Support ticket survey.

[Platyna 521]

Hi,

 

since some time I discovered that there is an option to fill a survey about how your in-game ticket was handled, but in this survey you do not give opinion about a particular GM but "support team" I think it should be corrected, the survey should be on a particular person, and then GMs who have best reviews and those who have worse ones could exchange the information and improve the quality of support.

[Thorinoakshield 603]

Doesn't sound like a good idea to me; as it could lead to a GM solving a problem professionally, still getting a negative review because that particular GM and the player can't get allong well.

 

I'm also aware  that quite often it's only one GM being in touch with the player, while the rest of the GM's are providing support through their own channels; meaning that quite often it's a team-effort and not a person-effort.

 

So a big "no-no" from me.

 

 

Thorin  

[Retrograde 12,013]

Multiple staff will work on one ticket, from CM's answering it at tier 1, to discussion internally before a decision is given.

 

It's about the support process as a whole rather than a discussion about the person who took your ticket. 

 

This avoids issues such as negative responses aimed at the staff member who had to be the bearer of bad news. 

[Platyna 521]

The survey is already here, you get it by right-clicking o n a solved ticket, and you CAN give a negative review in it.

 

The only thing I suggest here that it will be about a certain person or persons who handled the issue, so it would produce more useful data for the game management giving. Let's say there are some negative reviews about GM A, it is a lot easier for the management to talk with GM A and solve the issue than figuring out "why is our team getting negative reviews" - same goes to positive reviews - when a GM B has a lot of positive reviews it is a lot easier and more constructive to just ask him what does he do to make users so happy with him. It is done like that in ANY support system as this is the review system point - to spot possible problems and fix them and to spot the good practices and amplify them. 

[Retrograde 12,013]

I appreciate the idea, but it's not something that we are looking at adapting. 

 

 

[Platyna 521]

21 minutes ago, Retrograde said:

Multiple staff will work on one ticket, from CM's answering it at tier 1, to discussion internally before a decision is given.

 

It's about the support process as a whole rather than a discussion about the person who took your ticket. 

 

This avoids issues such as negative responses aimed at the staff member who had to be the bearer of bad news. 

 

So, let's assume, because it happened to me, that I had an issue, and this issue was handled by two GMs of completely different attitudes and professional level, what I am then supposed to write in the survey? Average them? This is the idea like: when Kowalski walks the dog, they have in average three legs. 

 

What I suggested is so obvious and useful thing to do, so do it. You will have good results, it is well proven best practice in all good support assessment systems, you surely saw it yourself by e.g. using a customer centre at your ISP or phone company. 

 

I think you shouldn't be brushing off the idea without e.g. discussing it with head GMs. It is so small and very useful improvement that it is worth to get more attention. If they say no - okay, but as this is something that is a common, well-proven practice that lets you to collect more data, I think it should be given some thought. 

 

Plus I don't like the assumption that we will only judge GMs according to how the ruled, so if the ruling is not favourable we will give bad reviews (anyway we still can do it just about a whole team not a particular person). That is very not nice to us. Indeed, probably some people, will be angry and give a bad review just because they didn't like the outcome, but let's be frank, Wurm player base is composed mostly of an adult, and adults usually are reasonable. The art of bearing bad news not to make customers angry is also an art. 

 

PS.: only macroers, scammers, and this kind of people should hear bad news in an online game, all others should only hear good news from GMs.  

Edited November 24, 2020 by Platyna

[Oblivionnreaver 5,174]

7 minutes ago, Platyna said:

Indeed, probably some people, will be angry and give a bad review just because they didn't like the outcome, but let's be frank, Wurm player base is composed mostly of an adult, and adults usually are reasonable.

as someone who's done contract work with reviews i can tell you with 100% certainty that adults are not reasonable and reviews are biased towards people they liked/benefitted from. you can see it in major chains, just go complain to the staff say youll leave a bad review and they'll give you refunds/free stuff to avoid it. they just end up being a measure of who is the best asskisser for corporate to show off

[Platyna 521]

That is not constructive approach, you shouldn't consider your customers as evil or stupid, they give your money. It is better to give a customer for example a day of service more than argue with them and make them sad and terminate, it is not asskissing. Wurm GM team are people who know each other many years, so I doubt there is any corporate-like relation between them, and they have to asskiss anyone. Simply good and bad attitudes should be found and the good ones should be amplified and the bad ones fixed. 

 

Anyway what I had to suggest, I suggested. 

