About This Episode

Site – https://appquantum.com/
Rustam – https://www.linkedin.com/in/rkuramshin/ 
AppQuantum LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/company/appquantum/
Medium – https://appquantum.medium.com/
Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/appquantum.team

In the latest episode of the Player Engage podcast, we had the pleasure of hosting Rustam Kuramshin from AppQuantum, a seasoned expert in player support. Rustam shared a wealth of knowledge from his eight years in the industry, discussing the intricacies of player support and the importance of creating a seamless player experience. From the evolution of customer support in gaming to the role of AI and automation, Rustam provided valuable insights into the current landscape and future of player engagement.

Listeners will find Rustam’s discussion on the day-to-day operations of a player support lead particularly enlightening, as he delves into the challenges of scaling support teams and the significance of understanding player needs. His personal anecdotes and experiences offer a unique perspective on the growth and development within the field.

• Discover Rustam’s journey from a support agent to a player support lead and the lessons learned along the way.
• Learn about the shift from email to in-app player support and the impact of AI and automation on the industry.
• Gain insights into the importance of communication skills and product knowledge in delivering exceptional player support.

For those eager to dive deeper into the world of player support and experience, this episode is a treasure trove of information. To uncover the full scope of Rustam’s expertise and the strategies employed at AppQuantum, tune in to the Player Engage podcast. Your next level of understanding in creating unforgettable player experiences awaits.

AI Transcript: Rustam

Intro: 00:00: 00:15: Welcome to the Player Engage podcast, where we dive into the biggest challenges, technologies, trends, and best practices for creating unforgettable player experiences. Player Engage is brought to you as a collaboration between Keyword Studios and Helpshift. Here is your host, Greg Posner.
Greg Posner: 00:16: 00:42: Hey, everybody. Welcome to the Player Engage Podcast. Greg here. Today, we are joined by Rustam Kuramshin from AppQuantum. He has a really cool background in player support from companies like, like I said, AppQuantum, Player Insight is Player Experience Lead, and a number of other different companies as well. So I’m excited to kind of learn about his day to day, what goes on, what goes on in his head. Rustam, thank you so much for joining us today. Is there anything I’m missing that you want to say about yourself?

Rustam Kuramshin: 00:42: 01:23: Yeah, hello everyone. First of all, thank you, Greg, for having me on your podcast today. So let’s talk about me. I’m working in the player support for over eight years right now. I’m a tech-savvy guy in the player support, but I also like working with people and meet their expectations and fix their problems. And basically not only on my work, but also on my daily routine, helping my friends and family how to fix their games or maybe Apple TV or Google Chromecast, etc.

Greg Posner: 01:24: 01:34: I’ve been there, you know, it’s the life of a customer support people. They think you can fix every piece of electronic in the world. And it’s just like, all right, I can’t do that. Don’t call me about that. But you’ll still get those calls.

Rustam Kuramshin: 01:34: 01:37: Yeah. And even in the middle of the night.

Greg Posner: 01:39: 01:55: Yeah, right. There’s no rest. You’ve spent a lot of time in customer support and that’s awesome. I got my career started there and I’ve learned a lot. So I want to ask you questions about your day to day, but before we get started, let’s go with a simple one is, are you a gamer still? And what are the games that you’re playing right now?

Rustam Kuramshin: 01:55: 02:14: Yeah, I’m still a player, so yeah, gamer, mobile, console, PC, standalones, Nintendo Switch, even sometimes Nintendo Game Boy. Yeah, sometimes happens when I want to replay my Pokémon Yellow series. Yeah.

Greg Posner: 02:14: 02:18: Are you playing Pal World then to kind of compete with Pokemon?

Rustam Kuramshin: 02:18: 02:31: I didn’t try it yet, but I watch a lot of YouTube videos and I want to try it, but right now I’m just playing Helldivers 2 with my friends.

Greg Posner: 02:32: 02:51: Okay. So your role at AppQuantum is a player support lead, right? Yeah. Sorry, I had this up. So your role is a player support team lead. Can you kind of explain to our audience, well, what’s the role of a player support team lead at AppQuantum? Because I realize this might differ from company to company.

