Want to know what CSR's are really doing? Jeff Hickman from the Camelot Herald reports all that is going on within customer service. It is great that Mythic puts this out for public view, let's you know what is up with customer service. It appears that all is coming together now after 3 months since release. Good job Mythic! Overview: ========= It has been exactly 3 months since we went live with Dark Age of Camelot and DAoC Support. Many things have happened since then, mostly improvements and things that have made us better capable of taking care of our customer’s issues. We have moved into a much more efficient triage system, as well as categorizing issues from the game better, for quicker response to critical issues. Our technical e-mail and phone support excel in both response time and quality of service. Here is an outline of each of our major Customer Support areas, and an outline of what has happened in the past 3 months. Technical Support. ================== E-Mail Support: On average we deal with over 500 e-mail issues everyday. Since the beginning, we have tried to maintain a 72-hour or less response time on e-mail issues. We are now averaging an under 24-hour average response on all e-mails. Telephone Support: On average we deal with over 400 telephone calls everyday. Our average hold times in October ranged upwards of 25 minutes at times. We have since dropped our average times to under 4 minutes, and hold steady there on a daily basis. We are also supporting Windows XP at this time, which really helps many of our customers. Bug Support: We currently process over 250 bug reports everyday. These bugs are tracked and prioritized for review by the development team. The DAoC technical team is truly world-class in handling the issues that are presented to them. In-Game Support: ================ General Appeals: Our general appeal queue has definitely had its ups and downs since we launched. At one point early on, there were over 13,000 active appeals in the queue, with an average wait time of over 3 days. Currently, we have around 400 appeals in the queue at any given time, with an average wait time of about 5 hours in-game. We still have improvements to make in this area, and hope to have our average wait time to under 3 hours in the near future. We have always firmly believed that just the simple act of giving our customers all information associated with their appeals, makes our support 100% better than any comparable in the industry. We have done this from the very beginning, and believe that it has truly helped our customers to understand where they are in the queue, and how long they will need to wait for service. Quest Issues: Quest issues have always played a large role in what we do. These issues play a large part in our game, therefore they play a large part in our support of the game. We deal with many quest issues everyday, most dealing with lost quest items, people who are stuck on quests, etc. During the last 3 months, we have improved the wait time on getting a fix for a quest issue from an average of a 2 week wait, till now when the average wait time on a quest fix is under 2 days. Violation Issues: Violation issues are very critical to the ongoing happiness and health of the customers who play our game. We deal with Harassment, Code of Conduct and all other violations very seriously. These are issues that impact DAoC negatively, and we make sure that they are taken care of immediately. All of these types of issues are sorted to the top of our appeal queue, and are the first issues that any server lead is presented with. Our current response time on these types of issues is under 15 minutes. We are very pleased with how much improvement has been made in this area, and are modeling many other areas after it. Naming Issues: Naming issues are probably the most difficult things to deal with. Everyone is very attached to their names and we try very hard to respect that attachment. Everyone has perceptions of what makes a "good" name and what makes a "bad" name. We try to make sure that we maintain a good atmosphere for all of our customers and this includes taking care of names that do not meet our policy requirements. We especially wanted to give our role-players the opportunity to role-play on servers where a stricter policy for names was enforced. We have been very successful in maintaining this role-play atmosphere, as can be seen by the soaring populations on our RP servers. Stuck Issues: Stuck issues used to plague us, as they are game-stoppage issues that have a huge impact on our player-base. We have put in a significant amount of code and other fixes that have cut the number of stuck issues to a very low amount. These types of issues are dealt with in an average of 15 minutes or less now. The Numbers =========== Total Tickets resolved (10/9/01 - 1/9/02): 218,538 Total Active Appeal Tickets in the queue (Peak for 3 months): 13,487 Total Active Appeal Tickets in the queue (Noon, 1/09/02): 438 Total Active Naming Tickets in the queue (Noon, 1/09/02): 4128 Total Active Quest Tickets in the queue (Noon, 1/09/02): 110 Average Response time (Appeals): 5 hours, 12 minutes. Average Resolution time (Appeals): 7 minutes, 36 seconds. Average Response time (Stucks): 5 minutes, 17 seconds. Average Resolution time (Stucks): 1 minutes, 23 seconds. Average Response time (Harassment): 14 minutes, 42 seconds. Average Resolution time (Harassment): 30 minutes, 28 seconds. Telephone Average Hold Time (current): 4 minutes. E-Mail Average Response Time (current): 23 hours. Top 4 issues (resolved): -Bug Issues: 22,406 -Quest Issues: 18,012 -Violation Issues: 9,582 -Stuck Issues: 8,418 What this all Means =================== What this all really means, is that we are have improved phenomenally in most areas. There is still (and always will be) room to continue to improve. Most significantly, we need to continue to cut our average wait time on general appeals, while still maintaining our good response on critical and game-stoppage issues. The Customer Support team continues to maintain its great attitude about giving professional and caring service to our customers. This combined with our forthright attitude and the amount of communication that we have about appeals, has made our support team truly excellent. What the Future Holds ===================== 1. We will continue to improve our response times and how quickly we handle all types of appeals. 2. We are pursuing methods to more quickly and efficiently take care of naming issues. 3. We will seek more methods to ensure that our customers are as aware of the status of their appeals as possible. -Jeff