Case Study: Serious Business

Get Satisfaction + Parature equals lower support costs and higher customer satisfaction.

Serious Business is a leading social gaming developer for the Facebook platform (recently acquired by Zynga), entertaining over 6 million people each month with their single most popular game, Friends for Sale!

Serious Business utilizes both paid support staff (helpers) and volunteer staff (moderators) to provide customer service to this large and still rapidly growing user base.

Serious Business tapped the Get Satisfaction + Parature solution to improve support communication, which was currently executed through one-to-one channels, primarily email and wall-to-wall communication inside Facebook. They looked to the integration to help them to:

• Provide an open, transparent—more human—support experience where customers had the same "voice" as employees and volunteer moderators.
• Serve more customers with fewer staff with one-to-many, community-based support.
• Leverage an efficient knowledge base and ticket tracking system for technical/billing issues where a support agent is necessary.

Community Based Support

For Serious Business, putting community in front of the support experience was virtually a must-have. Their user base of young, Internet-savvy gamers have been brought up to expect to be able to find answers in a social, self-serve kind of way.

Especially for social gamers, there are many types of questions where there is no one right answer. These tend to be 'how do I' questions about interaction in the game, and they’re the types of questions that other customers are eager to answer—a perfect environment for a community solution.

With the community as the "front door" to the support experience, Serious Business has successfully migrated customers away from the wall and into a social experience. Away from less human web forms typical of support entry points and into an authentic, engaged, and thriving customer community.

Now, Serious Business customers are more likely to serve themselves and help each other. Support staff has been freed up to deal with critical customer concerns—bugs, in-game credit and billing issues.

Putting Community First

From within the Facebook game, customers can click on a customized help link at the top of the application. In the Serious Business example, they’ve added a “support” tab to the Friend’s For Sale! Facebook page. This link takes customers to http://community.seriousbusiness.com, portal to a customized Get Satisfaction community with the same navigation as the Friends for Sale! application.

The user is then seamlessly logged into the Get Satisfaction support experience using Facebook Connect, preserving the Facebook ID, porting it into the Get Satisfaction community—and, importantly, making it available to other support systems, like Parature.

The Get Satisfaction Community prompts customer to ask questions in their own words and organizes user-generated topics into Frequently Asked Questions, Ideas Under Consideration and Recent Praise.

The Get Satisfaction – Parature Link

Serious Business encourages customers to search, create, and interact with support topics inside of the Get Satisfaction community first, but provides easy links to the Parature portal when interaction with an agent is necessary.

From the Facebook Get Satisfaction support page, there are two links into the Parature portal which, when activated, seamlessly log the user into Parature. Customers now have access to the Parature Knowledgebase and can "Contact a Helper” for individual assistance.

Most importantly, all the customer data, whether gathered on Facebook, within the Get Satisfaction Community, or from within Parature, is preserved and attached to the same customer.

ROI

Since launching the Parature portal with a Get Satisfaction community as the entry point, Serious Business reports that the 600,000 new users that have been added to their user base are now being serviced by a team of three paid support reps and thirteen volunteer moderators.

"As a support manager, I can see my results improve and my staff operate more efficiently," says David Schroeder, Serious Business support manager. "I feel confidant that we're supporting twice as many customers now with the same staff and we're able to do that because we've got great tools from Get Satisfaction and Parature.”

 

About Serious Business

Serious Business, recently acquired by Zynga, is a leading social games developer for the Facebook platform. Headquartered in San Francisco, and backed by Lightspeed Venture Partners, the company combines unique game concepts with rigorous analysis to create highly social games enjoyed by millions of users. The Serious Business flagship game, Friends for Sale!, is played by over 6 million people every month. For more information, visit www.seriousbusiness.com.

About Parature

Parature, a leader in on-demand customer service software, makes it possible for any business to leverage the Internet to provide outstanding customer service. The company’s software-as-a-service (SaaS) delivery and integrated, intuitive design enables organizations to better and more efficiently serve, support, engage with and retain customers in today’s Web world. Headquartered in Vienna, Virginia, Parature is at work in organizations of all types and sizes, and helps support millions of end users worldwide.

For more information, visit www.parature.com or follow @parature on Twitter.