Last year was an interesting one for Wargaming, and the gaming industry as a whole, to say the least. As a leading global game developer, we saw our numbers surge as people spent more time at home. IDC predicted that the gaming industry’s revenues in 2020 surpassed that of sports and film combined – reaching $179.7 billion.
We absolutely saw an uptick in customer service requests as a result of this phenomenon. Our games are enjoyed by people all over the world – of all ages, genders, languages and income levels.
In particular, Asian languages including Korean, Traditional and Simplified Chinese, and Japanese can be difficult and costly for us to staff with native speakers for customer support. That’s why we partnered with Unbabel. Using Unbabel’s language operations solution, our team of 52 agents was able to handle an average of 10 to 14 tickets per hour, while keeping ticket response times down.
Here’s how we did it.
Knowing our Players
An important goal for our customer support organization is to establish excellent relationships with our players. For us, that meant staffing up with agents who are actual gamers, and making sure that any technology we used was able to translate the unique gaming lingo of Wargaming.
Customer support tickets flow through Zendesk and are seamlessly translated from English into other languages such as Korean, Simplified and Traditional Chinese, and Japanese using Unbabel’s human-machine translation technology. Before our deployment kicked off, Unbabel’s machine translation algorithms were trained using Wargaming’s specific gaming terminology to ensure the most accurate translation results. Coupled with our agents’ expertise, our customers get world-class service.
At first, we were concerned about handling the influx of new support tickets last year, especially in lower-volume Asian languages. Many of these languages, like Japanese and Korean, are among the most difficult in the world to translate, especially for North American or European translators. Reasons why include the different characters, sentence structure and cultural nuances of each Asian language. Recruiting for native speakers in each of these languages was too costly and inefficient based on our number of inbound tickets. Instead, Unbabel can seamlessly and accurately translate these languages for our English-speaking agents, using its unique combination of human and machine translation.
For example, we only have one native Japanese-speaking agent, and when he is unavailable, we rely on Unbabel to quickly help us with inbound Japanese-language customer requests. Other requests in Koren and Chinese are handled 100% by Unbabel. In cases where we need to cover for a full-time employee using Unbabel, the setup takes only minutes.
Using Unbabel, we were able to maintain our fast support response times of under 15 hours without a drop in CSAT scores – ensuring that even our low volume languages get high quality support. This is a great result, since for smaller volumes, CSAT can be more volatile. In addition, APAC CSAT scores tend to be a lot lower than other regions.
Keeping the World Entertained
While it’s still unclear how quickly the world will get back to “normal” in 2021, we’ll be here for our players with some of the world’s most captivating games for PC, console and mobile platforms. This year, there will be an anticipated 2.8 billion gamers worldwide, and we’ll be ready to serve them in their native language.
Want to learn more about how other organizations serve their global customer base with Unbabel? Read our Case Studies
The post Guest blog: How Wargaming Improved Asian Language Support During 2020’s Gaming Surge appeared first on Unbabel.
