NYX Gaming offers omnichannel customer service with Zendesk

The year was 2016 and NYX Gaming Group, a digital gaming supplier to 86 percent of licensed online casinos in Atlantic City’s, was hitting all sevens.

The company had a successful IPO in 2014, followed by multiple acquisitions including but not limited to Side City, Bet Digital and Openbet which further expanded their robust portfolio of content. Already a powerhouse, game titles like “A Dragon’s Story” and “Witch Pickings” landed NYX’s games in over 200 online casinos worldwide.

Available 24/7 to support both the casinos and the tens of thousands of people playing online are the NYX Gaming Group Player Support and Operation Support teams. The Player Support team works from the company’s office in New Jersey to remain in compliance with the Division of Gaming Enforcement; however, the Operations Support team works globally and fields tickets from nearly every time zone around the world.

Much of the customer service team hails from the local casino and hospitality industry and prides themselves on exceeding each player’s expectations. However, as the team grew from one brand to three, with a tangle of new tools and processes in tow, the company’s ability to serve customers quickly and consistently was at risk. The now 35-person team was answering up to 20,000 tickets a month via phone, chat, and email through different systems. It was critical that the customer service organization get everybody working on the same customer service solution.

An 18-year veteran of the Atlantic City hospitality and call center industry and Head of US Customer Service at NYX, Steve Ross, led the search. Ross had two key criteria. First, the new support solution would need to work within the Division of Gaming Enforcement’s regulations around encrypting customer data and payment information. Second, the solution needed to provide both email and chat support. These two channels comprised two-thirds of NYX’s support tickets, with over 40 percent of support inquiries coming through chat.

Ultimately, Ross chose Zendesk over Desk, the other tool in consideration. Ross liked that Zendesk Chat was easy to navigate and wouldn’t slow the team down when responding to in-the-moment messages. Ross also favored Zendesk Support’s robust native reporting. He noted, “Reporting is huge for me and, of course, executives always like reports. It’s one of the features that I personally use the most.”

Customer support leads at NYX were surprised and pleased to learn how easy Zendesk Support was to implement. “It is such an easy product to learn. We became self-sufficient right off the bat and were able to build everything out without a problem,” Ross said. “We only used 10 percent of the professional services hours we signed on for.”

Rollout to the wider organization went just as smoothly. Ross explained, “The team has adapted well. It’s an easy system to learn and not something that required much time to get to know.” Choosing a tool that wouldn’t throw the team off their groove was partly why Ross chose Zendesk Support. “I want to make sure that the team stays happy and that they’re having an easy time navigating systems,” he said.

Today, agents can easily move between a player chat about promotions and bonuses to an email exchange with one of the casino clients over the uptime of a game without losing precious time. The team consistently beats their ambitious SLA for first response time on chat, which is to respond to 90 percent of chats within 10 seconds. “We’re at 96 percent pretty much all the time,” Ross confirmed.

Instant support is also easier to come by as mobile players can start a chat right from the game on their phone, thanks to the embedded Zendesk support widget. “We’ve included chat in our apps so that players can download the app from iTunes or the Google Play store, start playing, and chat from within the app,” he said. “It’s just the way people communicate these days.”

In addition to keeping the player in the game, the support widget is able to automatically feed player and device information into the Zendesk ticket, so that agents can immediately begin troubleshooting. “It was easy to embed,” Ross said, “and it contributes toward a faster resolution time.”

In addition to accepting calls, chats and emails, Ross’ team fields contacts from Facebook in Zendesk as part of a conscious effort to meet customers where they are, as well as to keep all questions, from all channels, flowing into a central repository.

The team also keeps a pulse on customer satisfaction, which marks a move away from the brand surveys they used to send. The team now asks for feedback in a way that focuses on the service a player receives—less likely to be colored by a player’s luck or performance in a game. By collecting feedback in this way, and by looking at every negative review, Ross has been able to implement some changes to internal policy to the end of providing a better customer experience.

Next in Ross’ crosshairs: a revamp of the company’s phone support. The team’s integration between NICE inContact and Zendesk has been good, but Ross anticipates that SMS support will a big hit with players who already like being served through chat. NYX is looking to rollout Zendesk Talk because, as Ross put it, “We just want to get everything through Zendesk because of how much we like the product.”