Guild Launch is doing their Dragon Slayer Awards and Blizzard is one of the nominees in the top community management team category. Blizzard was established in 1994 and has been delivering quality-focused games since then. You may recognize some of their popular games series: World of Warcraft, Diablo, and StarCraft. They have provided fans with various collectible items as well as apparel, comics, mangas, action figures, novels, and more.
First of all, what is a community management team?
A community management team is responsible for managing resources and problems effectively. These people are usually volunteers and stakeholders. To be clear, they are not customer support. In a gaming community, they are the people who answer common questions in the FAQs, as well as post opinions and news in the community forums. They do their best to make sure people are getting their questions and concerns answered and fixed by customer service.
What’s Blizzard like as a community management team?
A complaint from a customer, Umumaru, stated that:
“Their job is to grin and bear it, regardless of how wrong the customer is. They tell them what they want to hear (and let’s not pretend that Blizzard doesn’t do this to us) so that they go away.”
Zarhym, a community manager, disagreed with this and also reminded the person that these concerns should be taken to customer support because community managers, while related to customer support, are primarily focused on the public relations of the company.
An important point that Zarhym stated in response was that:
“One of the biggest components of our jobs is community engagement. We can’t effectively be functioning members of the community, relate to the community on a personal level, and maintain a two-day dialog in discussions which largely revolve around subjective experiences and opinion, if our job is to “grin and bear it.”
He encourages people to come to forums to discuss both positive and negative comments about Blizzard, but to be reasonable. Their role in the community is to focus on the gameplay and philosophies of the games, rather than the technical issues, and report the feedback of the community to the customer support. The community management team really focuses on people as human beings, rather than a problem that needs to be solved. In their responses, you can see that the person takes the time to explain their point of view to the person complaining, and make them as satisfied as possible with the service the company is providing.
In conclusion…
Blizzard seems to be doing a decent job of maintaining their communities. They are hard-working people who maintain community organization, keep up with fan sites, draft content preview articles, and a whole lot more. Of course, there are some improvements to be made, but no one’s perfect.