Rustam Kuramshin: 02:51: 04:07: Yeah, it might differ from company to company, but my main responsibilities is to handle how the player support team is structured, whether we need more agents or less agents, what is our daily routine, I mean, how many tickets we have during the day, what type of tools do we need to, like, maybe order or buy or maybe R&D or maybe create. with our internal development department. And also one-to-one sessions, development program. Maybe someone of the agents wants to be like maybe QC manager, or maybe he understood that the agents want to rise in the UI department. I have this story in my background when the One of my teammates understand that UI is his next big step.

Greg Posner: 04:07: 04:22: So you’re part of a good manager thing is identifying what your employees or the people that are working for you, where they want to aspire to get to, what they aspire to do. Is this part of when you’re talking about coaching, like understanding what their interests are?

Rustam Kuramshin: 04:22: 04:59: Yeah, because sometimes in customer support, if we’ll talk not about only player support, it’s like a niche, just jump on the boat in the IT industry. And then you want to understand whether you want to stick with it. But maybe, like, we saw different, like examples when from the agent in technical support, game designers, programmers, front-end, back-end, et cetera, or client-side.

Greg Posner: 04:59: 05:16: So one of the things I feel like you need to do is you have to be a little organized, at least a little probably more organized than I am to keep notes on people, to understand kind of the tools that you’re taking a look at. I guess, is there a specific tool that you use on a daily basis that kind of helps you keep organized, that lets you stay on top of what you’re doing?

Rustam Kuramshin: 05:17: 07:30: On top of what I’m doing, so any to-do list application, or even like back in those days, like our fathers do, notebook, notebook with a pen. So yeah, sometimes you need just a good cup of tea, coffee at the morning, and at least what you’re planning to do today, maybe you need to just, have three meetings, because in our fast-paced world, when everything changes within the hour, maybe in minutes, you need some kind of plan that you have three meetings with one-to-one, and you need to discuss it, because if you want that your team will grow with yourself, like you learn different tools, frameworks, or paradigms, or maybe you want to scale and adapt your team to the higher level, you need to plan this. You need to understand that one of your agents prefer like technical side of the issues. He good at it. And someone is better at quality control. So you need to plan their journey in your team and adapt to new tasks, maybe. For example, back in those days when we wanted to integrate quality control in our team, We use like any other team, Google Sheet and export the data. And at the first steps, it’s a team lead responsibility. But you could just provide this training session for an agent, and this agent will do the most of the work and train. And he will be this feature owner of this quality control sessions and help other agents do their job better.

Greg Posner: 07:30: 07:45: It’s a fun way to kind of take a look at it and understand how you can best solve a problem because certain employees are better at certain tasks and being able to identify that and put them. How often do you normally meet with employees? Is it a weekly meeting, monthly meeting? What’s the cadence of that?

Rustam Kuramshin: 07:45: 09:28: Cadence, we have basically every weekly meeting. So we gather with all of our team, just to plan our, let’s say, sprints. We plan our tasks, how many issues we received on our last week, maybe some pain points we have, maybe urgent issues or bugs in our applications we need to push on this week. And if we talk about one-to-ones, sometimes for the junior agents, it’s better to do it on a weekly basis because it’s a new employee, he has lack of experience in some how to do or resolve this issue, or maybe answer on the player’s review in the Google Play Store, for example. And you need to provide him a feedback, consistent feedback. Because back in my days, when I just signed as an agent role, I wanted this feedback, and I want to understand in which direction I need to Upgrade my skills even like communication or maybe technical side Yeah, so yeah consistency, but for the senior for example senior it’s okay for the b-weekly even monthly

Greg Posner: 09:29: 10:05: Yeah, it’s an interesting point to put that people may not know necessarily what skills they like at first and it’s your job to help, excuse me, it’s your job to help kind of learn and help expose that for the support agent. So taking a look at yourself, right? You’ve been in these types of roles for over eight years at this point. You started at Game Insight, kind of we talked about AppQuantum. How does your approach change? When you first started, you were probably more of an agent, but how did your approach to working with your staff change?

