Challenge
Microsoft’s Xbox had already established a permanent place in living rooms around the world – and, in doing so, entered a new era of direct-to-consumer relationships. As Xbox matured and Kinect loomed on the horizon, the software giant needed a simpler, more friendly approach to resolve support issues more efficiently for a less tech-savvy audience. Over the course of several releases, Microsoft’s Xbox support pages had evolved into a loose collection of long, text-heavy pages geared towards early-adopter gamers with above-average technical fluency. But, the advent of Kinect promised to bring with it an influx of casual gamers who’d be potentially overwhelmed by the volume and density of these pages and, in turn, flood call centers. Microsoft needed to up its service game and quickly architect a wholly new experience at support.xbox.com. As the popularity of gaming consoles grew beyond the hardcore gamer audience, the Xbox community quickly became populated with more family-centric, non-expert audiences. The new support experience needed to serve the core gamer’s taste for explicit technical detail while keeping the experience simple and friendly for the newcomer audiences. BORN SOCIAL Core Xbox customers are social creatures, playing together and helping each other to resolve their technical issues on their own. LESS TECHNICAL SUPPORT Support materials that were technically thorough, but hopelessly dense put Microsoft’s new, less tech-savvy audience at a disadvantage for self-support.
Solution
We created an entirely new support experience for Microsoft, moving beyond a reliance on long knowledge-based articles to act as the sole provider of support information. The new experience began by providing critical connectivity to customers’ Xbox consoles for easy diagnosis, along with highly visual, step-by-step instructions for self-support scenarios. The support experience was also designed to be inherently social, empowering and encouraging consumers to guide and learn from each other. Support Site Redesign Since different users have different preferred support experiences, the front door of our experience provided a simplified entry point for new issues, providing multiple potential methods for resolving a new issue. New content types and form factors, such as interactive demos and videos for both tech-savvy and novice gamers consistently rate highly across the Support.Xbox.com experience. By surfacing Trending Topics, we’ve empowered the community to indirectly help each other locate relevant content and provide solutions that’s already been vetted by consumers themselves. In addition to step-by-step diagnostic experiences, videos and walkthroughs, we developed simple visual diagrams for consumer-facing instructions. These reach beyond the “academic article” style of content that many expert audiences prefer and allow both new and expert users to use the same knowledge base across any platform or device. Leading Customers To Quick Answers Intelligent troubleshooting and step-by-step walkthroughs enable the new support platform to help customers assess specific support and warranty information – preserving phone agent availability for cases that truly require a personal touch. We developed a whole new e-commerce flow to provide new levels of service to users needing repairs. Order tracking, notifications, and warranty service information transformed a formerly complicated process into a clear and simple transaction. The new Xbox support experience delivers personalized service to keep gamers informed about the status of issues and repairs, while providing the information they need to maximize their Xbox console.
Results
Our re-imagined Xbox support experience was launched across 40 territories worldwide, in 22 languages, and drove substantial drops in call center volume almost immediately. The architecture and experience principles we helped develop have continued to power the site’s behavior through subsequent generations of Xbox and remain consistently ranked at the top of the industry for service and customer experience.
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