Activision has a storied history. Founded in 1979, it was the first company to publish video games independently from video game console manufacturers. The two biggest console makers at that time were Atari and Mattel’s Intellivision. Activision found almost instant success with games like Pitfall!, River Raid, and Kaboom!
Today, it is still one of the most successful game development companies with its current roster featuring popular titles like Call of Duty, Guitar Hero, and World of Warcraft. Of course, the games today are far more sophisticated than they were in 1979, and so too are the challenges of keeping consumers happy, engaged, and loyal.
Jane Maldonado’s job at Activision is to see that gamers, who are a passionate bunch, have a strong and positive relationship with the company. Officially, her title is Senior Business Analyst, Voice of the Gamer Program Owner. She explained how she and her team accomplished this when she presented “Operationalizing Customer Feedback to Take a Modern Approach to Customer Engagement at Activision,” on Tuesday at the 9th annual Loyalty Expo, presented by Loyalty360 – The Association for Customer Loyalty.
When Maldonado joined the company, she had her work cut out for her.
“Google ‘Activision does,’” she invited session attendees to do, “and it auto-fills ‘not care,’” she said.
It’s something she checks constantly. Interesting note: If you just type ‘Activision,’ Google auto-populates ‘support,’ followed by ‘stock,’ and ‘blizzard,’ the latter being the second half of the company’s full name. At least those are the results we got when we tried it. Your results may vary depending on Google’s algorithm.
In any case, Maldonado had a challenge before her when she started, to be sure.
“I’m trying to turn that around,” she said. “We’re chipping away at it. And we do care.”
But, getting gamers to feel that way has been a battle if you will. Indeed, where many companies focus on the “voice of the consumer” Activision calls its program the Voice of the Gamer, specifically reflecting their customer base.
To get things moving in the right direction, Maldonado implemented something she calls HEAR, which stands for:
-Harness insights
-Evangelize what’s working
-Articulate what isn’t working
-Recommend solutions
“And or motto now is ‘great games, great support,’” she said.
The turnaround started when she began to look at the mountains of data they had in terms of customer feedback. She quickly recognized a few common themes and began to act on them.
“One thing we heard was that we were robotic and we weren’t listening to what they were saying,” Maldonado explained.
Not only did Activision look at gamer feedback, but also to its frontline staff “because they are the ones, day in and day out, who are talking to our customers,” she added.
With so many stakeholders, from developers to top executives, and with so many contact points, Maldonado has been able to collect, analyze, and distribute data so that everyone, at every level, has a sense of the company/gamer relationship.
Today, gamers have a variety of ways to interact with the company, and things seem to be moving in the right direction. A recent survey the company posted wound up on Reddit, where gamers urged each other to take it. Many noted how well the survey was put together and how impressed they were with the fact that Activision really seemed to care about them. For Maldonado and her Voice of the Gamer team, that’s the name of the game.