Rustam Kuramshin: 10:05: 12:50: So reflecting back on my journey, I can point out several points in my approach. So, back in those days, we were in the middle of paradigm shifts from email-only contact channel to the predominantly in-app player support. So, and at this point, we realized the importance of scalability and finding workarounds faster and quick adaptability to the technologies changes, because I think maybe 2016, it starts like shifting to the early stages of ML, AI, on the big stage of IT, not only internal, like space or NASA, et cetera, or maybe only in Google, like fan companies. but in small companies like IT and etc. And my biggest learning was about understanding our players’ needs and meeting their expectations. Because when in early 2005, like we played on flash games in the browser but nowadays like on the your mobile handheld phone and our pipeline of releases be weekly for example maybe less because Players want their new features, in-game events, conquer new mountains, for example, in any other game, and all compete with each other. and to get the reward for this approach. Yeah, so we work a lot on improving communication, like building helpful self-service centers, quickly resolving technical issues. Player journey doesn’t just… So I learned that a player’s journey doesn’t just resolve around the actual gameplay. So when a player meets any issue, He just opened the in-game support with help center, with FAQs and et cetera. And on the second button, he just contacted with an agent, or maybe a bot, and it helps to resolve this issue faster.

Greg Posner: 12:50: 13:57: Yeah, I like a few things that you said there, right? I think you talked about scaling, you talked about automation, you also talked about player immersion or the player experience doesn’t just fall into the gameplay itself. It also, I mean, even beyond what you said, right? The player experience, the customer experience, you know, these days people go on Discord, people go on Reddit, people try and find other communities. It even still follows that branding, right? So if you’re playing a type of game, you want to feel that type of immersion, no matter what channel you’re on. And people just think it’s customer support. And yeah, it is just customer support, but the more it feels immersive, the more it feels like it’s fine-tuned to them, I think it’s going to be the better experience for them. And it’s going to be something that they’re more likely to use. And the thing I want to focus on here is you talked about automation and scaling it in the early stages of chat, right? You mentioned it was like about eight years ago when people started kind of starting to move away from email to in-game support. How do you, Rustam, how do you take a look at these technologies and like, how do you improve yourself on them while also managing some people?

Rustam Kuramshin: 13:57: 15:47: So first of all, I started to learn every site or maybe reports which were generated by big companies. For example, Forrester, an analytics company, they posted a report, I think, before the COVID situation and early 2020, that you need to implement AI that will handle and leverage all your issues with human-like approach. But at the end of the COVID situation, and I think late 2022, they delivered another report where they said that all the customers, they don’t want to hear AI looks like a human. They just want short, concise answers and shortness of the issue, like resolution. So just press a button. And for example, from banking, you press a button and your credit card was reissued. So in this case, you You don’t need an agent to resolve this issue or query. In gaming industry, for example, it’s easier to implement, like reissue the purchase or subscription, or maybe restore progress or transfer progress from one platform to another.

Greg Posner: 15:47: 15:59: So you’re creating those workflows to help kind of, again, you realize that it’s not about It’s more about getting the customer directly to the solution rather than kind of, and what’s the quickest way to do that?

Rustam Kuramshin: 15:59: 17:05: Yeah. Because I’m this player, I’m this customer. And I act in some cases when I want to put myself on the road of research and development, I’m just opening different support channels or maybe read books like Delivering Happiness about Zappos. Or maybe, for example, a book about the best service is no service. So this is like, it’s not only about this success stories, but they also mentioned a story where you need to learn. So in my case, for example, if I like purchase in-game item, so I want this in-game item to, and I want to receive this item as soon as possible. whether it will be agent or bots, or maybe any other AI solution. So faster, it’s better.

Greg Posner: 17:05: 17:36: You mentioned also earlier on, right, we talked about scaling support teams. And I think that’s something that people do struggle with and understand how you could do that. So this is kind of a two point question. And maybe it should have been a separate question. But you also just mentioned Zappos delivering happiness, right? How do you stay on top of the latest trends of what’s happening in customer success? How do you educate yourself on that? And with that, because scaling is part of that, how do you take a look at scaling? How do you think about implementing things like that?