 

Edited November 24, 2020 by Platyna

[crimsonearth 477]

  

1 minute ago, Oblivionnreaver said:

as someone who's done contract work with reviews i can tell you with 100% certainty that adults are not reasonable and reviews are biased towards people they liked/benefitted from. you can see it in major chains, just go complain to the staff say youll leave a bad review and they'll give you refunds/free stuff to avoid it. they just end up being a measure of who is the best asskisser for corporate to show off

 

To add to OR's point, as someone who has worked in volunteer management both in the public sector and in national gaming organisations, many of the staff who contribute their time to these (Wurm) processes are volunteers - not paid staff - and the burn out rate is high for volunteers who have to deal with upset players/customers but higher still when systems in place allow them to feel singled out by disgruntled individuals who didn't like their approach or outcome.

 

The team is small enough that if someone had a complaint to raise, doubtless the GMs could track precisely who dealt with the query and at what points for any internal investigation which is all you need, really. It's easy enough for them to check logs and make a judgement call on whether or not a staff-member responded appropriately and they are in a better and less-biased position to do so than the player who doesn't necessarily understand the full context and history of particular rulings or recurring problems that GMs have to deal with.

 

Most feedback that isn't raise-a-complaint level feedback is going to be impacted by personality, language and cultural variances and varying player expectations which are hugely subjective. What you think will be constructive will, I guarantee, at the other end result in volunteer staff not wanting to engage with certain players or problems for fear of having to read negative feedback about their voluntary efforts in what can often feel like 'damned if you do, damned if you don't' scenario.

For someone who is very prickly about players interpreting their behaviour in ways they didn't intend, I would think you would understand this. No one called anyone 'evil or stupid' - it's about constructive vs non-constructive ways to manage a team of staff and volunteers, and the feedback so far on this thread from both staff, review contractors and volunteer managers is that is won't be helpful for this team at this point.

[elentari 2,660]

43 minutes ago, crimsonearth said:

For someone who is very prickly about players interpreting their behaviour in ways they didn't intend, I would think you would understand this. No one called anyone 'evil or stupid' - it's about constructive vs non-constructive ways to manage a team of staff and volunteers, and the feedback so far on this thread from both staff, review contractors and volunteer managers is that is won't be helpful for this team at this point.

 

Volunteers or not, not having ANY metrics to assess the performance of your volunteer team just isn't a good approach. 

I did volunteer work in my youth for a Cultural Centre, helping with educational programs for kids from poor families from rural areas. Those families had unfortunate mentalities that wanted the kids to work from a young age instead of staying in school. "You ain't making money in school son, grab a spade and till the fields!". 

 

We did everything from logistics,  from buying books, setting up classrooms, making sure the kids had lunch to being volunteer assistant teachers, helping them with digital skills learning how to operate a PC, etc. 

 

Now, we had PLENTY of volunteers for that centre, mostly fresh high school students in their summer breaks or young students. The quality of those volunteers however was something to be desired. 

 

We had team leader that handled assignments and he was pretty strict about our work. Personally I didn't mind his attitude, he simply didn't like failure even if it was just volunteer non-paid work. 

The issue was most volunteers were students that wanted their CVs to contain " I did humane volunteer work helping poor kids, look at what a saint I am, give me brownie points so I can get a better job" .  In some conversations people were actually open about their intention, they just wanted something on their CV and didn't really care about what we were doing. 

 

A lot of the volunteer staff was made out of entitled lazy kids that half assed their job, some failed to order the right books, some didn't show up on time , some failed to order supplies and food for the kids meetings, etc. 

 

Needless to say our leader was furious every time since his main interest was to see the job done. He cared about the kids and only really wanted results for them. So in the end, from a volunteer staff of about 30 people, about 5-6 really did all the work, the rest half assed everything or failed to live up to some decent standards.

 

Point is, eventually he instituted surveys given to kids on who was the most helpful staff, who was late, who didn't show up, etc. Basically he wanted to weed out the selfish entitled ###### ups from the ones that actually did the work. 

 

In less than a month our volunteer staff went to 9 people from 30. 

 

Point is, volunteer or not, certain METRICS have to be applied in order to verify someone's ability in a certain field. As a GM / CM your main strengths should focus around social skills first , then information structuring after. 

 

If you are a good problem solver but come off as an ass, people will be inclined to stop sending support tickets and in the long run you'll have more negative steam reviews regarding the GM team. That information could be used to encourage a GM to work on his people's skills to be better at his job. 

 

Not sure if you guys have been keeping track but there's a significant number of steam reviews leveled at the GM team. Those reviews won't help Wurm's imagine in the future.

 

Just something to consider about how you want to structure the review process between players / GMs. 

Edited November 24, 2020 by elentari

[crimsonearth 477]

2 minutes ago, elentari said:

Volunteers or not, not having ANY metrics to assess the performance of your volunteer team just isn't a good approach. 

