Big Fish does not use any outsourcing for customer support and has committed 25% of its 400 worldwide employees to supporting the game experience in ten languages. The 100+ agents that make up customer support are split between the company’s two contact centers—one in Seattle, Washington and the other in Cork, Ireland. The RightNow contact center solution provides multi-channel support whether customers communicate with the company via email, chat, or phone. By tracking the reduction in support incidents as a percent of sales units, Big Fish has calculated that the ROI on their RightNow solution is an impressive 1,404%. Between August 2008 and February 2010, Big Fish has seen support incidents drop from 7.6% of units sold to 3.5% of units sold, representing a savings of approximately $870,000.

Big Fish strives to deepen relationships and create customer loyalty by providing support as customers learn to play games. Because many of Big Fish players aren’t particularly tech-savvy, this specialized customer care means not only offering assistance with the games themselves, but also helping customers troubleshoot issues with their operating systems or other software. RightNow’s agent desktop enables Big Fish agents to care for customers across the globe from a single system. They are able to automate workflows based on both customer information and actions taken by the agent. The workspace delivers instant access to relevant data, at the right time and place, so that agents may provide the most accurate response to the customer.

RightNow offers agents a 360-degree view of a customer’s history in order to provide better care. Big Fish has set up a series of routing rules specifically to assist new customers. For example, if a customer has a question within two hours of creating their account, s/he automatically goes to the first contact queue. This helps ensure that customers begin their relationship with Big Fish on a positive note. Big Fish’s most valuable customers, those who purchase the most games, are also pulled into an escalated queue so the company’s best customers receive resolution in the quickest manner possible from a specialized group of agents.
Email management is critical to helping Big Fish manage roughly 80% of the customer contacts received each month. Routing rules ensure that emails get to the correct subject matter expert while RightNow’s SmartAssistant uses key words searched and other information from the customer’s current session to suggest solutions, helping to reduce email volume. To help with customer retention, Big Fish has added a customized rule within the system, triggered when a customer contacts the company to cancel a Game Club subscription membership. The system automatically surfaces a survey widget to the customer. Based on the answers from the survey, an email response offers customers an opportunity to tell Big Fish if there is something the company can do to keep their business.

Along with savings in reduced incidents, the RightNow solution has also boosted Big Fish’s agent productivity and satisfaction. Since implementation, customer support agents have seen a 42% increase in productivity, on average, and are 30% more productive in the first five weeks of employment. “The results were almost immediate,” says Barrott. “Within six weeks of deploying RightNow, agents were already 25% more effective in their roles.” In addition, the company experiences low agent turnover and agents who do leave customer support are frequently hired into higher level positions within the company.

Customers play Big Fish 24/7. In order to service customers during hours when customer support isn’t available, the company uses the RightNow knowledge foundation to create a repository where customers can quickly find solutions to problems on their own. By offering solutions to the most common requests on the Big Fish website, customers benefit by receiving immediate help and can return to playing their games. With answers in ten languages, Big Fish supports their global customers even when agents aren’t available. Since implementing the RightNow solution, Big Fish has seen their web self-service rates continually improve. The rate in 2010 was 96.4%.

RightNow Chat gives customers another way to communicate with the company. Chat is now available in German and French as well as English. RightNow knowledge foundation is also accessible to users on their mobile devices. Users can even send incidents from their iPad or Kindle.

The reporting capabilities of RightNow allow Big Fish to identify what answers customers are viewing to ensure the knowledge base is delivering articles that are relevant, accurate, and responsive. Automated reports give executives insight into the customer experience at Big Fish while the reporting capabilities let the engineering and IT departments track the daily rate of incident creation in technical queues, if reporting shows a spike, they know there is an issue. With an immediate alert, these issues can be researched and resolved before they impact more players.

When Big Fish resolves an issue—such as a game bug—they utilize a keyword search across all customer inquiries to send an email to every customer who has experienced that issue. This offers customers the quickest possible resolution to their answers and adds efficiency to Big Fish’s contact center operations.

Big Fish also finds the solution easily configurable, so they can make modifications on their own. The ease-of-use saves Big Fish both valuable time that it would take for changes to be made by an outside party and the additional costs. “Our RightNow administrator can configure most change requests. We don’t even need engineering help,” Barrott adds. “We configure it ourselves which lets us make improvements to our services and queues on a dime.”

Not only is the RightNow solution supporting the tremendous global growth at Big Fish, the company also attributes revenue to the support function. “We run a monthly report on the buying history of customers who have been in contact with Big Fish for a support issue,” explains Barrott. “Customers who contact us for customer care end up buying more games. This is especially true of chat, which gets the highest customer satisfaction scores,” she adds.

RightNow surveys helps Big Fish track customer satisfaction. In February of 2007, the survey indicated that 58% of customers were very or somewhat satisfied, and 35% were very or somewhat unsatisfied. Three years later, surveys indicated that the percentage of customers who were very or somewhat satisfied had risen to 94%, and only 3% were very or somewhat unsatisfied. “We get comments all the time from customers, telling us how blown away they are by our responses, how impressed they are with how fast and professional our customer support is,” says Barrott.

Big Fish also benefits from attending RightNow conferences, educational seminars, and industry groups to learn how other companies are using features, measuring themselves, and how they have overcome technical challenges. Big Fish also participated in the formation—and has hosted—the Seattle RightNow users group and Big Fish team members are frequent guests in RightNow forums and communities.

Founded in 2002, Big Fish is a developer, publisher and distributor of casual games. The company offers a broad selection of interactive games for PC, Mac, mobile phone, and tablet. Renowned for offering A New Game Every Day!® on www.bigfishgames.com, Big Fish distributes more than one million games per day worldwide. Customers come from more than 150 countries around the world and the website, games, and customer service are available in ten languages — Danish, Dutch, English, German, French, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish, and Swedish. More than a billion games have been distributed via www.bigfishgames.com.