KRAFTON satisfies 1 million annual inquiries with Zendesk automation

KRAFTON is one of the largest gaming companies in the world. Based in South Korea, the company has created world-renowned games since 2007 such as PUBG: Battleground, PUBG Mobile, Elion, and Terra. Its flagship product PUBG: Battleground, has been credited with pioneering the battle royale genre and has attracted 12 million monthly users since 2017. “As a company, we are driven by the joy of creating long-lasting games that attract players,” says Sung Nakhyun, global customer support manager at KRAFTON.

For KRAFTON, expanding that joy means providing end-users the best assistance possible. Player’s Support, the gaming company’s customer support team, consists of more than 30 agents and is focused on user retention. “Our goal is to ease user discomfort, improve player satisfaction, and develop customer care strategies through user analysis,” says Sung. The team receives approximately one million inquiries per year, which come in 13 supported languages from players in different locations.

Automating customer support operations

In 2017, KRAFTON realized it needed an integrated management system that would efficiently serve multiple locations and brands. “We had several concerns to address,” recalls Sung. “It was a challenge to support multiple languages, and the number of tickets handled by agents were not always consistent, which made it hard to plan and optimize the time and cost of our agents.”

To prevent the Player’s Support team from being overloaded, KRAFTON decided to use Zendesk as a complete customer service solution. The company leveraged several features for its ticket management. Macros—prepared responses or actions enabled agents to solve tickets quickly. Automation helped agents run a process in a specific time frame. Triggers set off predetermined actions right when a ticket is created or solved.

Introducing Zendesk has also made it easier for KRAFTON’s team to set up customer support for a new brand. Aside from automations, the platform featured Dynamic Content—changing website text into different languages based on location and other characteristics. In addition, Zendesk’s reporting and analytics capabilities enabled the team to generate deep insights about each brand, the language used, and the types of inquiries made. “The internal team especially values the transparency and quality of data received. It’s really helped us make better decisions for the business,” says Sung.

Cost-effective improvements that create better performance

While KRAFTON’s overall operational efficiency increased after implementing Zendesk, the company was still looking for a more cost-effective way of running its customer support team. It also wanted a consistent way of handling small and large numbers of inquiries. Hence, in 2020, the team considered using an AI-based agent to aid customer support. “Since there were no similar use cases in the gaming industry, it was hard to predict the benefits of AI agents. We were concerned about how much time and effort it would require to set it up, and if it would be the right solution,” recalls Sung.

KRAFTON decided to follow Zendesk’s proposal to implement the Zendesk AI agent, which was fast to deploy, hosted a simple interface, and could import existing customer support settings. “We set up the Zendesk AI agent in one to two weeks. Our support team also created a response flow with Zendesk’s Conversation Design feature, which directs unresolved inquiries by the AI agent to a live agent,” explains Sung.

Although the initial setup was simple, the team still needed to overcome a few hurdles post-implementation. “People didn’t really use the AI agent and we struggled with poor automatic translation quality,” says Sung. KRAFTON then created an internal Zendesk AI agent dedicated team with guidance from Zendesk. “Zendesk offered us technical feedback and insights into the best practices by other companies. We’ve now managed to improve the overall quality of the Zendesk AI agent by changing settings and flows. We also directed simpler inquiries to the AI agent, which has increased the user AI agent utilization rate from 15 percent to 30 percent,” explains Sung.

The Zendesk AI agent alone has greatly contributed to team efficiency. “From the last quarter of 2021 to the first quarter of 2022, web inquiries have decreased by 28 percent, which has subsequently reduced the cost of hiring agents by 15 percent,” says Sung. Because the AI agent also collects customer context for inquiries, the time needed for agents to process tickets personally has been reduced by 18 percent, and there are seven percent less conversations required to solve tickets. “From our agent’s point of view, a lot of manual tasks have been automated and the stress from repetitive work has been reduced, improving their quality of work,” adds Sung. “As for the customers, it was very hard for them to get help outside working hours. Having the help center and the Zendesk AI agent changed that. Zendesk has helped us expand our consultation options.”

The exciting road ahead

KRAFTON sees more room for improvement in terms of cost optimization and agent efficiency. “Today we direct more agents to languages with more inquiries. Building a specific environment for every language or market is costly, but every individual user is precious to us,” explains Sung. “That’s why we will continue to consider how we can leverage Zendesk to deliver equal and agile support for all users, regardless of their location.”

KRAFTON is glad to call Zendesk its technology partner. “The Zendesk Customer Success team continues to help us solve issues and provide the right insights we need to improve. As these technological tools become more advanced, we’re excited to see how we can become more efficient and deliver even greater customer support,” concludes Sung.