April 23, 2014 at 18:44Support team experience with Kayako
Hello, Habr!
My name is Herman, I am the technical manager of the support team at Plarium. Today I will talk about our experience with the Kayako system. This material will be of interest to those who are planning to create their own user support team, or to people who want to find out how the support service works from the inside.
What we do
Plarium is developing browser, mobile and social games. Currently, our team of technical support employs 30 specialists who communicate with millions of players around the world. Each employee is responsible for his project in each of the social networks. At the same time, all the guys have a sufficient knowledge base to switch to another project if necessary.
As you know, regular updating of content is the path to success, therefore our games are overgrown with new features every week. We receive up to 800 questions (tickets) from the players per day. This means that technical support is extremely important to conduct an effective and continuous dialogue with users, instantly answering any questions or reports about bugs. Choosing the right tool for interacting with users and providing feedback to developers ultimately determines how successful the project itself and the company as a whole will be. Therefore, we approached this choice very seriously.
How it all started
At the end of 2012, our support team, which at that time had only 5 people, answered user questions by e-mail. I want to note that with a small load this is an entirely acceptable option, especially when you need to follow just one project. There are convenient plugins for Thunderbird (for example, Quicktext) that allow you to create a set of macros to reduce the routine set of answers to the same questions.
However, there are many disadvantages of working with e-mail: with the number of products more than one, you need to monitor several mailboxes (or ask the user what game he plays).
As the number of projects increased, the team also began to grow, and we had the problem of delegating questions from users (did someone reply to this letter?). It was also difficult to evaluate the effectiveness of the support department, to trace the history of user requests, etc. At that moment, when the team consisted of 10 people, and had to follow three projects, we decided to choose a convenient support system that would help to communicate effectively not only with users, but also within the team.
Choosing a support system
After the tests, among the various support systems, the choice fell on Kayako, which was also very praised on Habré. Here are a few key parameters that determined our champion:
• Kayako is quite flexible in terms of configuration. Most of the issues are resolved with the “usual check-box”;
• You can purchase a license “forever”. In addition, the old system price was much lower than the prices of competitors;
• a sufficiently large selection of plugins to further expand the functionality of the system;
• Excellent quality support Kayako.
I would not say that competitors had obvious disadvantages, or Kayako was all in the pros, it was just quite flexible and expandable for sane cost.
What we got at the start of
Kayako has many configurations, so that we could immediately make the following improvements:
• create “departments” for any number of products. This is necessary in order to distinguish questions from different projects. At the moment, there are 38 departments in our Kayako;
• localize the user interface;
• configure the acceptance of tickets by mail or through the site;
• Add articles to the knowledge base with frequently asked questions.
However, these were only basic improvements. To fully optimize the work with Kayako, we decided to continue improving the tool in several directions: interface, search query optimization, integration with our databases.
How we improved the system for users
A simple and convenient interface, as well as an attractive visual component, have largely determined the success of our rather complex strategic games. Therefore, we decided to transfer this experience to Kayako, and first we changed its appearance:
(what was)
(what became)
Recently, Kayako developers independently updated the user interface of the system, which is the default. Now it does not look so gray and is quite suitable for starting the support service (you can see it here: my.kayako.com ). It is worth noting that you can’t “choose different skins” in Kayako, but you can configure the interface manually.
Then we decided to make life easier for users in terms of usability and created a convenient knowledge base for our projects. Articles from this database are visible to the user while creating a question to the support service. In this regard, the search by article was adjusted: specific tags are now assigned to each text (instead of full-text search by database article, which is the default in Kayako), which help the system determine the material that needs to be offered to the user in a particular case.
We also added a new field, allowing the player to enter his game ID. Such a field can also be created using standard Kayako methods, but we added a function that calls our database when creating a ticket and warns the user if his ID is entered incorrectly. In this case, a ticket can be created in any case, even if the player has not figured out where to find his identifier.
In the further battle for usability, we decided to abandon registration on the support site. In our version of Kayako, the user is automatically registered after the ticket is created. We also refused to change avatars, time zones and other parameters, because it overloaded the user interface.
To get into your personal account, see the history of calls or simply reply through the site to your last call, the user just needs to click on the special link in the letter that comes after the ticket is created.
After solving basic usability issues, we moved on to finer settings.
In our games, the social component is of great importance, therefore, among the players, as in real life, there are influential people - these are leaders of clans, alliances, and simply high-level characters. Especially for them, a separate section of the VIP support site was created in which tickets are processed first. To get to the VIP-center, players go to the "dedicated site" directly from the game.
It’s impossible to get to this site just like this (for example, by sending a link to a friend): a timestamp is encoded in the URL format, which expires after 30 seconds. If you simply transfer the link of the VIP site to another player, he will switch to the usual technical support site. I had to implement this protection after the link began to be rummaged in our fan communities, knowing that they would respond faster in the VIP center.
What we added for the support-team The
above was about the user side of Kayako. Now we will consider the changes in those functions that the support team itself works with.
