Turning Upset Customers into Super-Fans: Honest Customer Support for Game Devs

Turning Upset Customers into Super-Fans: Honest Customer Support for Game Devs is a talk currently scheduled to appear at IndieCade 2017.

Summary
After a game's launch, customer support is often viewed by developers as an annoying source of frustration that just grows worse with a game's popularity. In this session, attendees will learn how to flip this idea on its head -- exploring how practicing honest, empathetic customer support turns support requests into valuable moments of community growth.

Attendees will:

- Closely examine how the language and tone used in response to requests can cause or resolve misunderstandings and frustration, and learn how to avoid making these mistakes. - Hear real support war stories from the Steam early access launch of Clone Drone in the Danger Zone, including a peek inside our &ldquo;trophy room&rdquo; of the most heartwarming notes from now-happy customers. - Learn how to coordinate support responses on teams of any size, without eating up your limited time and attention. - Discover what self-serve support options and documentation to offer your players, so the overall volume of support requests decreases without sacrificing the quality of player experience. - Consider how release planning and communication can help ameliorate player concerns. - Review available technical solutions to common problems plaguing games with a high volume of support requests -- how to figure out exactly how common a given crash is, and how to diagnose issues you can't reproduce yet. - Finally answer the question, &ldquo;how should we respond to negative reviews, if at all?&rdquo;