Player/Staff Chat - Discussion Topic

[Adhira]

This thread is to address the question posed by Barzalene that was deferred to a later date.

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[Adhira]

BARZALENE: I know we've been doing a lot of number crunching with new player retention on the boards, and I'm just curious if anybody's looked closely at since the Helper Chat went in, how much that has had an impact. Do you see a higher retention of people that do talk to the Helpers versus those who don't, and if there is, is there some way to get more people to use the Helper Chat?

ANSWER:

We haven't spent any time analyzing the Helper Chat or trying to drive people to use it more. From a very quick look at recent data the following was revealed:

August 1 - 17
37 chats
5 offline messages
4 operators answering


July
57 chats
22 offline messages
5 operators answering

June
38 chats
32 offline messages
4 operators answering

May
31 chats
27 offline messages
5 operators answering

We are pretty consistently getting at least one chat request per day. Of these chats the majority of them will be by 'repeat customers'.  Occasionally it appears that someone will log in once, ask a question, and then not use the helper chat again, however the logs tend to show that someone who logs in and talks with a Helper returns several times in that next 1 - 2 months to ask more questions. Since we don't have game accounts associated with chat log ins I can only guess at who has been 'retained' by the Helper system, but it appears to me that those who have asked more than 3 questions of Helpers are still playing the game 3 months later. I'd count that as a success.

I'm not sure what we could or should be doing to drive more people to the Helper chat. I do think it's an excellent tool, the logs show good interaction between Helper and 'customer', and the real time interaction seems to be a very effective way of having these questions answered. We probably need to look at how to address the amount of offline messages. These are messages that people leave when no helper is available, as well as the mechanisms around answering these, as they are filed to staff accounts and have tended to be forgotten/overlooked.

[bcw81]

Send offline messages to helpers as well?

[Adhira]

I made that change this morning!