Rustam Kuramshin: 17:36: 19:30: So only on the base, in the customer support, do you have like a formula, like full-time employee, and you just For example, you have, on average, 1,000 tickets per week. You need eight hours. You have an eight-hour shift per day. So you need this amount shifts per week. And you calculate this. It’s basic, common approach, I think, in customer support to just calculate a full-time employee. But in this approach, doesn’t count on how this issue, you just answer about the gameplay issue, gameplay question, for example, how to hatch the egg, for example, in Pearl Harbor, or maybe it’s like transfer the profile between one platform to another. It’s a different time consumption of the issue. And, for example, if in any bad cases, like urgent when you have a bug on your production, it’s like in tickets immediately and you do want to have, you have to have this amount of agents just not to, just to resolve this issue based on your SLAs and KPIs. Even if you have like, for example, four agents on your shift, you ask another one to go out for extra money, for example, and resolve these issues in time.

Greg Posner: 19:30: 19:36: Do you, when you factor in metrics like that, though, do you take into account potential of bots and what bots can handle?

Rustam Kuramshin: 19:36: 20:57: Yeah. Yeah. It’s in nowadays, it’s better just to do it quarterly, just to analyze your issues, categories, issue types, and analyze this data and create flow with like bots and through APIs. So if in some cases, for example, player wants to, he’s providing a feedback, for example. We gather information from the player about the feedback. This feedback we can deliver or handle this feedback to our product team. And if our product team decide that this feedback was very precious, so we created a new feature, for example, in our game, and we want to provide this player with in-game crystals, in-game currency, or maybe a unique item, it’s easier to do it with a custom bot and API. So just track this information, store it in some database, and then just push this reward to the player.

Greg Posner: 20:57: 21:28: You mentioned communication with the product team, and that’s something we’ve seen some studios sometimes have trouble with. In my previous lifetime, when I was a customer support person, it wasn’t gaming, but we would butt heads with product a lot because we would think we would know the features that our users were complaining about and product wasn’t. Always, whatever. You see your side of the world, right? How do you and your team, how do you guys make, like when you do make that request to product, right? Is there a formal methodology to do that? Or you just drop it in like a Slack or Teams message and let them know?

Rustam Kuramshin: 21:28: 23:10: I think in like urgent situation where like your production server or the game client just crashing on the blink of an eye, you need just provide this information to your product team, product manager, producer, programmer, or backend developer as soon as possible and in the short message with all the information about this bug or the issue. But if you want to fix the bug that’s like all the players are living with this bug, for example, for one year, you need to provide a good technical documentation, like bug report in Task Tracker with step to reproduce, with examples of tickets, maybe screenshots, or maybe logs. If we will talk about PC games, it’s easier to record the logs on this type of platform. So yeah, basically, at the first place, I think you need a good communication skill, because even if you are working in the customer support where communication skill is the main skill, But when you start talking about the feature request or bug issues, you need a different approach in your messaging.

Greg Posner: 23:10: 23:35: Yeah, right. It’s something that I think both teams can agree upon and follow. When it comes to your specific team, you know, I asked a little earlier, kind of what tools you use, and you talked about, well, for a different thing, you mentioned kind of pen and paper, but for the actual technical work that you are using, like, I know, help shift, right? But what platforms do you utilize for your team that they’re working with their customers on, that they’re escalating, that they’re working on, are there other tools as well?

Rustam Kuramshin: 23:36: 25:19: So right now, at Quantum, we are using HelpShift in our games because it provides us with this cool feature in app support. Because we are also playing the games, it’s easier to communicate within your application rather than just use like deep link, mail to, and then drop an email. Yeah, it’s easier to answer on email, on your phone, and then on BPC, or on your tablet, and et cetera. But when you could resolve your issue within like, okay, not minutes because of the asynchronous communication, but within like a couple of hours. And it’s easier to grab information about actual player On the back of this SDK, you have information about his support ID, platform, app version, maybe issue type, maybe how much it’s his or her total purchase. and it’s easier to route this issue to the actual agent. Maybe it’s a first line, maybe it’s a second line, maybe it’s a question about a legal question. So it’s a manager issue. Because sometimes I handle this type of tickets in daily routine, yeah, sometimes it’s

Greg Posner: 25:20: 25:43: Yeah, and I love that aspect of the platform is that you can kind of set up the routing to go to the appropriate teams and things like that. How often are those workflows from your side taken a look at? Maybe the question should just be, how often are you really taking a look? Or how often do you take a look at the user feedback, your players’ feedback, and figuring out how you can change the support system to better fit their needs?

