A lesson in bad customer relations management - the European W:AR open beta launch | The Greenskin - Warhammer Online Blog, Videos, Guides, Webcomic & Podcast

A lesson in bad customer relations management - the European W:AR open beta launch

September 9, 2008 – 1:29 pm

In this post a European W:AR fan, who also works in PR and lobbying, gives some background on the problems with the European W:AR beta launch, what went wrong and what a lobbyist thinks about the whole affair.

The background of PR

When one hears the word PR (public relations) or lobbying one immediately thinks of sleazy politicians or corporate lawyers trying their very best to say as many words as possible without actually telling the truth or admitting they are wrong in any way. As a person who works in these very fields I can only say that this is as far from the truth as one can be. Of course we all know of several examples of lying politicians or corporations that have in any way misbehaved or acted in an immoral way. But the basic principle of lobbying and PR is actually quite simple: honesty. As long as everything you say or communicate is the truth you are very unlikely to get into trouble. The only thing people like less than a person saying something they do not agree with is a person who is not telling the truth.

As long as you, the politician, or you, the CEO, are telling the truth you will most likely never get to handle a PR crisis.

There are countless examples of bad PR in history. In 1996, Structural Dynamics Research Corporation fired a guy on Take Our Daughters to Work Day while his 8-year old daughter was with him in the building and in 2002, Southwest Airlines announced that they would begin charging overweight passengers for two seats instead of one.

Now, neither SDRC nor SA intended to hurt their brands. They just did not think through what the consequences of their actions would be. Therefore PR firms and lobbyists today focus more on setting up good routines to avoid mistakes rather than fixing already existing ones.

There are, of course, also examples of organisations fixing bad images. Dell struggled with an image of, for a while, having bad customer support but fixed this by starting to participate on blogs and networks and today Dell is considered having one of the better customer supports. IBM also struggled with an image of being an ancient corporation where its employees had to sing company songs and wear suspenders with their socks. Today IBM, while it may be an old company, isn’t considered an ancient one.

Mythic, GOA and the European W:AR beta launch

GOA is, as far as I’ve understood, a French company mainly owned by France Telecom with servers in France and a support division based in Ireland. GOA handled the servers for another Mythic MMO, Dark Age of Camelot, and was already then surrounded by rumours of failing to support gamers adequately. Therefore some players were worried when it was announced that GOA would handle the European accounts and servers for W:AR.

It started when the site for the European launch (http://www.war-europe.com) was launched. Whereas the American counterpart (http://www.warhammeronline.com) was written in HTML the GOA site was based on Flash. This meant that the European site, though it looked nice with nifty animations, was very slow. Some players were also concerned with whether or not this meant that credit card information would pass through secure HTTPS code. Later on GOA assured the fan base that though the interface was in Flash, important information would be transmitted through secure code. This was how it started. But this is not where it ended.

When it got clear that the account validation and registration for the beta launch would not be on-line a good time in advance of the launch many players raised their worries (mainly on the fan site Warhammer Alliance [http://www.warhammeralliance.com/forums/showthread.php?t=76947]) that perhaps this was not giving GOA time enough to fix any problems that might arise. GOA representatives assured the fan base that they knew what they were doing. All of this communication went through community managers of GOA at the Warhammer Alliance forums.

So, with almost 250 000 European beta keys out and a very large fan base, GOA let two community managers based in Ireland take care of all the information spreading and customer relations. There was no steady rate of press releases, no daily updates as to what they were doing. Only an assurance that they in fact knew what they were doing.

The launch of the beta

And so, on the 7th of September, the open beta was launched. In the US no big problems arose. The American registration site handled all traffic and the beta test simply started. Not so in Europe.

Immediately people started complaining about not being able to register accounts, not being able to validate beta keys, not being able to access their accounts and getting several error messages when accessing the EU site. No information came from the GOA headquarters. Aggravation rose as no information from GOA was delivered as to what the problems were. Again, the job of informing the fan base fell to the two representatives at the Warhammer Alliance forums.

Now, it must be said. Those who have the time to spend a lot of daytime on a forum and post their anger about how a computer game is being handled most likely aren’t very old with regular daytime jobs. And when posting on the internet the veil of anonymity in some cases lead to people not only being blunt, but outright hostile. Several distasteful posts were made on the WHA forums alongside well reasoned, but also angry, posts.

It went so far as to having Mark Jacobs of Mythic feeling the need to involve himself in the debacle and post the following:

Folks,
I just got off the phone with senior management at GOA and I know you’ll be getting lots of information shortly. I know it doesn’t make today better but I can assure you that leadership is very aware of the situation and they are doing/going to do something about it. They are not at all happy about the situation either.

I won’t say trust me on this because right now, our European fans have no reason to have any trust. I will say though to see what transpires before launch, during Open Beta and then, if we launch well, I hope we will regain your trust.

