If you want to benchmark your customer service levels, look to gaming

customer service gaming
Image credit | Cube_KRD/bigstockphoto.com

A recent study into customer service levels across a number of industries showed that the telecoms industry is dreadful at customer service. Although telcos in the Asia Pacific region are a little better and can boast the ‘least-worst’ scores, the situation is pretty dire. One of the most revealing statistics showed that 65% of emails from customers went unanswered and those companies that pinged back a quick reply pinged irrelevant or wrong solutions.

Given that challenge for telcos (who are quick to hide behind COVID-19 for things that were broken before the pandemic), they should take a look at what the gaming industry needs to provide for their customers.

Gaming is now multi-player and global. Hundreds, if not thousands of players come together to take each other on. Gaming obviously requires 100% uptime and, as importantly, according to Everise, multi-national customer experience experts, it requires multilingual support as players come from every corner of the world.

While 100% uptime is, in practical terms, more or less impossible, it is critical that developers and network providers are poised to put things right as quickly as possible. Gaming is also social and it is vital to host and moderate effective and well run social media forums and chat rooms. As gamers are competitive it is also important to run efficient scoreboards, which must be updated immediately, as well as keeping information and news up to the minute.

All of the above are basic requirements for the gaming community and it sets the bar very high for customer service support teams.

While gaming requires the highest level of support, telecoms must try and get at least some way there. Particularly now, as the industry finally turns its attention to how to make money out of 5G. As Teresa Cottam rightly points out, the telecoms industry still does not seem to know, care or understand the complexities and needs of the people behind a customer’s front door.

A whole new opportunity awaits those telcos willing to step up but if customer service remains as bad as it seems to be, that opportunity will slip away. Again.

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