Rustam Kuramshin: 25:43: 27:47: Yeah, so in gaming industry, CSAT in most cases isn’t working like we want because it’s like a double-edged sword. So in-app support provides you with an easier communication channel, but at this point, every pain point and every issue a player has, it’s also mirrored on the CSAT. So you need to analyze not only CSAT, but, for example, NPS or customer effort. Because, for example, customer effort score provides you with information if you with information about, for example, how good your self-service help center is, or FAQ, or maybe your bot flow isn’t working like you expect. Maybe you need to deconstruct it and make it shorter. You can find any, not any, but good best practices in different blocks, even help shifts block, or maybe any other customers for service like Zendesk, HelpScout. It’s base information, but you need to analyze it on the quarterly basis because it’s fast-paced world. IT development, not just IT, but gaming development, you release. five events past year and then you create a different version like 2.2 with guilds, in-game chats, communities and etc.

Greg Posner: 27:47: 28:06: I know there’s some tools out there that help enable kind of feedback for your customer support agents internal, right? Like basically review periods, I can’t think of any of the tools, I know Miros is one, but are you using any tools to help provide agent feedback, say for coaching, for stuff like that?

Rustam Kuramshin: 28:06: 29:19: I used Miros as an example. Yeah, it’s good. tool to analyze big amount of data. It’s easier to do it. And it’s easier to connect this help, help desk services to mirrors because of the API integration or maybe native integration. It provides a safe place where you can communicate with agent personally, like on a one-to-one or like nowadays you have not only in-house teams, but working from home. You don’t have a separate like meeting room to chat personally. So you need to, you have to have this like type of separate page to talk only with actual agent. and provide with the feedback how to do it properly, where the answer wasn’t right. Maybe giving a different approach how to resolve some kind of issue.

Greg Posner: 29:20: 29:31: As a gamer yourself, right? You said you play on almost every system here that we have here. How often do you go into the support menu of other games, just kind of see what they’re doing and how they’re doing it?

Rustam Kuramshin: 29:31: 32:15: Or is it something that you don’t really… It’s a good question. I think if you want to be good at your customer role and even not only in player support, but only even all the customers. You want to ask yourself to go out and drop a message to different support teams. And sometimes it’s a good idea to test their nerves and pretend that you are not insane. For example, I just lost my progress and Watch how they respond on this message. The good artist, like copy, like, yeah, greatest still. Draw inspiration. Yeah. Inspirations. Because when you see different approaches, you can combine some like text messages or maybe tools or create a new tool, like internal tool, how to resolve the issue. or you understand that your FAQ isn’t good enough because, for example, in Asia, FAQs in Asian games, like, for example, in FAQs, they use like stars and they change the bullet list in the star like bullets. So they have a different approach in formatting FAQs. And like, I saw it, the last place where I saw it is on December. It’s an Action RPG game, and they use this type of like formatting, but in like Europe and USA style, I think it’s a good approach with bullet lists, one, two, three, and et cetera, maybe chapters and et cetera. But it’s also a good time to analyze in which FAQs, for example, this like support team uses GIFs or images because some cases we haven’t because we are people some better some of them it’s better to read the text some of them it’s better to just watch a video on youtube or gif or maybe image so yeah it’s different approach

Greg Posner: 32:16: 33:18: Yeah, I think it’s interesting, right? I mean, I know Helpshift, we do support kind of the different types of self-service versus agent. And it’s always interesting to understand what subset of users want to do self-service versus which subset of users want to provide an agent. And I think it all comes down to your point a little earlier. It’s like your FAQs, how are they formatted? Are they clean? Are they, again, it’s interesting. I didn’t know about it being different in certain parts of Asia, the different lists, but like, once you start knowing that, do you create separate, what you can do, right? Do you create different FAQs for them? And just picking up on those trends, I think is fascinating. I wouldn’t even think about doing that. And we mentioned about eight years ago is when in-app support started, and now we’re seeing other channels really kind of kick it into high gear where things like Discord, Reddit’s always been a little bit popular there. I How do you, A, do you even look at providing customer support on those platforms right now? Is it things you ever thought about? And how would you, I guess, how would you handle that or approach it?

