Electronic Arts - Contact Center of the Year

Company: Electronic Arts, Austin, TX
Company Description: Electronic Arts Inc. is a global leader in digital interactive entertainment. EA develops and delivers games, content and online services for Internet-connected consoles, mobile devices and personal computers. EA has more than 300 million registered players around the world.
Nomination Category: Customer Service & Call Center Awards Team Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Contact Center of the Year (Over 100 Seats) - Other Service Industries

Nomination Title: Making EA Known For Taking Care of Players

Tell the story about what this nominated contact center achieved since the beginning of July 2017 (up to 650 words). Focus on specific accomplishments, and relate these accomplishments to past performance or industry norms. Be sure to mention obstacles overcome, innovations or discoveries made, and outcomes:

Worldwide Customer Experience (WWCE) is the customer support organization of EA. We strive to make EA known for taking care of our players. Our offices in Austin are home to 240 employees that help EA players in 14 languages via email, chat, phone, Twitter, Facebook, and in-game support.

We focus on resolving player issues, and we measure our success against key objectives and KPIs. Our stats continue to improve with customer satisfaction at 81.3% and a resolution rate of 76.7%.

Innovating as a team

Over the past year we’ve focused on a strategy to create signature experiences for our employees and players. Our goal is to create interactions that improve engagement through experiences that are frictionless, unique and now.

We’ve realized that how our employees experience our culture influences how they help our players.To provide an employee experience that positively impacts players, we’ve implemented these initiatives this year.

Artificial intelligence

To drive faster service and higher resolution rates, we experimented with conversational artificial intelligence (AI) and tested 210k AI conversations with players. We found that the responsiveness of AI reduced our handle times. Players still spoke with advisors if AI couldn’t resolve their issue, which reduced abandonment rates.

Cheers recognition program

The ‘Cheers’ reward and recognition program encourages WWCE employees to publicly recognize each other for bringing our values to life and helping players have great experiences with EA. We aim to reward good work and motivate people to mirror positive behaviors using virtual bonuses called Cheers Bucks. They’re powered by the Bonusly app in Slack, and everyone in WWCE can give them. Awarded Cheers Bucks are redeemed for items from an rewards catalog.

We set our engagement goal at 60% per the industry benchmark and have continued to outperform this benchmark with 97% engagement. In its first quarter, over 13,000 individual bonuses were given, and nearly 70,000 Cheers Bucks were redeemed.

XPilot and targeted help

XPilot is a program where specialized teams experiment with new concepts in areas where we can improve performance. For example, we created a dedicated mobile games team to address low resolution numbers. The team tests solutions, measures impacts, and rolls out improvements to the rest of the org.

Innovating through XLabs

WWCE is determined to innovate and deliver new technology in support of our players, and we have established two innovation labs to pool ideas from all across the organization. We call them XLabs. They experiment with new technologies to enhance how we help players. We also bring advisors onboard to help us explore projects and assess their practicality and impact.

Listening to our team

We pride ourselves on our diverse and inclusive culture that positively engages our employees. We ask what our employees think about our culture and if we’re improving twice a year in a survey we call the CE Culture Study. We’ve seen improvements in areas like process efficiency, communication, and implementing employee feedback.

Throughout the year we gather feedback through various surveys and roundtables to inform our employee experience strategy. Our focus is on team interaction, employee-led programs, and effective communication. This approach includes Let’s Play Advisor Shadowing, Snack and Share & Share lecture events, a celebration station for team-building cards and tokens, quarterly business storytelling events, and a weekly email newsletter called The Beat. We get positive engagement feedback from the team on these activities and continue to see our engagement numbers increase.

This high level of employee engagement is reflected in our retention and attrition stats. WWCE employees have an average tenure of 3.57 years and our attrition currently stands at 15%.

WWCE exists to help players have great experiences with EA and we’re excited about our achievements this year. We’re players taking care of players and people talking to people — whenever, wherever, and however they need us.