shinobi602
Member
A lot more at the link: http://www.cnet.com/news/how-electronic-arts-stopped-being-the-worst-company-in-america/
Quite a fascinating read.
Quite a fascinating read.
The day before Consumerist.com announced the worst company in America, Larry Probst was already pissed. That cloudy April day in 2013, Probst, interim CEO of Electronic Arts, called an emergency meeting of his senior leaders at the company's Redwood City, Calif., headquarters.
Probst knew that EA, which had grown into one of the world's largest video gaming companies since it was founded in 1982, was struggling: Its financial performance wasn't meeting expectations, its stock had fallen two-thirds over the last six years and a loud group of critics were probably about to crown the company the worst in America -- for the second year in a row.
"It was a hideous thing," Probst said of finding the company so hated. In that conference room on that cloudy Monday, with the executive team surrounding him, Probst "hit the roof," as one person described it. "The message I tried to deliver was, 'This will not happen again,'" Probst recalled in an interview a year and a half after the gathering. "'As long as I draw breath, this will not happen again.'"
Winning the worst company award served as a wake-up call for EA, helping to convince executives they needed to change the way they thought of their customers. That rethinking has paid off: Over the past year, EA's sales, which declined in the year leading up to Probst's April meeting, have swung back to growth. Profit has skyrocketed to $875 million from $8 million in 2014, and the company's stock price has soared.
All with little change in research and development investment and no dramatic layoffs.
Five months after taking over, on February 12, 2014, Wilson gathered 146 of the company's top leaders at EA's headquarters. Together with Gabrielle Toledano, EA's chief talent officer, Wilson hatched a plan to help them understand why so many customers were unhappy.
The group was led to the basketball court, which had been temporarily remade into a conference space with stations of computers and telephone lines. For hours, executives went through the steps of installing, troubleshooting and playing the company's games. They also listened in on customer service calls so they could hear firsthand players' frustrations.
"We weren't thinking about everything we were doing in the context of the player experience," said Wilson.
He knew customers were unhappy, but when he sat down and listened to a customer lash out at a service agent, it struck him. Some executives had been dismissive of customer complaints and even looked at the worst company votes as a fluke. They couldn't be any more.
Söderlund went back to his office in Sweden and faced a new challenge. There was an unexpected hiccup in the development of a highly anticipated new title, a futuristic war game called Titanfall. Söderlund had been trying out the game on the newest Xbox, the Xbox One, released in November 2013, and it was going great. But an engineer whose job was to ensure the game's quality said it wasn't running well on the older Xbox 360, originally released in 2005.
So he tried it and immediately knew it wasn't acceptable. The animations weren't running fast enough, and when he shot a virtual bullet, it didn't seem to hit at the right time. "We couldn't ship this," Söderlund said. So he asked EA's executive team to push back the launch by a few weeks.
Eighteen days might not sound like much, but delaying a big-budget game is no small decision. It isn't just a matter of keeping boxes off store shelves and sending an apology email to eager customers. Companies commit to advertising blitzes on TV, radio and the Internet. Shelf space and shipping partnerships are set months in advance. Changing things last minute can cost millions of dollars.