Client Spotlight: Wooga

Berlin-based video game company turns to ModSquad for top-scoring support.

If you’ve spent any time playing video games on your mobile devices, chances are you’ve played some of Wooga’s titles. The Berlin-based company prides itself on creating sophisticated, detailed releases featuring compelling, propulsive narratives. No wonder their games are so popular on mobile devices worldwide.

We spent some time with Richard Kiernan, Wooga’s Head of Customer Care, to hear an equally compelling narrative. He described how the company’s expansions — new titles, new markets, and new languages — prompted them to partner with ModSquad so they could maintain a superior level of player support and engagement.

Tell us about Wooga.

We are a casual story-driven games company. Currently, our two biggest titles are Pearl’s Peril and June’s Journey, which are hidden-objects games. We’re heavily focused on trying to bring more story elements into mobile games.

What drove Wooga to look into augmenting their customer support team?

I started at Wooga doing tech support six years ago. When I became the lead of the customer care team, I started to look into scalability issues, because I was the single point of contact for our game team and our customer care team. I was essentially this silo of information. As we started to build and release games more frequently, I realized that the amount of projects I was in contact with was becoming a little unmanageable.

We partnered with ModSquad for scalability, to take the bulk of our tickets off our staff and to have the ten people working on customer care take on much of what I had been doing. We gave each of them their own game team for which they were responsible, which meant that they had more time to focus on feedback, create support materials like FAQ articles and template responses, and follow up on reported bugs. The team also had to make sure that the Mods had the information that they needed to answer our tickets. Initially, we didn’t have any knowledge bases set up, but ModSquad was really supportive with this. They helped us fine-tune Zendesk, make it more efficient, and fix up some of the workflow problems that we had there.

What were some other needs you had when you brought in ModSquad?

We realized that with our new products and new markets, we needed the flexibility to be able to add languages. And there were times when we’d have this huge backlog of tickets that we just weren’t able to get through.

But ModSquad gave us flexibility, the ability to have floating hours and to scale up. We could put the Mods on alert to have hours in reserve so that if there was an issue and a massive response, they were able to handle it. They would spot the trends for us, so that our in-house staff could focus on the larger issues at hand and solve the issues faster. With the sheer flexibility of having so many people available to us, we didn’t have to worry about having a backlog.

Have you expanded the work that ModSquad is doing for Wooga?

Initially, the Mods started with customer support. In 2018 our internal customer care team shrunk as some people left. There were just two or three people doing customer care in-house at that point. ModSquad was able to scale up for us, so we weren’t overwhelmed. They answered reviews in the app store on Google Play and iOS for us as well. When we started ramping up our community management work, they provided content moderation for all of our different groups, which is helpful in cleaning up our community.

Has ModSquad helped you save money?

Yes. Another thing that’s been fantastic. We set a 24-hour ticket-response SLA, which ModSquad is absolutely smashing at this point. They answer sometimes in as quickly as two to four hours. ModSquad helped right-size the hours needed, which has saved us quite a bit of money.

In terms of saving us costs, the flexibility of being able to scale up or scale down means that we don’t necessarily have to have in-house staff. I still like having in-house staff, but working with ModSquad allows me to have a leaner, more agile team.

What would you tell other companies considering working with ModSquad?

I would say absolutely, 100%, go for it! ModSquad’s sheer flexibility and responsiveness is really, really helpful. But if I was to single out something that’s unique and actually better than other outsourcers that I’ve worked with, it’s the relationship I’ve built with the Project Managers. They’ve been phenomenal in their efforts, an absolute beacon of hope, and I cannot emphasize enough how valuable their work and their reliability is to me. I would not have anyone else do it for me. I think they’re just second to none.