Around 85% of the top 700 grossing apps in the world are games.
What does this say?
Well to start with it shows that games are a great way to make money because these days a game developer will often give away the game and make money from in-game purchases. Secondly though, it suggests that almost every smart phone has at least one game installed.
Gamers are all ages and can spend nothing or spend a lot on their gaming hobby. The games industry is often overlooked by those who don’t spend time playing games, but in revenue terms you can combine the global music business and Hollywood movies and games are still worth more – playing games is a serious business.
But gamers are a very special kind of customer. They want customer service quickly when something goes wrong. If a gamer needs to spend hours getting help then they will be lost to the game. They might not try again, meaning they might never return to that game and all those revenue opportunities vanish.
There is one golden rule about helping gamers that is now being taken seriously for all forms of customer service and this is to ensure that the customer never has to leave the channel they are inside.
Gamers using a console game can usually stay inside the game and use text to ask for help. Gamers using an app-based game will rarely stay in the game if the only way to get help is to exit the app and then to make a phone call.
We have all seen poor service across channels. This week I asked on Twitter for help with a product I recently purchased. The response was an email address. I replied saying that I’m using Twitter because the email response was very poor. They responded with a phone number, which doesn’t sound like progress, but it was a direct number to their headquarters and helped, but the lesson here is that everything should have been handled in the channel that I chose.
More customer service executives should start playing games and seeing how these extremely demanding customers not only demand service quickly, but across a variety if channels and – most importantly – they usually want it inside the environment where they are spending time. If you ask your customers to put down your product while they ask for help then they might never pick it up again.
