i3D.net's superior service desk

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How the service desk at i3D.net keeps customers happy

Pim Bazuin

Team Lead Service Desk

17 October 2023

Signing up for game hosting products and services is easy these days, considering the process can usually be completed online or through a quick chat with a sales representative. Most websites of the big cloud providers will tell you that you can sign up for game hosting services of your choice at the click of a mouse button, but what comes after can sometimes be unclear. Yes, you will technically get the resources you pay for with the premium cloud products. Any other added bells and whistles you sign up for will also be available.

However, when things are not streamlined and a little more is needed, game developers — with potentially millions of players worldwide — need more than just a live chat or a status update. This is exactly why i3D.net has looked to prioritize its service desk to respond to any concerns or issues highlighted by clients in real-time, alongside offering support that often goes beyond just oversight over i3D.net’s products and services.

Then again, what even is ‘good service’? How do you ensure the customers are kept happy and there is room for the team to be able to assist customers and provide them with what they need? Our customers have often stated that the i3D.net service desk and its responsiveness have led to their satisfaction, alongside of course, the superb performance of our products and the reliability and high performance of the network. But for the purposes of this article, let’s stick to the subject. Allow me to walk you through what we do here at the service desk at i3D.net, and why customers continue to send us positive reviews.

What i3D.net’s service desk offers

Before moving on to the efficacy of the service desk, it is important to understand what its responsibility entails. The idea behind a service desk is to offer support, which in modern terms, means that customers can use the ticket system on i3D.net’s portal, receive support through email or even just by talking to us over the phone — we will never hide our phone number to avoid responding to our customers. If you are responsible for online communities, you want to be able to give someone a call that is picked up straight away to help you in your job.

Direct line to experts and the inherent full-ownership advantage

Then, of course, there is something that sets us apart. This is the more direct line to our team of network engineers, server engineers, game hosting experts and our management on Slack to resolve pressing issues. The level of response and our ability to even handle issues outside our scope is enabled by full ownership of the infrastructure stack — we know what can go wrong in all spheres due to our management of the whole hosting process.

i3D.net’s service desk outshining competitors

On the surface, many of these features are standard for other players in the industry as well, but since our customers are well-entrenched in the industry and have experience with most of the big cloud and connectivity providers, they have told us that the biggest difference in our service is the high responsive rate and the fact that this response usually brings substantive solutions to the table.

“When talking to other companies, most conversations go through the salespeople or account managers. When you have a technical question, it is hard to directly get in touch with technical people. Sometimes they send you from department to department, by phone or email, this way you lose information. When working with i3D.net we directly get in touch with the departments we need. This allows us to solve problems quickly.”

Mark Smith, Director of Infrastructure at Discord

Read more about Discord’s experience with i3D.net.

Our service desk team is composed of experts in game hosting, server management, infrastructure and everything in between, who actually understand the issues that might surface with game launches and unpredictable concurrent user numbers. Once an issue has been identified, the respondents will look to first establish contact with the customer and get more details of what is needed.

i3D.net: Where game hosting expertise shapes superior support

Managing a global network of players or users is never easy. There are a multitude of factors that affect CCU — it is very hard to predict how gamers will receive a title or respond to it in the months and years to come. Peak hours can have a player count that is exponentially bigger than other times, and sometimes this can vary day to day, hour to hour.

“The i3D.net team has experience in helping manage these unpredictable periods with the studios, to burst into specific locations as needed and advise developers on the best course forward.”

Handling launch–day unpredictability with onsite assistance

The launch day of a modern multiplayer title is crucial for the initial effect a game can have on its future player base. While those generally interested in a genre or theme might stay for longer, a lot of players trying out a game for the first time will gain or lose interest depending on their experience. For the developers, the day revolves around constant monitoring of graphs and numbers to see if everything is working and if the resources deployed are enough to make sure the player experience continues uninterrupted.

i3D.net has even gone the extra mile to help game studios at this stressful juncture, by deploying dedicated experts to assess locations, player count numbers and other network-related factors to make sure your players can enjoy the game you intended for them to experience. We have even dispatched team members on occasion to work at the game studio’s office to make sure this assistance is on hand to take proactive decisions at a moment’s notice.

Our experts are also there to help identify any issues that might arise in other aspects of online multiplayer gameplay. i3D.net’s team has been on hand to assist in aspects such as multiplayer infrastructure scaling and anti-DDoS protection for titles like Rocket League, The Division and FIFA, identifying issues that could affect player experience.

Supporting some of the most popular game titles

Our customers have also leveraged the service desk to get the most out of some of our game-hosting products. The service desk offers a direct line for all our customers to the experts they need — whether this entails support for products or involves keeping the developers and studios informed with performance metrics and regular reports — we are on hand to help customers 24/7.

Our team has worked with some of the biggest multiplayer games to maintain performance thresholds and carry out adjustments in specific locations to resolve any issues that may surface.

Regular updates and transparent reporting

This one may sound a little obvious, but it is also important for your compute and connectivity partner to communicate and keep customers informed of global network incidents. While a backbone network like ours has planned multiple redundancies and alternative routes to ensure that a natural event has minimal impact on the network, it can still happen. This is why regular communications with all our customers and giving them regular updates about the network is part and parcel of what we do here at the service desk.

Our customers can also subscribe to receive automatic updates for network and service updates, or the newsletter to receive a set of general technical information.

Looking to the future

Going forward, the objective is to continue doing what we do and look to provide more data and information to customers that are interested. This would mean even more real-time granular information about specific servers at locations, usage drops, or changing CCU numbers. The objective of the service desk will continue to be responding to customers’ requests and communicating with them to ensure that they have the information they need to make the best decisions for their players and end users.

We will also continue to investigate reasons for any outages — small or big — because this is something that our customers really value. Whether this means investigating why a single server is down in a specific location or whether there is a regional outage due to local ISP issues: we will continue to take this additional step that is often not considered by the bigger hosting providers such as AWS and GCP. This is greatly valued by our customers and an important part of why those in the i3D.net ecosystem swear by the excellent service we provide. I would like to commend the efforts of my team, and hope that we continue to satisfy our customer base!

Main Take-Aways

Take an inside look at what the i3D.net service desk does and how it stands apart in its service offering compared to cloud and connectivity providers in the industry.

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How the service desk at i3D.net keeps customers happy

Table of Contents

What i3D.net’s service desk offers

Direct line to experts and the inherent full-ownership advantage

i3D.net’s service desk outshining competitors

i3D.net: Where game hosting expertise shapes superior support

“The i3D.net team has experience in helping manage these unpredictable periods with the studios, to burst into specific locations as needed and advise developers on the best course forward.”

Handling launch–day unpredictability with onsite assistance

Supporting some of the most popular game titles

Regular updates and transparent reporting

Looking to the future

Main Take-Aways

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