 

Yeah, I don't disagree with that. But I think performance is something that can and should be managed internally by the team in charge. I don't know if volunteers for Wurm go through any kind of periodic review of their work or what their induction period is like, but when we (we, in my rl work, not in Wurm) have volunteers working with organisations or individuals that feedback and management is handled by the person they report to and, because they work in teams, feedback from the organisations they work with might highlight particular individuals where it merits it, but mostly focuses on the work as a whole in recognition of the fact that the results of their work are a group effort and individual contributions are often missed/ill-measured when not seen by the person giving the feedback.

 

If there isn't one already, an open comment box on the survey would allow people to say 'GM Joe handled my issue in a swift and timely fashion but I could have done with more clarity about what caused the issue in the first place' but the point is there *are* metrics in place for the volunteer team: there's the survey that prompted this thread. It just doesn't allow you to pick on individual staff members because you don't see all the staff members involved. So, those metrics exist and info is being gathered on the team. Can't comment on what is done with that data, but the survey is there to collect it.

[Platyna 521]

Erm...my suggestion is not how to make bashing particular GMs more efficient, my suggestion is how to improve a feedback tool so game management has more information and can make the support team better...never seek any hidden agendas in what I say. There are none. 

 

And I have to agree with @elentari - we don't see the output of these metrics, and Wurm staff knows each other since many years, so decent metrics can only improve them not detriment. And I think we both would benefit - this will improve the staff and the user experience. 

Edited November 24, 2020 by Platyna

[crimsonearth 477]

4 minutes ago, Platyna said:

Erm...my suggestion is not how to make bashing particular GMs more efficient, my suggestion is how to improve a feedback tool so game management has more information and can make the support team better...never seek any hidden agendas in what I say. There are none.

 

The people responding aren't seeking hidden agendas in your suggestion, Platyna - we're explaining, from our experience in this area, what your suggestion will result in, and why the survey currently asks for feedback on the support team when the player supporting usually only interacts with one member of that team. Given that support tickets are numbered and the survey is tied to that ticket, the means already exists for the team managers to look at the survey responses and see which GM handled the ticket.

[Badvoc 204]

If the GM support tickets are handled as a team how would it be fair to give feedback on the GM at the sharp end, facing the player?

 

At the moment there is support surveys that you can leave feed back for the teams efforts, you also have the option of contacting the head GM if you feel the support or Gm decisions was wrong.

 

This could lead to a witch hunt to "weed out" unliked GM's, I have already heard many times in game people complain about this or that GM, saying they are biased to such and such player, so I could see this being used badly.

 

Also what happens if a GM feels picked on, if that GM feels he is being a target, maybe the GM says sod it and walks away as its not worth the hassle, do we really want to see a reduction in GM's and support staff as its not worth the hassle, also how much extra work for the team, going through and sorting out every complaint, less support staff = longer wait times = more unhappy player base.

 

Team effort, Team feedback I think thats the only fair way to do it IMO, so against the idea for that reason.

[Platyna 521]

Okay, good, but I disagree that volunteers shouldn't be assessed. Yes tickets are numbered, and they can be read, but it is a lot easier and less time-consuming to just read the ones (first) that were done by someone who did exceptionally well or exceptionally bad in users opinion. That also enabled a quick reaction - before a very dissatisfied user will rage-quit and then complain, for example on Steam. 

 

Edited November 24, 2020 by Platyna

[crimsonearth 477]

43 minutes ago, Platyna said:

Okay, good, but I disagree that volunteers shouldn't be assessed. Yes tickets are numbered, and they can be read, but it is a lot easier and less time-consuming to just read the ones (first) that were done by someone who did exceptionally well or exceptionally bad in users opinion. That also enabled a quick reaction - before a very dissatisfied user will rage-quit and then complain, for example on Steam.

 

But what you're talking about here is back-end processes (which should already happen but which users are not privy to). You're making suggestions for how a team's performance should be monitored and managed without any knowledge or insight of the current process by which it is monitored and managed because you're only seeing the user-end survey.

 

And, again, no one has said volunteers shouldn't be assessed, rather that the processes already in place support that.

[Platyna 521]

You can make a survey where you judge the whole team, I suggested changing it to be able to survey on particular team members as the data will be more useful then. Simple thing, no additional suggestions from me here. And the fact I don't know all the details of the current process doesn't mean I don't have experiences I can base my suggestion on. I don't know whole Brie cheese production procedure either, but I can suggest to e.g. add some more (or less) salt to make it better. 

Edited November 24, 2020 by Platyna

[Retrograde 12,013]

I'm going to lock this as we've said it's not changing. This doesn't need to continue and I'd like to avoid it.