Contact centers have gotten a bit of a bad rap over the last few years, as a place that is far more concerned with finishing out a call than making sure the customer has left satisfied. Most contact center employees are told that it is far more important to get in as many as calls as possible, rather than making sure the issues are actually being remedied.
Of course, not all call centers are created equal, and it appears that Zynga has decided that customer service is paramount when it comes to its own facility. If other companies were smart, they would follow the Internet gaming company’s lead.
Zynga hired Telus, a well-known call center company to handle its customer service calls, back in 2009, and the arrangement got off to the usual start – too much focus on completing the calls.
That particular approach was noticed by Zynga and the company decided action needed to be taken. "Ramon [Icasiano, vice president of player advocacy and service at Zynga] let us know that we needed to delight their players," said Jeffrey Puritt, president of TELUS International.
Part of the way the two companies were able to manufacture a shift toward customer service was to make sure that the call center agents were more knowledgeable of the games they were discussing.
Zynga says that by getting its contact center employees more engaged with the games they cover, they not only understand how to answer questions and complaints, but where the players were coming from when those questions came up. That understanding has led to far better customer satisfaction, and Telus now handles customer service for 25 to 30 different Zynga games across multiple platforms including iOS and Android.
The lesson that should be learned from Zynga and Telus’ experience is that more call centers should be making an effort to understand not only the problems that callers are facing, but why those problems matter to them. There are almost certainly some problems that seem trivial, until you understand where the caller is truly coming from.