Bart Stewart over at Gamasutra recently wrote a short essay called “Game Development as Customer Satisfaction.” Throughout the essay he stresses that the MMO game genre requires companies to build a business model around making a case for continued play constantly, not just at purchase and not just around releases and updates. Stewart also steps forward and defines customer satisfaction as “setting and meeting expectations” the #1 skill-set required of any CM.
As a online community manager, I’ve found my job directly and on a daily basis revolves around setting expectations and driving desire for continued play of the product. I’ve always approached this without gimmicks or smoke and mirrors, despite some encouragement to play marketer rather than community manager. Setting expectations is as simple as being as honest as possible as soon as possible — this alone will drive customer satisfaction. If you honestly tell your community it is unlikely “x” feature (or request) will ever come to fruition, there will undoubtably be some flames to put out on your forums. However, if the approach taken is silence or too general of an answer (see: “It’s not a bug, it’s feature!”) the expectation is never set and therefore never can be met.
While there are certainly times to remain quiet, especially when something has yet to be coded or even planned for, maintaining an open dialog with your community cannot hurt your player satisfaction and leads to continued play of the product.
To end with a quote from Steward, “the ultimate responsibility of everyone making a commercial game is to [sic] customer satisfaction. And everyone in the group can contribute to that goal by committing to making everything they do just a little bit better than it has to be.”
I really can’t agree more.
Nice shiny new css and ajax powered thingies, Burdenday. Comments are a bit difficult to find though.
Have a nice burden-one.