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How The Walking Dead: Road to Survival developer Scopely approaches customer support

Director of Player Care David Tamayo deals out his top tips and KPIs

How The Walking Dead: Road to Survival developer Scopely approaches customer support

Developers should focus on areas such as scalability, staff empowerment, training and creating the right tools to manage an effective customer support team for players.

That’s the opinion of Scopely Director of Player Care David Tamayo, who was speaking at Helpshift's MORE Gaming Summit 2017 in San Francisco to discuss how the developer of games like The Walking Dead: Road to Survival and WWE Champions approaches player support.

The publisher has grown its customer support team from seven staff to 70 employees over the last two and a half years as its userbase grew significantly.

Ready to scale

Offering a number of tips on Scopely’s strategy, Tamayo said it was important from the start to plan for scalability.

“Are the tools we’re using going to make sense in two years from now when we’re much bigger?” he said.

Secondly, he stated studios should empower them customer support staff to deal with player queries and complaints, such as allowing them to action compensation where required.

The publisher also looks at scalability in terms of how its talented staff will develop over time.

Having started with seven people it was important to look at whether these staff, whose roles were changing every few months as the publisher grew, were being trained not just for the job of today, but training for the job of tomorrow.

Another factor that informs Scopely’s approach to customer support is the tools made available to the team.

He said a feature could not launch in a Scopely game without the tools needed to support that feature in customer support, and stressed the importance of talking with the likes of designers and product managers early on to ensure the necessary tools will be in place.

Lastly, he advised regular analysis, as the needs of today will be different from the needs of tomorrow.

Key perfomance indicators

When it comes to the key performance indicators the customer support teams look at, Tamayo identified five areas Scopely focuses on.

These were player satisfaction with the game overall, tickets per 1,000 DAU, customer satisfaction from the survey point, first contact resolution and retention.


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Craig Chapple is a freelance analyst, consultant and writer with specialist knowledge of the games industry. He has previously served as Senior Editor at PocketGamer.biz, as well as holding roles at Sensor Tower, Nintendo and Develop.