The main changes were aimed at adapting Kayako to our daily work: communication of Kayako with the player base and game admin panel, automatic answers with instructions to users in various situations, proper sorting and prioritization of tickets, the convenience of the support team working with user tickets.
All incoming calls are synchronized with our internal database or admin panel, so it is so important for us that the player enters the correct game ID. The player can also enter their coordinates (position on the map in the game), and the internal function automatically converts them into ID. If the coordinates or ID are entered incorrectly, the system will throw an error by comparing the last request with this simple regular expression:
By the way, this is a very good spam protection. A kind of captcha, which is very useful in our work.
By the entered ID we see the deposit amount, an avatar from the social network and the level of the player who contacted us. Next, you can easily go to the admin panel to find information to solve the problem or just perform an action.
In the ticket viewing window itself, we added the extremely necessary function of the history of questions and combining them into one. This greatly saves team time, as it often happens that users create multiple tickets with the same problem.
In the standard configuration, the system does not greet the player, so we taught Kayako to automatically substitute the correct greeting.
What we got
In total, we made several dozen changes to the Kayako system. We taught her to recognize spam, automatically sort calls by keywords, hide support answers quoted by a player, upload screenshots, analyze user search queries for writing articles in the knowledge base, make support performance reports and much more. Kayako really provides great opportunities.
Since the introduction of Kayako, the number of solved tickets from users has increased by 3-5 times, however, the support team has also expanded from 10 to 30 people. For the year we processed more than 100,000 tickets, and the players sent us 50,722 screenshots with a total volume of more than 28 gigabytes.
The graph shows how much the percentage of processed calls over the past 2 months has grown. This is due to the recent cleaning of bots that we carried out in our projects. Thanks to Kayako, the support-team processed about 20,000 calls in 1 month, although usually the number of calls does not exceed 8,000. Of course, we are talking only about those calls that were sent to technical support. A community team also works with each of the projects, which answers most of the user's questions directly on social networks.
What's over the horizon
Kayako is a very powerful system in terms of scalability, and it has shown excellent results under heavy loads. I think with its help you can work with 50 or even 200 projects. In this case, a certain participation of programmers will be required, and, of course, constant work on optimization, but this will not be difficult.
At this stage of work, Kayako really lacks simple integration with mobile platforms and social networks. I would like to be able to fully integrate into the games in order to respond to users directly during the game process, skipping e-mail, entering ID and other unnecessary actions.
But, striving for technical excellence, do not forget about improving the professionalism of the team. Systems such as Kayako can help with speed and efficient power distribution, but the main job is always done by the person.
My name is Herman, I am the technical manager of the support team at Plarium. Today I will talk about our experience with the Kayako system. This material will be of interest to those who are planning to create their own user support team, or to people who want to find out how the support service works from the inside.
What we do
Plarium is developing browser, mobile and social games. Currently, our team of technical support employs 30 specialists who communicate with millions of players around the world. Each employee is responsible for his project in each of the social networks. At the same time, all the guys have a sufficient knowledge base to switch to another project if necessary.
As you know, regular updating of content is the path to success, therefore our games are overgrown with new features every week. We receive up to 800 questions (tickets) from the players per day. This means that technical support is extremely important to conduct an effective and continuous dialogue with users, instantly answering any questions or reports about bugs. Choosing the right tool for interacting with users and providing feedback to developers ultimately determines how successful the project itself and the company as a whole will be. Therefore, we approached this choice very seriously.
How it all started
At the end of 2012, our support team, which at that time had only 5 people, answered user questions by e-mail. I want to note that with a small load this is an entirely acceptable option, especially when you need to follow just one project. There are convenient plugins for Thunderbird (for example, Quicktext) that allow you to create a set of macros to reduce the routine set of answers to the same questions.
However, there are many disadvantages of working with e-mail: with the number of products more than one, you need to monitor several mailboxes (or ask the user what game he plays).
As the number of projects increased, the team also began to grow, and we had the problem of delegating questions from users (did someone reply to this letter?). It was also difficult to evaluate the effectiveness of the support department, to trace the history of user requests, etc. At that moment, when the team consisted of 10 people, and had to follow three projects, we decided to choose a convenient support system that would help to communicate effectively not only with users, but also within the team.
Choosing a support system
After the tests, among the various support systems, the choice fell on Kayako, which was also very praised on Habré. Here are a few key parameters that determined our champion:
• Kayako is quite flexible in terms of configuration. Most of the issues are resolved with the “usual check-box”;
• You can purchase a license “forever”. In addition, the old system price was much lower than the prices of competitors;
• a sufficiently large selection of plugins to further expand the functionality of the system;
• Excellent quality support Kayako.
I would not say that competitors had obvious disadvantages, or Kayako was all in the pros, it was just quite flexible and expandable for sane cost.
What we got at the start of
Kayako has many configurations, so that we could immediately make the following improvements:
• create “departments” for any number of products. This is necessary in order to distinguish questions from different projects. At the moment, there are 38 departments in our Kayako;
• localize the user interface;
• configure the acceptance of tickets by mail or through the site;
• Add articles to the knowledge base with frequently asked questions.
