Pixelberry

Tips from a top grossing app – How to handle 2000 tickets a day!

Overview

Pixelberry Studios, a leading game publisher known for its top-grossing Apple App Store game, “High School Story,” has achieved remarkable success since its launch in August 2013. The game quickly climbed the charts, securing a Top 5 position in Free Games and maintaining a high rank among top-grossing apps, complemented by an impressive 4.5-star rating. The secret to their sustained achievement and user engagement lies in their early adoption of Helpshift, a customer support tool that has been instrumental in managing their interactions with players.

The Challenge

With the game’s success came an overwhelming volume of customer inquiries, with thousands of players reaching out daily with questions about gameplay or reporting issues and bugs. The small team at Pixelberry faced the daunting task of managing these conversations efficiently to keep their customers satisfied and engaged. Initially, the team, comprised of just five Player Specialists, found themselves swamped, struggling to keep up with the sheer workload of responding to thousands of conversations every day. The challenge was to find a scalable solution that would allow them to maintain their high level of customer service without compromising on the quality of responses.

The Solution

Pixelberry’s team, led by Theresa Nguyen, implemented several strategic practices with the help of Helpshift to manage the high volume of customer support tickets effectively. They focused on collating common questions into FAQs, reducing incoming tickets by 75%, and employed canned messages for quick responses. Helpshift’s powerful search capabilities and bulk actions feature allowed the team to efficiently categorize and respond to common themes in tickets, significantly impacting wait times for other tickets. Furthermore, to manage the ticket surge during the holiday season, they introduced an auto follow-up system to prioritize urgent cases. This system helped them identify players who still required assistance after submitting a ticket, enabling the team to focus on those who needed help the most.

The Results

The adoption of Helpshift and the implementation of targeted customer support strategies allowed Pixelberry’s small team of Player Specialists to handle approximately 400 tickets per day per agent, a significant increase from the industry average of 60-90 tickets. This efficiency not only helped manage the influx of tickets, especially during peak periods like the holiday season but also ensured high retention rates by prioritizing gameplay questions and issues. The success of these initiatives is evident in the sustained popularity and high ratings of “High School Story” in the App Store. Pixelberry’s proactive approach to customer support has set a benchmark for managing high volumes of customer inquiries while maintaining exceptional service quality.