Greetings everyone! I’m Venla and I work as a Customer Support Specialist here at Superplus Games. I’m working with one of our tank games called Hills of Steel 2. Not many people might know what it’s like working in the support role for a game like this, so I thought I would share my typical day with you. Hope you enjoy this post!
As for many others, the past year has been quite different compared to any previous years for me. I started working at the company earlier this year, but because of the pandemic I began my work remotely and have never actually been to our office in Helsinki! I’ve been working from home this whole time and have only seen my co-workers through their webcams – it’s definitely been quite strange.
Remote work is very different from the usual work at the office. I start my day by walking to another room in my apartment, without any commuting or good morning catch-ups with co-workers. I usually begin my work day with a cup of coffee and prepare for the day’s tasks.
First, I check the emails we’ve received from players. I categorise the emails and check what players have been up to. Some of the most common emails we receive are related to player accounts, game issues or general feedback and suggestions for the game. You never really know how many messages you’ll get daily and what they’ll be about. Every day is certainly different, and there’s a lot to learn each day.
One of my favourite things about the emails are the messages from players who have suggestions and ideas for the game. You’re all really creative and I wish we could implement all your requests in the game!
After emails, I tend to focus on game reviews. As you can probably guess, we receive several reviews every day, just like emails, and the content of the reviews can vary quite a lot as well. It’s really important to us that players can leave their feedback and share their thoughts with us. Without any feedback, we wouldn’t know what the player base would like to see next or what they’d want us to improve in the game. We are always interested in the reviews players write; and mark all the suggestions and feedback for later use.
Usually at one point of the day, I have calls with my co-workers. We like to check on each other daily to see what everyone is working on and hear how they’re doing. There might also be calls about certain projects or news in general. Especially during remote work it’s nice (and essential) to have regular contact with your teammates.
Another platform that keeps us up with the community is Discord! Discord is a place where they can gather around, talk about the games, share their game-related creations and make new friends. I aim to chat on Discord with our players every day and see how the players are feeling about the game. I also try to be around as much as possible whenever we release new content for the game so I can check the feedback and bug report channels to make sure the developers know how the players are liking the update.
By the way, if you haven’t joined our Discord server yet, you can join it here.
As stated previously, a common daily task for me is to forward feedback, issues and reports to the developers. You could think about it as being a bridge between the players and the developers where I forward the information from one party to the other.
The role also comes with lots of information gathering: e.g. I often have to ask the developers for answers to players' questions when they’d like to know more about the game's features and aspects. This also works the other way around; I sometimes need to know more about a bug a player has reported to make sure the developers can easily investigate the issue in the game. There have been cases where players tell us about bugs that we didn’t know about, which only emphasises the importance of communication between the two parties.
I play the game during my workday as well! If you work on game support, it’s important to know how the game behaves and what it consists of, to understand players better. It’s also helpful to know a thing or two about the game, so that you can reproduce issues if needed or check some other things that have come up. I’m quite fond of the game, and often spend hours of my free time playing it as well.
And that’s what I usually do during the day! I’m not able to include quite all of it. Like I said earlier; my days are very different each day, but I hope this gave some insight to what a day might look like in customer support.
I would also like to clarify that my day might look very different from other customer support personnel’s days. Every company is different and even in the same company the role of the support personnel might look different.
Customer support is an important part of the company where you get the best understanding of your customers and their views of your product. Here at Superplus Games it’s vital that we make every player feel heard and understood, and it’s my job to make sure this gets carried through as well as possible.
