Meet the Team - Sam Warren

This week's meet the team is Customer Service Manager Sam Warren

Sam Warren

Customer Service Manager


What does an average day at work look like for you?

My average day starts at 7am with a trip to the gym, a love of food and lack of exercise doesn’t mix well!

When arriving at work I have a range of daily responsibilities starting with contacting customers directly to managing the support team, analysing our top support issues and resolving them with the development team and working to improve our support levels to every last player.


What aspect of the game have you worked on that you are most proud of?

Since joining in February, the support team and myself have done lots of things outside of the game to be proud, of including:

- Turn around response time problems with support tickets

- Improve our quality of service to help support your issues better (e.g. losing your ship)

- Introducing the customer satisfaction surveys

- Introducing bug reporting on the forums and separating the support issues from the bug reports


What's your favourite thing about Elite: Dangerous?

The scope of exploration. CQC is pretty fun too, minus the fact that the team are far better than me.

What was the biggest challenge you came up against during game development?

Personally, my biggest challenge has been to build a bigger, stronger, effective support team that can stay on top of your issues, be vigilant on any new problems that crop up and ensuring our supportive development teams can provide you with the fixes you need.

Since joining, the support team now have 10 new members of staff. We record your problems and get fixes developed for them. We have eyes and ears on the forums, Reddit and social media to help ensure we can help out with any issue you have, every day of the week.


What have you learned from working on Elite: Dangerous?

Docking looks far easier than it is.


Tell the community a fun fact about yourself

Despite growing up with cats and being a cat person, I now have possibly the cutest shiba puppy that became internet famous for 48 hours. (click here to see Sam's dog)


If you could ask the community one question, what would it be?

“Have I answered your questions satisfactorily and offered good customer service?!”

Answer Sam's question in the thread below.
 
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Hey! Look!

Someone working in customer support for a company!!

Why aren't you going after him yet! Let's grab the pitchforks!!!!

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This is the correct response, right? :p



No, but seriously...your team have made huge improvements in response time when handling issues so keep up the good work! :)
 
Thanks! Customer support response time is amazing. I lost a ship due to a bug and it was restored within 5-10 minutes of sending the email.

It's also nice seeing the bugs on the forum now. During the beta it felt a bit like sending them into a black hole, so it's really nice that we can view and discuss them there.
 
Nice to meet you Sam, support can be a tough area to work in, you tend to get little recognition in most businesses unless something bad has happened.

Touch wood, I've never had cause to raise a support call but I'm sure you and your team are all doing a top job. Nice Simpsons collection by the way.
 
I have been happy with the resolutions for any ticket I have submitted. I think the customer service department does a good job of understanding but also making sure players take some (not enough in some cases) responsibility for their own actions.
 
Thanks Sam. Id love t o know how you plan to manage support and bug issues that players feel have fallen in to a black hole. We often see significant iusues raised and eventual response saying something alon the lines of 'under investigation and nown with the development team' and then nothing comes of it and no response for weeks maybe months. This gives the impression that the support team are not getting the feedback they need from developers in a reasonable time. Have you got any kind of internal SLA agreement with the development team to give solid responses to issues raised with them, if so what re they roughly?
 
Heh, I've not had the need to contact you since early beta :)

I do read a lot of the stuff in the support forum though, so thanks for that!
 
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Prompt and satisfying answer! That's what we have come to expect from FD support, so thank you very much Sam. Good luck with the Shiba puppy.

:D S
 
And do not forget that ED is not the only game of Frontier ... thus still more merit for Sam and his team (perhaps the team supports more that ED ?)
 
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