Play Games24x7 implements proactive customer service for its skill gaming apps

Games24x7 is an India headquartered online gaming company with a portfolio that spans skill games (rummy, fantasy sports, carrom) and a casual games platform (U Games).

Play Games24x7 has been operating since 2006 and has over 100 MN users. The company specializes in using behavioural science, technology and artificial intelligence to provide an awesome game-playing experience across all its platforms. Games24x7 operates RummyCircle, the largest online rummy platform in India, and My11Circle, one of the country’s top fantasy sports platforms with offices in Mumbai, Bengaluru,
New Delhi, Philadelphia, and Miami. The company has also set up a casual games studio, U Games, to launch new games for the global market.

One view for multiple touchpoints

Play Games24x7 receives a high volume of customer inquiries about its popular apps year-round. “Our peak season is during the Indian Premier League or cricketing season. We get around 600,000 emails in two months,” shares Nishant Kalgutkar, associate director for customer excellence at Play Games24x7. “Outside of that, we get roughly 100,000 emails monthly.”

Managing this large volume of inquiries led the gaming company to search for a more robust customer service solution. Play Games24x7 uses various tools for its customer touchpoints, but collates all the data into Zendesk. “Zendesk has a complete package for any customer relationship management (CRM) but we are mainly using it for email. Even though we have different software for voice, chat, and social, whenever cases from those channels get escalated, they are forwarded and tracked on Zendesk,” explains Kalgutkar. “Zendesk is great in terms of tracking or managing things. And obviously, when you are able to track or manage things in an efficient manner, then your service level agreement, first response time, customer satisfaction rating—all those things will improve and result in better customer experience.”

Zendesk provides Play Games24x7 with a holistic view of its customers, thanks to the highly customizable dashboard. “What consumes most of our agents’ time is checking the history of that customer or doing research,” shares Rahul Garg, head of customer experience at Play Games24x7. “So, having a single view of the customer helps. Agents can quickly look at past tickets and address issues more proactively. Having the customer’s history also helps in terms of research—an agent will know whether the same customer has reached out to us on social media or chat, and we can reply to the customer in a more informed manner rather than replying blindly.”

Managing volumes with automations

As query volumes fluctuates with the seasons, Play Games24x7 has been able to successfully manage the surges with automated responses. “We have triggers which we customize depending on the volumes that we get,” Garg explains. “We can quickly switch the automations on or off to manage our ticket queues. The automated response also changes based on the volumes we are experiencing. It’s a seamless process.”

Some of those automations point customers to the company’s knowledge base on Zendesk Guide. “The intent is always to have a seamless experience so that customer queries are answered real-time throughout the day via automation and directing them to right stakeholders,” explains Kalgutkar. “If a customer asks us a question, we consider what types of automation or quick replies we can create so that the response time is minimal.”

“When queries have to be handled manually, our agents can look to the standard macros we’ve created as responses for specific queries,” Kalgutkar adds. All these interventions mean that 95 percent of tickets are getting a response within 3 hours—no mean feat for a company that sees hundreds of thousands of queries a month.

Smarter, more proactive responses

As a company that rigorously applies data science to the game development process, Play Games24x7 uses the same scientific rigor in its customer service. “We’ve recently integrated the customer database with our internal BI software,” explains Kalgutkar. “We are evaluating all these data points and looking at the trends and insights. What kind of queries do our customers raise and what can we do to solve them? What is the resolution time around those? We are doing a lot of things around the data that we get out of Zendesk, like feeding them into our triggers and automations.” These tactics helped the company reduce average resolution times by 68% in 2022, compared to average resolution times in 2021.

The collected data is fed into Play Games24x7’s proactive communications as well. Based on the customer queries we receive, we collate the insights and help our acquisition and retention teams with insight driven marketing campaigns and tailored communication explains Kalgutkar.

Moving into predictive customer care

“We want to move towards predictive CX where we would develop models to predict what issues customers can face in the future and try to solve those problems proactively, or else preempt those with more communication,” Kalgutkar explains. “We will continue to offer hyper personalized solutions which will provide a further fillip to unparalleled player experience on our platform , and Zendesk is helping us move in that direction.”