Player Support Specialist
With over 10-million of them around the world, and with a number that grows every day, our players are at the heart of what we make at Hinterland. We are looking for a Player Support Specialist to help us provide best-in-class support for anyone encountering technical or quality issues with the experiences we make.
In this role, you will take ownership for the Player Support portal, responding to support queries and keeping the portal up to date with well-researched FAQs. You will monitor social channels and forums (both official and external) with an eye to reports on issues being experienced by players. You will need to be able to process highly technical information about the game and players’ platforms, collect details about bugs, handle reporting diagnostics, and communicate effectively as a bridge between players and the Test team.
Your effectiveness will shine when we see the team’s ability to quickly respond to player support issues with information or hotfixes due to your excellent, clear, and specific communication. Player good-will is protected when support issues are resolved quickly, transparently, and to their satisfaction.
As the first point of contact for many of our players, and sometimes those who are having a frustrating experience with our games, it’s important that you are able to maintain a professional demeanour and not get easily phased. You are a representative of Hinterland and therefore should consider yourself as a kind of concierge service, providing friendly, helpful, and professional communication with a customer-centric mentality. We also pride ourselves in protecting our staff from online harassment of all kinds, and so you will work through anonymous studio accounts, and we will hold all issue reporters to the same high standards we hold our player community to. We have a zero-tolerance for abuse of any kind, and will always prioritize team safety above all things.
The Player Support Specialist role stands at the crossroads of community, customer support, technical support, and is a great opportunity to get a bird’s eye view of many different areas of game development and operations at Hinterland, an independent self-publishing developer. You’ll get to experience what it’s like to work alongside the project development teams, as well as within the broader publishing and operational infrastructure of the company.
Your Contribution
Through your hard work, player issues will be communicated to the development and test teams so that they can be resolved quickly and efficiently. Players will feel heard and will appreciate their issues being addressed, which will then strengthen their good feelings towards our games and our studio.
Your Responsibilities
Check all major game channels on a daily basis with a specific eye to technical or customer support issues, responding where possible, looking for trends, and escalating issues to the dev team as you encounter them. This includes official forums, Steam, social channels, support emails, and the support Portal itself.
Report issues to the Test team, in an efficient manner that optimizes the dev team’s ability to identify, recognize, triage, and fix player issues.
Maintain and improve the Support Portal with accurate and well-conceived FAQs.
Understand the game(s) and the team(s). Be aware of what issues exist in the internal bug databases and use your view of the player community as a way to help the dev team solve issues more efficiently.
Hold yourself to an extremely high level of professionalism in your communication on behalf of Hinterland.
Be a visible (but anonymous) point of contact in our high-traffic community platforms, so that players recognize our efforts to support them with their issues. Do this while remaining collected and “above the fray” of typical internet and forum discussions.
Be an active practitioner of Hinterland values, and a representative of the studio and brand in all your interactions with players.
Manage and maintain Support-centric social channels, as directed by the studio.
Write accurate and well constructed FAQ and other useful Support documentation, some of which will be published on our Support Portal.
Collect and collate player feedback metrics on a regular basis, to track the relationship between Support response and player sentiment.
Be strongly present and an active participant in our project Launch days (updates, hotfixes, new releases, etc.). Launch days tend to be very busy for Support!
Your Skills & Experience
Excellent customer service skills. Experience in retail and other customer-facing roles in software or game companies is strongly valued.
Very strong English writing skills.
Professional communication experience. A background in technical writing or other writing would be highly applicable.
Good knowledge of PC and console hardware, and strong video game literacy.
Previous experience using bug databases, ex. JIRA
Comfort with common documentation tools, including MS Word and the Google Suite.
Previous experience in player support for well-regarded games and studios will be highly valued in this role.
Previous experience in game software testing, and experience with console testing, will be highly valued in this role.
Knowledge of our game(s) will be highly valued in this role!
Salary Range: $55,000 - 70,000 CAD annually
Hinterland is an equal employer and as a remote-first organization, we hire the best talent globally. To ensure we are equitable and fair, the salary range listed above is provided as a gauge and is indexed specifically to candidates based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, where our studio is headquartered. This range represents multiple skill levels, as we encourage candidates from all backgrounds to apply with us, acknowledging that cultural disparities historically disadvantage non-white and non-male applicants. The range is generated based on research using a combination of publicly and privately available data. We take a holistic approach to compensation and consider factors such as skills, experience, and cost of living, to ensure we pay fairly and equitably within our team. This means we may modify the range based on the candidate's location. In addition to an annual salary, we have no probationary period, and all employees receive our health & wellness benefits package on their first day.
ABOUT HINTERLAND
In an industry not known for taking care of its people, Hinterland strives to be different. We believe that the diversity, points of view, experience, and individual backgrounds of our team members contribute to a rich mosaic that helps us create better experiences, and helps those experiences reach a wider audience.
Hinterland is an equal-opportunity employer. We encourage applicants from all backgrounds to apply for our positions, regardless of ethnicity, social class, sexual orientation or identity, or religious affiliation. We value seniority and experience for our senior and leadership roles, but are always looking for ways to bring diverse viewpoints and experiences from across the spectrum of entertainment and technology.
We embrace a flexible working environment that focuses on high-autonomy balanced against high personal accountability. All our positions are remote-first, focused on finding the best fit for culture and talent. This remote-first flexibility is balanced with a physical studio in Vancouver, which is optionally available (COVID-permitting) to anyone on the team who wants to use it. We strengthen our team bond through offsite retreats, where we focus on creating memories together. We feel this balance of remote and in-person opportunities creates the strongest alloy for our culture.
We encourage everyone on the team to find balance between work and life, and never ask anyone to compromise one for the other. We are a No Crunch studio. We have high expectations of the level of commitment and the quality of the work done by our team, and trust everyone to manage their own schedule and workload. We offer a generous bundle of benefits and vacation time, and strongly encourage our team members to enjoy the 5+ weeks of paid time off we offer annually. We are a family-first studio and offer a range of tools to support our team and their growing families.
For more information about how we work, we encourage you to read this description of our Culture, written by our Founder.