Mark

This lead to the CEO of GOA, Ghislaine Le Rhun writing a post herself:

Dear all,

I rarely address players directly, but I wanted to write you as too few of you have been able to access the open beta today.

As my team explained in the previous post, although we have opened the servers and corrected numerous issues during the last 24 hours but we have not yet solved the issue of saturated Open Beta key activations that we’re currently experiencing. I am sincerely sorry for this, and I understand all the frustration the situation has spawned.

Today was a dark day. We expected a massive influx of players, but reality was even harsher.
I personally commit that we will communicate to you as clearly as possible on the resolution of these current issues. My goal is to give Warhammer Online the success it deserves. Be ensured that all GOA teams, with Mythic’s support, are working hard to bring you the best possible game experience.

Best regards,

Ghislaine Le Rhun
GOA CEO

Do note, however, that her original post seems to have been in French and some of the meaning of her post may have gotten lost in translation. Do also note, however, that it was not until Mark Jacobs of Mythic called her up that the fan base actually got to know who the CEO of GOA was.

So, the EU beta launch was not working. A lot of people were angry. And some of these angry persons made immature and, some might think, laughable posts. This is when GOA made a huge mistake alongside not having kept their fan base up to date with information, not taking warnings seriously and not showing (if only false) humility. This is when one of the Community Managers of GOA posted on the WHA forums describing those who made angry posts in a not very flattering manner.

In the golden book of PR however, you always have to show understanding towards your customers (or your voters). You may think they are complete morons (they may actually be, especially in the case of voters) but this does not change anything. You always need to keep your customers with information, be honest, come off as compassionate and humble. In the worst case - act it! Whatever you do - never ever lash out at your customers - however much they may deserve it.

This is when GOA should have realized their mistake of not being prepared for the launch and their mistake of not showing enough humility. I have to tell you, this could easily have been fixed. If you have ever watched the masterpiece that is Bill Clinton’s televised excuse of him being involved with Monica Lewinsky you know what I’m talking about. Before that speech the American public felt disgusted with their president. However, in his speech he was so honest (or at least appeared as it), so humble and so sorry that the viewers and the end of the speech felt sorry for the guy. This is a text book example of begging forgiveness.

Be honest (or appear as it and make sure no one can come up with the lies you’ve said), be humble, appear as regretful as possible and in no way try to excuse your behaviour. The only thing that can happen is that you appear so sad, so humble and so sorry for what you’ve done that people start feeling uncomfortable with staying angry with you. Needless to say, the few pieces of information that GOA actually let out can be summed up this way:

* Yeah we were wrong.
* We are fixing the problems now.
* Soon it will be ok!
* But don’t forget that there are others who make mistakes!

Oh, I almost felt sorry when I read the information from GOA. If they had just stuck with expressing their sadness about not being able to handle the beta, that they were begging for forgiveness and that they would work hard to earn the fan base’s trust again they might had solved their problems.

Instead they were back at square one with lots of players wondering why they had been waiting as long as 24 hours to get their keys validated, players asking why the website wasn’t working and why the heck GOA wouldn’t dare share any information they had.

With a game like W:AR word of mouth marketing is extremely important. Not only is it important for people to buy the game. But they also have to tell their friends what a good game it is. Instead, right now, a soon to be famous (or infamous) youtube video (http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=Drnz1i3IEuE&feature=related) of the EU launch debacle has gotten over 40 000 hits on youtube.

The end of the story?

It’s not wise to restrain the flow of information towards your customers and keep this information being sent only once every 12th hour. It’s not wise showing your frustration with your customers (even though they may deserve it). It’s not wise launching an entertainment product without having an outward face that the customers can feel connection to - would you threaten violence and write despicable messages if you knew that the one who you are talking to is Paul Barnett or Mark Jacobs? I think not. In this case however all the players knew was that the ones responsible worked for an anonymous French corporation.

There have been a lot of European players talking about buying US copies of the game instead and I can understand them. Myself, I’ve been playing the US beta from Europe and it has worked flawlessly (with some minor in game bugs of course) and I am considering playing on US servers.
What we all can learn from this is that customer relations are a hard thing indeed (that’s why people like me are very well-paid to handle it) and that you have to be really careful when you deal with people.

As I am finishing this post the European site still doesn’t work properly, and instead of informing the fan base how it’s going with fixing this problem GOA has released a news post about guild banks…

Honesty. Openness. Information. Humility. That’s really all it takes. The people at GOA have probably learned this now (at least they should have). But it has been a costly experience, one which both they and the European fan base for W:AR would have liked to be without.

-John

The author of this post lives in Europe and has worked both in politics and in business with PR and lobbying. He is a great Warhammer-fan who still plays the table top game as a Dark Elf and Empire player. Due to his work he wants to remain anonymous.