Activision pulled off the most successful launch in entertainment history with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3®. Bigger than any other game, movie, or album before it, Modern Warfare 3 eclipsed $400 million in sales across North America and the U.K. in the first 24 hours it was on sale. Sales went on to hit $1 billion in just 16 days, setting another record. Modern Warfare 3 was a hit because Activision knows gamers. Activision loves making games and it loves talking to gamers about making gaming better. The company also knows that when something goes awry, gamers want customer service that flows organically into the stream of their online lives. So in the wake of the success of Modern Warfare 3, Activision worked with Salesforce to create a new way of listening to its customers. “It’s all about being personal and interacting with people the way they want to be interacted with,” said Robert Schmid, CIO. “I personally don’t like calling somewhere. I just hate hanging on the phone.” The customers who play Activision’s games don’t much like waiting on the phone, either, so Activision deployed Marketing Cloud’s Social Studio to bring customer service online. Using Marketing Cloud, the team can easily track and monitor all relevant tweets and conversations on social media, with the goal of increasing player engagement. All interactions are uploaded to Service Cloud where social conversations are matched back to existing customers for follow-up. In the first year after integration, Activision saw some pretty big changes. Customer tweets about bugs in game play became relationship builders as well as service calls. Employees across departments now collaborate internally to find fixes to issues posted on social media — Activision calls this “swarming.” Replies on Twitter and Facebook not only resolve issues, they become content for use by social, service, and marketing teams. Conversations about related brands and industries of interest are tracked and routed to sales reps as new leads, automatically. Activision unlocked a new level of customer service – you can think of it as social customer care.