Nobody Likes Talking to Support

I've been stuck in a support loop with a payment company for four weeks. Their AI agent keeps telling me to print a form. I don't have a printer. I've asked for an e-copy and that seems to have completely stumped it. Each further interaction sends us further down a rabbit hole and any attempt at a new interaction tells me I have a ticket logged. 

The problem is that most companies don't want efficient support teams, they want cheap support teams. An AI-driven helpdesk with contractors costs a lot less and still hits a reasonable level of efficiency. If the team solve 6/10 problems that’s a good number. 60%.  Those numbers don’t work for live products. Broadcast TV can't be offline 60% of the time and neither can a multiplayer title. Outages, bugs and problems hit player mood hard, and if a game fails, we can lose our jobs. That's how directly our success are tied together. Support has to match that.

Everyone promises to love their clients' titles, look after them and say sweet things when everything is working. The difference is in the support when something breaks. Whole titles can fail because engineering support isn't available in time or knowledgeable enough. AI can't replicate engineers who know their systems and know how games work.

When a server goes down, or can't allocate servers, having a helpdesk doesn't help. You need engineers in tickets, on calls and talking in Slack channels. Support isn’t just resetting passwords, it’s complex troubleshooting and problem-solving from senior engineers. For most companies, contractors and AI are cheaper, and they do a great job on the bottom 60% of tickets and problems. But they can't cope with real, multiplayer problems. And when disaster strikes in the top 90%, support need to know their stuff and get involved.

The difference between success and failure for an online service is whether the stats are treated more importantly than the product. I’ve seen an international publishing house use Jessops on print day because their own infrastructure wasn’t reliable or well supported.

6/10 means you're happy with offline players, dead allocations and failed matches. For us that's the worst possible scenario in an online world. Players online are #1 and even money comes second. The sales team hate me for saying that, but dead games don't get paid.