems such as the PlayStation® 3, PlayStation®2 computer entertainment system, the PSP™ (PlayStation® Portable) system, Xbox 360™, Xbox® video game system from Microsoft, Nintendo Wii, Nintendo GameCube™, Game Boy® Advance, and the Nintendo DS™ as well as PC and games for mobile phone devices. Since its inception, EA has garnered more than 700 awards for outstanding software in the U.S. and Europe. EA markets its products worldwide under four brand logos and has over 33 product franchises that have reached more than a million unit sales worldwide. EA is headquartered in Redwood City, California, and is publicly traded on NASDAQ under the symbol ERTS.
Greg Gianforte