Island King
Providing round-the-clock customer support for global gamers with Facebook Messenger
Their Story
A good time for all
Island King is a casual social game created by game developer Forever9 Games. Since its release in May 2019, it has gained a very active community on Facebook. Players in need of guidance would often turn to Messenger to contact Forever9 Games with their questions about Island King.
Their Goal
Managing customer support and player retention
Forever9 Games did not have a dedicated customer service team and relied on one full-time employee and volunteers to answer players’ questions regarding Island King on Messenger. Because of this system, the gaming company could not provide 24/7 support. As the game gained popularity, the small customer service team found it challenging to provide timely feedback to players worldwide.
In addition, Forever9 Games had plans to expand internationally and was exploring innovative ways of attracting new players and re-engaging with people who had stopped playing the game. However, managing the operational costs of acquiring and maintaining communities of new players was a hurdle they needed to clear.
Their Solution
Making efficiency a priority
To build a more efficient customer service system and player engagement channel, Forever9 Games partnered with Chatopera, a local Messaging chatbot company. As an alumni of Facebook’s startup program: Accelerator Shanghai, Chatopera was able to implement learnings from the program and advise Forever9 Games to build an optimal Messaging experience. After consolidating a list of common requests made by Island King’s players, Forever9 Games and Chatopera created “Luna”, an automated experience for Messenger that was capable of answering frequently asked questions.
Luna was built with natural language processing, persistent menu and quick replies to provide timely responses to questions from players. Whereas each customer service volunteer could serve around 50 people a day, Luna could respond to thousands daily, and used a handover protocol to transfer players with complex queries to a live agent seamlessly. Luna also used its machine learning capabilities to learn new questions and expand its knowledge pool, automatically broadening its supported FAQs.
With Chatopera’s expertise, the automated experience for Messenger, was developed, built and launched within one month.
Forever9 Games also tested one-time notification (OTN) as part of Island King’s September 2020 Beer Festival marketing campaign . The game publisher saw the limited-time, annual in-game event served as a great opportunity to attract lapsed players back to the game, and designed ads that click to Messenger to direct people to sign up for OTN services. On the day the Beer Festival began, the OTN message was sent to players who had subscribed, reminding them to login to the game for the event.
Their Success
Scoring big with automation
By working with Chatopera, Forever9 Games integrated an automated Messenger experience that greatly enhanced the customer experience for its players and the efficacy of the customer service team. The gaming company could support all of its global players immediately and achieved the following results:
4X
higher volume of customer inquiries handled
80%
questions solved in 5 minutes
60%
registration rate achieved and 780 lapsed gamers re-engaged through one-time notification campaign