NCsoft Achieves Global Success By Delivering A Great Customer Experience And Saving An Estimated $1 Million Annually With RightNow
Goals
- Deliver optimum online gaming experience
- Keep customer support costs under control
- Deploy common customer care environment worldwide
Achievements
- Customer questions answered quickly and consistently via web, email, and phone
- Estimated $1 million saved annually through customer self-service
- Customer care provided in six languages across multiple products and locations
Electronic gaming is a tough, competitive market. To succeed, you have to deliver a great gaming experience, keep your customers happy and watch your costs. And RightNow's CRM product is helping NCsoft—which saw its North American customer base grow 3,000 percent in less than four years—do all three.
NCsoft focuses completely on online gaming—unlike other companies in the business, which specialize in device-based games and only offer online titles as a secondary business. So superb online support is essential for ensuring customer satisfaction and long-term loyalty.
RightNow’s acclaimed web self-service and email management functionality are of tremendous value to NCsoft as it delivers this high-quality online experience. Using NCsoft’s RightNow-powered knowledge bases, gamers can quickly look up answers to their most common questions. NCsoft has enhanced the effectiveness of its knowledge bases by providing many “answers” in the form of screen shots that are easy for gamers to understand. Plus, with answers available in English, French, German, Italian, Korean, and Spanish, gamers around the world can get the same immediate online support in their native languages.
In fact, by automatically answering customers’ questions via the web, NCsoft has estimated savings of more than $1 million annually. And that savings is projected to rise significantly as the company’s business continues to grow.
NCsoft has further enhanced its customer experience by integrating RightNow's CRM product into the games themselves, so gamers can submit questions directly from within their active gaming sessions. These messages automatically capture a variety of information about where gamers are and what they’re doing, so NCsoft’s staff can more quickly and effectively answer their questions.
And, while gamers are generally directed to ask their questions online, RightNow's CRM product enables NCsoft to make phone support a seamless component of its overall service environment. So regardless of how a customer asks a question, the NCsoft staffer providing the answer can see the customer’s entire interaction history on a single screen.
“RightNow is an extremely effective solution for getting information to customers where, when and how they need it,” says NCsoft director of studio services John Erskine. “Regardless of what game they play, what language they speak, or what communication channel they use, RightNow enables us to answers our customers’ questions quickly and accurately.”
Optimizing The Productivity Of A Global Support Team
In addition to ensuring that NCsoft’s customers get the kind of help they need to keep them happy and loyal, RightNow's CRM product also maximizes the productivity of the company’s global customer support team. It does this in several ways. By offloading customers’ most common and repetitive questions, for example, RightNow's CRM product allows the team to focus on issues that truly require their personal attention and expertise. In addition, because NCsoft’s staff can see each customer’s complete support history on their RightNow desktops, they don’t have to ask the same questions over and over—and they can avoid suggesting a solution that has already been tried and did not work.
RightNow's CRM product also makes it easy for customer service agents to delete redundant or expired incidents from the work queue. “When customers get frustrated, they sometimes unleash a barrage of support requests that all look like separate incidents,” explains Erskine.
“With RightNow, our agents can clear those incidents once they’ve helped the customer and ascertained that no further support activity is required.”
In addition, RightNow's CRM product links NCsoft staff around the world, so they can easily route incidents to each other as appropriate. So if a customer from the U.S. accidentally goes to the company’s European web site to ask a question, that incident can be easily routed back to a North American support center.
RightNow's CRM product has proven to be such an intuitive and flexible communication management solution that NCsoft is using it for a full range of customer-facing business processes, including technical support, billing and administration issues, contest participation and bug reports.
On Demand Technology From A Committed Business Partner
RightNow’s on demand delivery model is particularly useful for a company like NCsoft with locations around the globe. Because the system is accessed via the Internet, agents around the world can share a common computing environment without all of the complex infrastructure typically required to distribute an internally deployed application on an international basis. This allows NCsoft to avoid both capital costs and ongoing technology management expenses.
The on demand model also eliminates the costs and headaches associated with ownership of the software itself. “RightNow manages hundreds of implementations of its software, so it can do things like execute an upgrade much more quickly and effectively than we could if we had to do it on our own,” notes Erskine. “The result is that we gain all the business benefits of their technology without many of the hassles.”
Erskine also says that RightNow has been highly responsive to NCsoft’s needs—both in terms of immediate technical assistance and the long-term evolution of its customer experience management strategy “We’ve always been very pleased with the assistance RightNow has provided us and with the continual improvements we’ve seen in its software,” he says. “RightNow is a great partner for a fast-growing, customer-focused global company like ours.”
About NCsoft
NCsoft Corporation is one of the world’s leading developers and publishers of online games. Founded in 1997, NCsoft popular titles include Lineage, City of Heroes, Guild Wars, and the recently launched Auto Assault. Headquartered in Seoul, South Korea, NCsoft has offices throughout North America, Europe and Asia.
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