How your support team can help developers in solving problems with your product (an app or a game)? Here I discuss ways of improving your support on data collection and data submitting.
The first place players go when they run into trouble is your support and sometimes it can accumulate actionable data before it’s even reflected in analytics. Your support team can be of invaluable assistance for bug fighting.
This is a short instruction on how the company can improve its support work while gaining a lot of useful information on bugs first hand.
Work with user requests
Users sometimes run into various issues and bugs and then they press either “Support” or “Contact developers” button. It s important to make those forms as informative for developers as you can.
Let users choose a category for their request before they submit it
Divide possible questions into categories and assign each category an individual tag that will be added to the request as it’s submitted (i.e. “payments”, “lost progress”, “game error” and so on). This basic division will let you keep different types of requests separate and even make some conclusions about the app's functioning. For example, if you have about 100 “game errors” every day, but suddenly you’ve got 500 reports, it means that something went wrong and you need to take immediate measures.
Request or automatically collect more detailed information
You can make a list of additional information that developers often request. This could include player ID, platform, device name, device OS, player level, server (if you have more than one), and any other data they might need. It is better if you will collect this information automatically and add it to the request.
Work with store reviews
By replying to reviews in stores you can grow the loyalty of the players and affect your rating in a positive way while working with collecting data on important bugs. Some errors completely shut the app down for a user and they can’t even log in to report a problem. In this case, they often go to the app store where they downloaded it (App Store or Google Play Store) and write a review. Stores’ interface is not very user-friendly, but you can use one of the external tools that make review-handling easier. It’s very important that you keep an eye on these reviews since these kinds of problems are critical.
Just collecting actionable data is not enough because you want to get prioritized information from the support team. Usually, only a small percentage of users report a problem to support, so you need to realize that for every person who contacts support there are many more who don’t, but still experience the same issues. To make the information more informative on priorities, the support team can:
Generate a report for each version of the app in order to see how the number of reports in each category has changed over time.
For every complaint report the percentage of complaints on the same issue in the incoming ticket volume. This will be more telling than just a number of similar issues.
On a regular basis (daily, weekly, monthly) compare the number of complaints you’ve received in various categories.
It’s important because you can see that the situation with a certain issue had improved or got worse. Let’s say that during the last release you’ve got 1,000 issue reports, and 10% of them, i.e. 100 people, were complaining about a bad connection. During the next release, you’ve got 200 reports, 20% of which, i.e. 40 complaints, were connection-related. It means that your connection had got better.
Using support is a great way to make your developers’ life easier!
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