However, these were only basic improvements. To fully optimize the work with Kayako, we decided to continue improving the tool in several directions: interface, search query optimization, integration with our databases.
How we improved the system for users
A simple and convenient interface, as well as an attractive visual component, have largely determined the success of our rather complex strategic games. Therefore, we decided to transfer this experience to Kayako, and first we changed its appearance:
(what was)
(what became)
Recently, Kayako developers independently updated the user interface of the system, which is the default. Now it does not look so gray and is quite suitable for starting the support service (you can see it here: my.kayako.com ). It is worth noting that you can’t “choose different skins” in Kayako, but you can configure the interface manually.
Then we decided to make life easier for users in terms of usability and created a convenient knowledge base for our projects. Articles from this database are visible to the user while creating a question to the support service. In this regard, the search by article was adjusted: specific tags are now assigned to each text (instead of full-text search by database article, which is the default in Kayako), which help the system determine the material that needs to be offered to the user in a particular case.
We also added a new field, allowing the player to enter his game ID. Such a field can also be created using standard Kayako methods, but we added a function that calls our database when creating a ticket and warns the user if his ID is entered incorrectly. In this case, a ticket can be created in any case, even if the player has not figured out where to find his identifier.
In the further battle for usability, we decided to abandon registration on the support site. In our version of Kayako, the user is automatically registered after the ticket is created. We also refused to change avatars, time zones and other parameters, because it overloaded the user interface.
To get into your personal account, see the history of calls or simply reply through the site to your last call, the user just needs to click on the special link in the letter that comes after the ticket is created.
After solving basic usability issues, we moved on to finer settings.
In our games, the social component is of great importance, therefore, among the players, as in real life, there are influential people - these are leaders of clans, alliances, and simply high-level characters. Especially for them, a separate section of the VIP support site was created in which tickets are processed first. To get to the VIP-center, players go to the "dedicated site" directly from the game.
It’s impossible to get to this site just like this (for example, by sending a link to a friend): a timestamp is encoded in the URL format, which expires after 30 seconds. If you simply transfer the link of the VIP site to another player, he will switch to the usual technical support site. I had to implement this protection after the link began to be rummaged in our fan communities, knowing that they would respond faster in the VIP center.
What we added for the support-team The
above was about the user side of Kayako. Now we will consider the changes in those functions that the support team itself works with.
The main changes were aimed at adapting Kayako to our daily work: communication of Kayako with the player base and game admin panel, automatic answers with instructions to users in various situations, proper sorting and prioritization of tickets, the convenience of the support team working with user tickets.
All incoming calls are synchronized with our internal database or admin panel, so it is so important for us that the player enters the correct game ID. The player can also enter their coordinates (position on the map in the game), and the internal function automatically converts them into ID. If the coordinates or ID are entered incorrectly, the system will throw an error by comparing the last request with this simple regular expression:
By the way, this is a very good spam protection. A kind of captcha, which is very useful in our work.
By the entered ID we see the deposit amount, an avatar from the social network and the level of the player who contacted us. Next, you can easily go to the admin panel to find information to solve the problem or just perform an action.
In the ticket viewing window itself, we added the extremely necessary function of the history of questions and combining them into one. This greatly saves team time, as it often happens that users create multiple tickets with the same problem.
In the standard configuration, the system does not greet the player, so we taught Kayako to automatically substitute the correct greeting.
What we got
In total, we made several dozen changes to the Kayako system. We taught her to recognize spam, automatically sort calls by keywords, hide support answers quoted by a player, upload screenshots, analyze user search queries for writing articles in the knowledge base, make support performance reports and much more. Kayako really provides great opportunities.
Since the introduction of Kayako, the number of solved tickets from users has increased by 3-5 times, however, the support team has also expanded from 10 to 30 people. For the year we processed more than 100,000 tickets, and the players sent us 50,722 screenshots with a total volume of more than 28 gigabytes.
The graph shows how much the percentage of processed calls over the past 2 months has grown. This is due to the recent cleaning of bots that we carried out in our projects. Thanks to Kayako, the support-team processed about 20,000 calls in 1 month, although usually the number of calls does not exceed 8,000. Of course, we are talking only about those calls that were sent to technical support. A community team also works with each of the projects, which answers most of the user's questions directly on social networks.
What's over the horizon
Kayako is a very powerful system in terms of scalability, and it has shown excellent results under heavy loads. I think with its help you can work with 50 or even 200 projects. In this case, a certain participation of programmers will be required, and, of course, constant work on optimization, but this will not be difficult.
At this stage of work, Kayako really lacks simple integration with mobile platforms and social networks. I would like to be able to fully integrate into the games in order to respond to users directly during the game process, skipping e-mail, entering ID and other unnecessary actions.
But, striving for technical excellence, do not forget about improving the professionalism of the team. Systems such as Kayako can help with speed and efficient power distribution, but the main job is always done by the person.