No matter how robust a player support team might be, every game studio or publisher must contend with occasional coverage gaps. Sometimes a team member gets sick, leading to fewer available members. Sometimes there is a surge in player inquiries, requiring a ramp-up in service. There might even be an unexpected rise in the number of uncommon or unsupported languages, for which there is no in-house solution. These occurrences are increasingly endemic to a player support team, especially in our connected age, where a game can become popular in any geographical region. 

Fortunately, we’ve had enough experience with these occurrences to have developed a solution.  

What is it exactly? 

RESOLVE™ is a neural machine translation solution that helps teams manage unexpected coverage gaps, allowing the timely resolution of player issues and inquiries. This tool offers clients a cost-effective option to maximize their team’s productivity while maintaining service levels. 

Why did we develop it? 

 “As part of our mission to build technology-driven solutions to problems throughout our industry, we created a platform that addresses many of the localization pain points our clients have repeatedly voiced,” said Deborah Kirkham, Chief Executive Officer of PTW. “With RESOLVE, we now offer flexible, cost-efficient machine translation with features that check all the boxes—it’s a game-changing solution.”

Neil Long, Senior Director of PTW Player Support, added, “RESOLVE was developed from the ground up by our engineering and game localization experts who are innately familiar with the challenges our clients face. This solution is not only scalable, but it’s efficient and can bring immediate cost savings to anyone spending too much money on inadequate support.”    

The solution was developed in response to three core challenges:  

1) Managing unplanned events causing a surge in service requests
2) Tending to unforeseen coverage gaps across languages due to unplanned absences  
3) Allowing teams to respond to inquiries from unsupported languages and where the low volume does not warrant hiring a full-time agent 

In these situations, either players wait longer to have their issues resolved, or costs can increase as additional resourcing is required to continue to meet service levels.

Who will find it useful?  

Any business with a multilingual support team will find RESOLVE extremely valuable. The larger the team, the more efficient and effective the solution can be, as clients can leverage their own paid resources to perform post-editing.  

However, the solution can benefit teams of any size, especially smaller indie studios who might not have the budget to staff up for full multi-language support coverage. These smaller teams really take advantage of the solution’s ability to provide coverage if a language team has agents on holiday and experiences sickness in the team, meaning they are short-staffed to handle normal ticket volumes.

How does RESOLVE work?  

To construct this solution, we leveraged the power of industry-leading neural machine translation engines that can be optimized for each game with glossaries, tone of voice customization, entity protection, profanity filter, and other fine-tuning techniques. 

They are connected to the translation memory—the client database where previous data is stored and reused to speed up the process and reduce costs. RESOLVE integrates seamlessly with a partner's CRM. 

We understand that agents are not translators or linguists, so RESOLVE includes an intuitive post-editing portal. The connection to the TM/CAT tool happens in the background so agents only see the editable text like in any other chat.

Our game-expert linguists are always available in case of team shortages, providing additional post-editing support beyond our partners’ resources when required. RESOLVE simply provides the final piece of the player support puzzle, allowing overburdened teams to receive, translate, and respond with accuracy in a timely manner.  

With this new neural machine translation solution, teams can read and write player tickets in their native language; exchange emails and chat with people from anywhere in the world as if they spoke the same language; integrate seamlessly with CRM to empower agents to understand and respond rapidly to global player enquiries; remove language as a barrier to the global player experience by combining machine translation technology with post-editing shared agents; and deliver the speed and scale of machine translation with the authenticity that comes from native speakers. 

For more information on RESOLVE and how to incorporate it into your workflow, contact us for a demo.