The Secret to Dealing with Your Customers like Dirt (& Getting AWay WIth It)

Here’s a story from yesterday you won’t find in the news.

It’s about the only scenario where you can treat your clients extremely badly and still have no impact on your business whatsoever

Obviously, no company would openly say that they deem their clients to be disposable and yet that’s how we all would have felt dealing with certain telcos, banks etc.

This story is about a mobile-game called Rise of Kingdoms – released in 2018 & makes money through micro-transactions

Some players spend tens of thousands of dollars every month in-game for virtual goods (commanders/heroes, equipment, resources etc.)

A rare few have spent close to a million USD!

All-time revenue? 2 billion USD and counting

All time rank – 5 – that’s higher than Clash of Clans

Their major updates usually take 3 hours – the one yesterday took 10 (3+3+3+1)

And the way they managed it is a case study in how not to manage unforeseen circumstances

1. No information about delays in the updates were communicated till the previous 3-hour timer ran out.
2. Their official discord was on fire with players asking for explanations and when none were given, resorting to name-calling & cursing the developers.
3. This was escalated further by the discord admins who at first used slow-mode to reduce the frequency of complaints and then resorted to auto-deleting messages to clear the channels’ history.
4. This angered their player community even further who then went onto the voice channels to show their displeasure.
5. The discord admins then escalated the situation even further by giving players life bans from their server. This included paying players as well as free-to-play (F2P).
6. In the meanwhile, fake screenshots were created that said that the company had lost all player data so all progress and transactions etc. were gone.
7. This was the fuel that this fire most definitely did not need.

After this update the game was up – with only a couple of minor bugs and nothing new in terms of gameplay – yet.

Lessons for the company

1. They’ve a fantastic product with a very passionate user/player base.

2. Technical issues can & will happen. Training people on how to handle irate customers especially when they’re being unreasonable is one part of the solution. Proactive communication is the other.

Lessons for everyone else

1. Aspire to create loyalty & passion in your clients like gamers have for their games.

2. And no, it’s still not OK to treat clients like dirt even if your product is as addictive as a drug 😏