Esports and CX, How Are They Related?
Hey everyone! I have been away from writing for a little bit to catch up on other life things, but I am glad to be back! I will preface this with the fact that I am by no means an esports expert at the moment, but I do know customer experience, and I have thought of some ways these two areas can overlap. By the end of this article, I want you to leave with the strategies to define who your customers are in any situation. And hopefully, you can incorporate that into your esports projects!
Every industry has customer experience regardless of what you are actually doing or who your customers are. So whether your role is specifically customer service or not, everyone has a customer. It is up to you to define who your customer is and how you can best serve them. The customer could be the actual end-user, or it could simply be the technician you are designing a system for. Regardless of your specific job duties, your customer is generally the next person in line once you are done with your portion of the work.
So many universities, colleges, and K-12 schools are offering some sort of esports program, whether for a degree, credits, or just for fun. In all cases, there are various staff members who work on implementing and supporting these activities. There are the technicians and engineers who help build and maintain the space daily and the AV/IT teams that support the connected services like the network and servers for operation. Then there are the active participants of the program. These include the players, coaches, teachers, and shoutcasters, all of which have different customers to be on the lookout for. Many people looking at this would only see the players as the end-users; therefore, they are the only customers. This is a flat customer structure, and to lay it out visually would look like this:
When in reality, the customer structure should be much more focused on individual customers like this:
Regardless of what position you hold, think about who your most immediate customers are. It may not always be the group that your institution considers the customer. Notice in the graphic above that by analyzing the flow of work; you can figure out that some groups serve multiple customers and can determine what should be priority when providing a service. Obviously, there is an end-goal (the “why”) that may be affecting the final end-user, but there are so many layers that if each person focuses 100% of their efforts on their own customer(s), they will inherently be more successful. Communicate thoroughly with your customers and work to figure out what they need the most. If that means you need to reach out to someone else for service, you have then taken over the role of customer and are hoping to have a great experience that will trickle down to the end-user. When each individual team focuses on their specific customer, it leads to better service and a better overall experience.
I hope this was helpful, and I hope you can apply it to your esports projects and any other projects you are working on! If you have any questions or just want to chat, always feel free to reach out.