Appen Strengthens Customer Support Capabilities of a Gaming Company with AI

With Appen's platform, the gaming company was able to onboard new internal labels easily and the project team was able to grow efficiently.

Challenges

Appen provides high-quality training data with its leading technology platform, managed services, and its global crowd to power AI globally. A US-based large gaming company that is known for delivering games and online content to hundreds of millions of users globally approached Appen with a challenge. Gaming customers seldom seek customer support when they face a technical or gaming issue. For a satisfactory consumer experience, the company uses artificial intelligence-powered chatbots to manage support queries. With a global user base, player requests are often confusing or vague due to language limitations, creating difficulties for the AI model. 

To solve this issue, the gaming company needed to enrich their machine learning model with more data to train on, to support a broader scope of support requests. The goal was to equip chatbots with the capability to better comprehend and address customer needs. The team internally worked on annotating the past chat logs between customers and agents to serve as training material for the model, but only a single member from the team had the bandwidth to work on the massive effort. The tools were also limited, the team members used Excel documents and programs to collect labels which made it difficult to scale. The projects needed more resources and a comprehensive database for data storage. 

Initiatives

Appen's platform includes a set of functionality and tools that were capable of integrating with the gaming company's processes. The platform superseded the need for their various Excel documents and instead collated that information into a central data repository. With Appen's platform, the gaming company was able to onboard new internal labels easily and the project team was able to grow efficiently. Team leads used the platform to track the labelers based on valuable metrics like how long tasks were taken and how their performance compared to each other. Apart from that, team leads could also pull reports to compare data on key factors like trust scores and label accuracy. 

Results

Appen's platform allows the gaming company to scale its project team resulting in a number of benefits. The company discovered new and specific labels that enabled the application of increased granularity and nuance to support the issue. Its customers, in turn, received a more personalized experience that came with improved response times from the chatbots. 

Another benefit that was highlighted was that the time required to review the labeled data for completeness and accuracy was reduced greatly. This happened because more team members were integrated into the labeling process. Through Appen's platform, team leads were able to easily monitor contributors for performance and task fatigue along with leaving a way to make adjustments whenever required. 

During the inception of the project, the gaming company was able to develop more than 13,000 rows of data and that number increased 12-fold as the team expanded. Therefore, interactions between customers and agents have improved significantly as the chatbots were able to target support needs more efficiently. This continued success of the customer support model opened further opportunities for the gaming company which allowed them to explore play experience enhancements.