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Darkstone News
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Date Posted: Sun, Jun 22 2003, 04:36am
In reply to:
Darkstone News
's message, "UOSC #8 Lots of tidbits of info within..." on Sun, Jun 22 2003, 04:01am
Greetings everyone! I wanted to take a moment to introduce myself and give all of you a heads up about some changes we will be making with UO GM support in the upcoming months. I am the Director of Customer Relations for Electronic Arts and am responsible for in-game (GM) support for EA’s PSWs. I have been in customer service for many years, with several companies, and have served EA in other customer service roles before recently taking on my UO responsibilities.
Over the past couple months, I (and my Leads team) have been reviewing all sorts of GM issues, including customer comments, the quality and consistency of GM support, the Rules of Conduct (ROC), as well as the rules that the GMs follow to enforce the ROC. We recognize that there is frustration with our service and we want to make every effort possible to resolve those issues and ultimately improve your satisfaction with the services we provide. This is the top priority of the department. In coming months, we will be making several changes to how we do things in a strategic effort to improve the overall quality of our GM services.
I have outlined just a few of those changes below, organized in three key areas where GMs provide customer assistance:
- Game Wizard - Self Help. Our GMs write the articles for the Game Wizard based on questions we get from customers via email or petitions. We try hard to leverage the research when one of you asks us a new question by documenting the solution and posting it here for everyone to see. We hope that customers will continue to use the Game Wizard to look for a solution before contacting us. To make sure that the knowledge base is useful to you, we have renewed our commitment to keeping it up-to-date and accurate. Our goal is to make the Game Wizard your first stop for in-game help, which will allow us to focus GMs on solving problems that actually require direct intervention from a GM to resolve. To check out the Game Wizard, go to and chose "Find Answers," or just type your question in the "Search" field.
In the near future, look for us to revise and update the articles and the organizational structure of the Game Wizard, in addition to adding new articles on subjects not previously covered.
- Email. Questions submitted via the "Ask a Question" tab of the Game Wizard are answered by our GMs through email. This is a much more effective form of communication for GMs to use when working with a player because we can track the issues whether you are logged in or out of UO. As many of you know, when you page a GM in-game, your petition only lasts while you are playing UO. If you log out, your question is lost and you have to ask it again the next time you play (We are hoping for tool upgrades, but until we get them, we have to work with what we have.). Instead of petitioning regarding the same problem over and over because you had to log out, or because the reply from a GM you received didn't resolve your problem, try email. Our email system is more developed than our in-game petition system and allows us to track each issue to completion. Our Senior and Lead GMs review the emails addressed by our GM staff regularly to make sure that your questions are being answered to your satisfaction. If they are not, our tracking systems in email allow us to quickly review all replies sent to see who is doing a good job and who needs improvement. Try this method of contacting us and see how we do. For any issue where you don’t need a GM to appear in-game, this is the best option to use.
Our goal is to provide you with an email response to your petition within an hour of when it was submitted. Issues that need to be escalated to specialists may take longer to resolve, but you will receive a response from us letting you know that your issue has been escalated.
- In-Game Petition. GMs answer thousands of petitions a week using our petition system, covering a wide variety of subjects. The primary role of in-game GMs is to enforce the Terms of Service and Rules of Conduct, but there are other game issues where GM assistance may be required. The in-game petition option will continue to be available, but we do plan to make some tweaks regarding which issues we will address in-game and which ones we will only answer via email or via chat tells.
Some customers have game problems that require a GM to appear in person in order to use special GM tools to fix the problem, like broken house doors, broken vendors, stuck issues, etc. GMs work with the development team to get permanent fixes for these kinds of problems, but it is likely there will always be a few issues where GMs need to show up and do something to help you. In order to keep the GMs focused on these issues and their primary role of TOS enforcement, and have them respond in the shortest possible time, we need to reduce the number of issues the GMs are asked to handle in-game.
Moving issues out of the game and into our email system will free up GM time and reduce wait times, since email can be much faster than addressing the same issue in-game. Right now, the GMs are often asked questions that are clearly covered in the Game Wizard, causing delays in getting to those customers that have time-sensitive problems or require true in-game help. Over time, as we track these common issues, we will begin requesting that you ask for assistance using the "Ask a Question" feature instead of filing an in-game petition. We plan to experiment with a small number of handpicked issues--issues where we have updated the Game Wizard and believe that customers will be better served with an email response. When these questions are asked in-game, we will refer you to the Game Wizard and the "Ask a Question" feature to get your answer.
If the Game Wizard does not help, then the GMs are committed to resolving your issue via email and will work with you as much as required to ensure your happiness. In the end, we believe that by focusing the GM in-game presence on addressing true in-game issues, we will decrease your wait times for all issues.
In another and perhaps controversial change, I have instructed GMs to require that you ask a question or state a problem before they respond to a help request in-game. It seems some customers like to petition with "Help!" or "GM come here!" without actually outlining their problem. In order to manage all our customer issues properly, we need to have some ability to prioritize and route your issues. We recognize there are limits to the amount of space you have in a petition to state your question (another good reason to use "Ask a Question") and are taking steps with the development team to address this problem. But as part of this change, GMs will now reply to pages with no problem stated with a standard reply asking for a more specific question. Please work with us to ensure that we can get to you quickly and efficiently. Your help in this area is especially appreciated.
Recap aside, as I type this introductory novel ;-), I wanted to take some time to address our commitment to quality. As some of you may know, our support organization has recently been certified as ISO 9001 compliant. I have read some interesting comments regarding this on the message boards and wanted to address this directly.
The EA CRMD (Customer Relationship Management Department) is committed to providing high value service to our customers. We pursued an ISO certification as part of our internal process for continuous quality improvement. ISO is used as a quality control mechanism whereby we are required to document our support processes, follow the processes accurately, gather customer feedback on how we do, and act on that feedback accordingly. Quality improvement is an ongoing process. Our processes and policies are ever evolving to meet the changing needs of our customers. We have documented internal processes where we review GM issues for accuracy, consistency, and other quality factors, and we hold our GMs accountable for meeting internal requirements in each of these areas. There are other processes in place to address the overall quality of the games and the tools the GMs use to do their jobs.
Over the next few months, you can expect to see several improvements as we work to serve you better, and as always, we welcome your feedback on how we are doing. Don’t be surprised if you get a survey from us soon asking for more detailed comments than we are already getting through normal channels. Your opinions shape our policies and help set our priorities. I know I can speak for all the GMs when I say: we want you to have fun when you play UO and to keep playing for a long time. We don’t succeed if you are not satisfied. We won’t always be able to tell you exactly what you want to hear, but we are committed to doing all we can to make your game play experience more fun.
I’ll see you in the game, incognito. :-)
Boyd "DraconisRex" Beasley
Director, Customer Relations
Electronic Arts, Inc.
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