Rustam Kuramshin: 33:18: 35:32: I looked at it. I haven’t like internal tested it, like on trial, but because or with a different approach. So Discord, I think they suspended like in-game SDK features. So it’s like less communication within the app. You need to, like for the players, if we will talk about the mobile games, it’s easier just to stick with one single channel. It’s like not only single channel because you have the basic one, email and the help service on your site and then in AppSport. So this is the main basic three types for the mobile thing. It’s good enough because the one will provide you with all the data about the player. If we will talk about console, for example, I think it’s like in HubShift, you have a QR code to open via a web chat to communicate with the support team using your phone. It’s harder to analyze data and help players in Discord, it’s harder. If you want to communicate with a little community, it’s OK. You can. Because it’s easier to communicate with, for example, 50, 100 active players. But if you have millions of active players, oh, it’s a mess. because of the lack of the like automations, custom bots, APIs, you will have like, you will have to hire so many agents for the manual work and not just automate this using the button, et cetera.

Greg Posner: 35:32: 36:11: Yeah, you know, it’s one of those things that in the app, you could control the full experience. You can pass through the data you want, The problem is you can’t really stop people from talking on Discord, right? And I mean, I don’t know. Helpshift does offer a Discord plugin. This is in the sales pitch, right? But again, you can’t capture all that information, right? We can capture things like the Discord username. And to start, it allows you to still keep your data from within the platform. But to your point, right? If it’s on your own proprietary system, whether it be your game, whether it be your website, right? Then you can at least control that data. the web or on Discord, it becomes a little more the wild, wild west where you don’t know what the type of data you’re going to get is.

Rustam Kuramshin: 36:11: 37:07: Yeah. Yeah. It’s because, for example, like in Twitter, I have some like cases when I contacted customer support through Twitter and they send me, for example, an email or link to their web chat, and then they communicate and resolve my issue within this channel, but not in the Twitter. In the DM, the Twitter. But if you want to help the players, you need to check Discord or Reddit on a daily basis, because it’s your active and mostly hardcore community. They will provide you with bugs and issues within the seconds when, for example, your update is delivered to the production.

Greg Posner: 37:07: 37:23: A little bit more about the role of player support team lead. When you wake up in the morning, there’s certain days you wake up, you’re like, yeah, I can’t wait to do this at work today, or days you dread because of something that happens. Well, what’s the type of exciting thing that gets you excited to get going in the morning and get working?

Rustam Kuramshin: 37:23: 38:44: Because we are working in the gaming industry, so we have like developing new features, new events. I want to help my, it’s not only about me right now, because when I, back in those days, when I was an agent, it just worked, worked only around me. So my goal, my, my, mine, et cetera. But right now it’s all about my team. I want that my team do something. So. they create, maybe some agent use chat GPT to create a new feature or maybe script to handle their daily routine task faster. And then we just asked our internal development team to create a single, like a new, not just like application, but a microservice to handle this on a daily. So just scheduled it. or the 8am, for example, mentioned me at Slack about how many issues created during the night or night shift. And yeah, it’s only about me, but about the team here.

Greg Posner: 38:44: 39:12: I think that’s a sign of a good manager, someone that gets excited about enabling others to achieve what they want, aspire where they go. I think that gets your team excited and wants them to probably work harder. On the flip side, something I struggled with a lot of my career is not knowing what’s next, right? You don’t know where your career goes. So as a player support team lead, where would you aspire to go? What would be your next logical step if you even thought about it?

