How to treat your VIPs (Very Important Players)

All gaming companies know how hard it is to turn a non-paying customer into a highly lucrative player who drives revenue. These are your VIPs, your Very Important Players, and they’re the players you want to stay, play — and pay.

Even once you’ve turned a casual player into a revenue-driving VIP, you need a retention strategy to ensure you keep them. It’s good business, in every sense, to look after your VIPs. It’s good for them in that they’re rewarded for their loyalty and advocacy, and good for you, for repeat revenues and bottom line. But how do you do it?

VIPS get to go a la carte

Just like a restaurant that gives its best customers the first pick of the menu, smart player experience teams make sure their PX is VIP-centric.

VIPs clock up serious time on their favorite games. They know every nuance of the worlds they inhabit. So, when contacting support, they can also tell when they’re getting standard responses, so you need the following:

• Customized responses built on player profiles
• Personalized language support
• Operation across their preferred channels
• People who know what they’re talking about

In other words, you must ensure your most valuable players don’t feel like they’re “ordering” the same thing as everyone else.

Matchmake your best people with your best customers

Great PX needs great people to make it happen. So why wouldn’t you try and romance your VIPs by finding them the player support agent of their dreams? Take your player experience for VIPs up a notch and create dedicated VIP service desks.

The best PX practitioners, with the strongest gaming and service skills, are dedicated to ensuring that your best players get the support they need before they even realize they need it.

Your VIP service desk should be staffed by agents specializing in one game or genre, so their knowledge is levels-deep. After all, VIPs are often the world’s most experienced players in the games they play, and people with expertise and experience can help them.

For your very best players? Get them their own dedicated agent, whose job is to know them and their preferences inside out. Think of it as offering a top-of-the-range concierge service: the best is proactive, not reactive.

Be smart (and fast) with your channel choices

You’ll want to give your VIPs plenty of ways to connect. Can you go omnichannel for your total player base? Maybe not. Do you need to? Maybe not.

In some ways, it’s the wrong question to be asking. Your player support doesn’t need to be a monolithic, one-channel-fits-all approach. Instead, focus your firepower—even if it’s limited—on your VIPs and stretch to be where they prefer you to be.

Whatever service channel strategy you create and customize for your VIPs, you need to deliver. Speed of response is key, so don’t tailor a channel for your VIPs if you have capacity issues.

Poor response times for VIPs—and the rest of your player base—will damage your brand, but you’ll see equally severe repercussions for your revenues. Player downtime while waiting for support has a direct impact on the profitability of your game. After all, less time playing equals less time spending.

Make sure it ends in tiers

There are moments when you need to reward players by compensating for service outages, bugs, in-game glitches, and more. However, no amount of hard work on your part to fix what’s gone wrong will be as effective as in-game compensation.

Sometimes, no matter how massive the service screw-up is, you can turn even the worst situations to your advantage as long as you have a smart compensation strategy in place.

The important thing is to ensure that whatever levers you pull, from credits to in-game multipliers, you tailor closely to your players’ spending tiers. Otherwise, what might seem like an extravagance to a casual player could feel like chicken feed to one of your big spenders. And you’ll feel that displeasure where it hurts: your customer satisfaction ratings and gaming word-of-mouth.

Don’t forget the bigger picture

Like an oil tycoon searching for their next payday, you should always keep sight of your pipeline. While your player retention strategy should focus your attention on big-spending VIPs, you should have a solid recruitment strategy to create the next VIPs.

How you target those players who are enjoying the game but not spending anything will be just as important to your long-term success.

When we hire our fans of brands, we scour a global talent pool to find exactly the right people. We only hire them if they love your brand as much as you do. So if you’re looking for a PX partner that treats you and your business like you’re Very Important, we’d love to talk.