Activision reduced its annual customer services spend by 25% while improving customer experience through Salesforce.

As makers of some of the most successful games titles in the world, Activision understands gamers and gaming like no one else. And because they know gamers, they understand that when things go wrong during game play gamers want to access customer service quickly and in a way that suits them.

In the wake of the most successful game launch in history, the release of its Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3®, Activision wanted to find even better ways to interact with gamers to deliver the best customer experiences possible.

To achieve this, Activision used Salesforce to create a new way of listening to its customers, taking the conversation to gamers in the online spaces they use to share their experiences.

Over the course of a three-month deployment Activision used Marketing Cloud’s Social Studio to develop its online customer service.

This made it possible to identify, track and respond to relevant tweets and conversations happening on social media. These social interactions were then uploaded into Service Cloud where they could be matched with existing customers to enable follow-up or converted to sales leads.

This made it possible for employees across departments to collaborate quickly to find solutions to problems being highlighted by gamers as they were unfolding, referred to by the company as ‘swarming’. Sales leads are automatically channelled to sales representatives, saving time, reducing costs and improving responsiveness.

By bringing their customer service online with Salesforce integration Activision found that:

• Replies generated during conversations between gamers and customer service employees became content that could be used for social, service and marketing
• Self-service problem resolution by its customers increased from 50% to 85%
• More than half the remaining 15% of live service interactions took place on social media, improving customer experience

Significant savings were made on operational expenses associated with support interactions:

• 25% annual decrease in customer services related expenses
• Integration of Social Studio resulted in a 378% ROI in just one year, according to a study by Nucleus Research
• This equates to a cost-benefit ratio of 1-to-2.1, an average annual benefit of $800,000