Rustam Kuramshin: 39:13: 40:28: So I think the next step, maybe like bigger games, bigger approach, do things that I write, maybe scale my, like, if you created, for example, if you created a good game with a lot of players, so for example, like million players a day, your support team will scale. Even if you implemented bots, automations, et cetera, your team will scale because of how many players you have. And I think bigger team, bigger approach, maybe tools. Because I’m a tech-savvy guy, so yeah, I like tools. I like test new tools, implement them. And also I just, I’m providing my team with like technical presentations, how this feature works, how you can use this feature to test business logic. Is it working or not? For our example.

Greg Posner: 40:28: 40:55: You know, if I came to you like 10 years ago, I said, Rustam, what should I do to get into the industry and say, Hey, you make sure your email skills are good. You’re organized. You can keep up to date. similar things still these days, right? But now we’re in a whole new era where it’s not email. So say there’s kids who are young and want to get into the industry, the gaming industry, and they’re looking at maybe CS as being their approach. Any advice you would give people just to kind of, to get started on how to- Yeah, that’s a fantastic question.

Rustam Kuramshin: 40:55: 41:47: Yeah. So as a player support, I think, first of all, firstly, develop strong communication skills. In player support, you are not just assigning players with bugs. So not just assisting players with bugs or issues, but also, like you mentioned before, communicating with your internal team, product team, marketing team, and et cetera. And you need to train this skill to be a bridge between players and your development team, product team. So clear, prompt, and respectful communication, I think is essential.

Greg Posner: 41:47: 42:15: Communication is key. Communication skills? Yeah, I was going to say, communication skills are key, right? I mean, I think no matter what industry you look at, especially the face of the game to someone, right? I mean, when someone, a player reaches out and I’m working with one of your agents, right, they’re representing the game. And I think if you have sloppy typing skills, poor grammatical skills, right, that’s probably not the look your game and your company wants to have.

Rustam Kuramshin: 42:15: 43:55: Yeah. And that was, it will be my second point. So you need to understand your product because even if you are not like a mobile player, but you, a player, this means immersing yourself in the games and communities you are interested in. So it will help you to understand what frustrates players. For example, in the mobile games, you open the Reddit, you read it, and it helps you understand and combine information from issues. It’s easier to create a bug report for your product team. And also it will help you to meet their expectations because in most cases, in tickets, you will meet less good feedback, only negative highlights of their issues, progress transfer, payment issue, or game question. So you need to gather this information. So you must possess the patience of a saint in the customer support. In the world of player support and experience, not every player will be polite or understanding. And it’s important to keep cool and remain professional in all circumstances.

Greg Posner: 43:56: 44:09: I love that. I have experienced that many times in my life of trying to deal with unruly end users. And it’s hard to find a way to keep your cool sometimes.

Rustam Kuramshin: 44:09: 44:31: I think the last point is remember that the gaming industry is incredibly dynamic. Just keep learning and adapting with the changes. be new games, new communities or technological advancements and you’ll always be in a good position.

Greg Posner: 44:32: 44:52: So Rustam, I appreciate all that insight that you brought to our call today. I think it’s great to understand how you can succeed as a support rep, a technical agent, right? How you can kind of build out your career, how you can help your agents, how you can grow, how you can deal with them. There’s a lot of information here and cool stuff. So I appreciate that. And before we go today, is there anything else you want to share with our audience?

Rustam Kuramshin: 44:53: 45:11: Yeah, thank you very much. And let me say it’s not just a job, it’s a career, but a career that requires passion and dedication. If you love gaming and have the desire to create a real impact on players’ gaming experience, then there is no better field than this one.

Greg Posner: 45:12: 45:38: I love it. I love it. You can become the face of a game to some players that need help. And I think it’s super important. And I think it’s a great way to get started. That’s how I got started in my career. I think that a lot of people can get started very easily in customer support. And again, Rustam, thank you so much for joining us today. You can check out AppQuantum. We’ll send information about their website. We’ll send information about Rustam. So again, thank you for joining me today, Rustam. And I hope you have a great rest of your day. Thank you, Greg. Have a nice rest of the day too.