Artyom Rudakov, Head of SOFTSWISS Managed Services: “Our reliable First Line Support acts as a safety net, guaranteeing uninterrupted operations”
Artyom Rudakov, Head of SOFTSWISS Managed Services, sat down with Focus Gaming News for an exclusive interview covering the benefits of their First Line Support.
Exclusive interview.- Managed Services is a part of SOFTSWISS solutions offered to clients to facilitate their iGaming brand growth. One of the core services is First Line Support, a 24/7 live chat and email support delivered in 3 languages: English, German, and Russian. Please take a look at what Artyom said about it.
How would you describe the role of First Line Support in collaboration with SOFTSWISS’ clients?
In today’s iGaming industry, First Line Support is a must-have solution. It’s not just about efficiently processing requests, it is also crucial for licensing purposes. That’s why the biggest brands trust us – we reliably handle both aspects.
Our goal is to improve both brand owner and player experiences. We work simultaneously in several directions – people development and performance management, workload analytics and distribution, team restructuring, tool upgrades, reporting, and quality control.
What are the advantages for brands to choose your First Line Support team instead of building their own?
Choosing our First Line Support brings numerous benefits to brands. The team consists of 120 iGaming business-oriented professionals who also strictly follow responsible gaming principles. Their expertise aligns with international gambling licence requirements, including Maltese regulations.
Our team is proficient, stress-resistant, and flexible to handle any player requests, including those struggling with gambling addiction. Our experts are located in several countries worldwide and provide 24/7 support to players in different languages, ensuring a smooth and uninterrupted service.
Our First Line Support team covers hiring, training, onboarding, and managing processes so clients can focus on building their brands. To efficiently handle workloads, we rigorously track KPIs. For example, we deal with nearly 300k chats with around 130k withdrawal requests monthly, ensuring prompt responses to each of them.
But what we are most proud of is our ability to fast-scale the service. Depending on the size of the client, we provide them with either shared services or a fully dedicated team. We can balance our resources tailoring our approaches based on the clients’ needs. In other words, we save operators time by offering them the highest quality services and customised solutions.
“In today’s iGaming industry, First Line Support is a must-have solution. It’s not just about efficiently processing requests, it is also crucial for licensing purposes.”
Artyom Rudakov, Head of SOFTSWISS Managed Services.
Could you provide any specific examples of such a scaling process?
Sure, last November, about 20 operators faced a critical situation. Their third-party first-line support couldn’t handle the player enquiries and turned off its services due to the force majeure. This left the operator scrambling for a solution, and they turned to us with an urgent request.
We had to redeploy the support as fast as possible. It took our specialists less than 24 hours to plug in all the required services, dedicate the team, and provide all the instructions from scratch.
By the way, this case is not an exception – each year, we have 3-4 similar challenges when either a client’s support provider lets them down or their in-house team fails to cope with the request volume.
Our reliable First Line Support acts as a safety net, guaranteeing uninterrupted operations for our clients. This approach helps our clients keep their players’ loyalty, and this, in turn, fosters operators’ loyalty to SOFTSWISS.
What are the main requests your team receives?
The inquiries are generally typical for the field – everything related to bonuses, deposits, withdrawals, and verification. Bonus appeals constitute around half of all requests, with a nearly equal share for the rest of enquiries.
We are proud of our meticulous approach to withdrawal requests. Each withdrawal undergoes manual checks aligned with a client by a dedicated sub-team that ensures the KYC, AML, and other crucial criteria are met. Funds are released only after such thorough checks.
“Our reliable First Line Support acts as a safety net, guaranteeing uninterrupted operations for our clients.”
Artyom Rudakov, Head of SOFTSWISS Managed Services.
Can you elaborate on some of the key projects you are implementing to improve the quality of services for clients?
Our services go beyond just commercial enquiries. Currently, we focus on request quality analysis. For that, we employ an AI-based third-party tool that not only evaluates support chats themselves but also measures positive or negative patterns in players’ moods.
Also, we consider it crucial to address safer gambling concerns promptly. For example, in March, we emphasised the significance of personal stories of problem gambling. We distributed resources among operators to assist players struggling with gambling addiction. This effort was part of the Problem Gambling Awareness Month organised by the National Council on Problem Gambling.
