The economy may not be completely back on its feet yet but with companies like EA creating new jobs, we may well be on our way. EA has launched the grand opening of their 50,000 square-foot Worldwide Customer Experience Center in Austin, Texas boasting over 300 new jobs for locals.
“It’s really about building out our competency in supporting the tens of millions of consumers that interact with us everyday. This is an important part of our strategy as we continue to build out games that are more service oriented now and in the future,” said EA COO Peter Moore about expanding in Austin.
“So we’re looking to address customer needs, issues they may have with a game, issues they may have in commercially transacting with us, issues they may have in understanding what they need to do to progress in a game (we get a lot of calls asking to be helped through a section of a game) – so all of that is done here via telephone, email and in a lot of instances now through in-game chat. So this is the global headquarters and it’s where we manage all of our customer service centers around the world.”
“When we put roots down there, the government of B.C. welcomed us and supported us and we became a tentpole for bringing in digital talent – not only for us but for companies sprouting up alongside us, and I expect to continue to see that here in Austin. I’m very excited about our growth in Austin,” he added.
Currently EA has more than 600 employees in Austin, spread across Bioware, EA Sports, IT, and the Worldwide Customer Experience team. “Texas is a great place to make games, and Austin is a great market for EA. As we opened the doors on the new Worldwide Customer Experience Center yesterday in front of many of our Austin employees, Peter Moore remarked, “It’s only going to get bigger from here.”
Alex Atkin UK
January 11, 2012 at 3:01 PMThis is something they badly needed. The customer experience of EA is generally pretty bad. They have an official forum for problems which they do not bother to respond on, most bug/problem reports just go unfixed.
Literally everyone I know has the belief that EA = shoddy work and servers that kick you offline all the time. Most people I played Need for Speed Hot Pursuit against stopped playing the game because Autolog only worked 50% of the time, the same goes for all EA games with online functionality.
Lets hope this means they are finally taking the customer experience seriously because its had years of neglect.