Anyone actually noticing an improvement in the ticket system?

[Siofra Alter]

Recently, my account was put on administrative hold. To be very clear, I don't have an issue with the concept of administrative holds.  There are idiots and worse out there and keeping them contained is important.  I was told I would have to use the ticketting system and wait for the ticket to be processed.  When I agreed to that, but explained I wanted my L$ refunded so I could arrange through alts to pay for market stalls and land rentals (yea - none of them were put on hold...  same RL details) I was told that wasn't possible.  Fortunately, my credit card company would disagree, and oddly enough, I was asked to provide photo ID and my administrative hold was lifted VERY quickly after that.

I do try to be polite when dealing with LL staff as they're about as stuck in the situation as I am, and I try to apologize when I'm not.  Since I tend to crabby when this sort of thing happens, I wanted answers as to why the hold in the first place and wasn't getting anywhere on the phone ("Linden Governance only communicates by email and tickets").  Since the original ticket had disappeared from my history (how odd), I made another and put all the emails in there.  Creation date on the ticket:  2011-03-22 09:28:50, actions to date by LL on the ticket as of now:  None.

Every time I blink, LL is telling me how much they've improved the ticket system and I am NOT seeing it!  Is ANYONE seeing improvements?  Am I just whiny?  (ok - bad question, obviously I'm whiny today *grins*).  However, would love to know if anyone's actually getting service for their membership $$. 

 

 

[Persephone Emerald]

I glad your administrative hold was lifted once you remined Linden Labs that you were a paying Customer who wanted your money back if you weren't going to be able to use their service. I think most of us get so used to the idea of being Residents in a virtual world, in which the Lindens are the ruling monarchy & we have no recourse to thier actions but to wait patiently for their judicial process to slowly turn it's wheels, that we forget we are also paying Customers for a computer service.

The TOS says lindens aren't really currency, but rather "tokens" that can be used to buy goods & services for use within the virtual world of Second Life. Well, isn't that exactly what currency is? RL money is just a bunch of tokens that can be exchanged for goods & services within the physical world. Gambling chips & video game tokens work the same way, and as far as I know governments don't usually allow their creators to revoke their monetary exchange value without giving a warning to their customers first. Not long ago, a man stole a large quantiy of gambling chips from a Nevada casino. In response, the casino revoked the monetary value of that style of chip, but not without anoucing a 30 day notice that anyone holding those chips could exchange them for new chips. (If the robber tried to exchange his chips, he'd be caught, since they had his image on video tape.)

We buy monetary "tokens" called lindens, which aren't really money, but which most US courts would probably view as being equivalent to money. Linden Labs knows this. They want us to believe they have all the power & we only have the power to play in their sandbox or go somewhere else, when really, we have the power of being Customers of a service that is answerable to the laws of Califorina & the United States.

 

[Darrius Gothly]

 

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Persephone Emerald wrote:

I glad your administrative hold was lifted once you remined Linden Labs that you were a paying Customer who wanted your money back if you weren't going to be able to use their service. I think most of us get so used to the idea of being Residents in a virtual world, in which the Lindens are the ruling monarchy & we have no recourse to thier actions but to wait patiently for their judicial process to slowly turn it's wheels, that we forget we are also paying Customers for a computer service.

The TOS says lindens aren't really currency, but rather "tokens" that can be used to buy goods & services for use within the virtual world of Second Life. Well, isn't that exactly what currency is? RL money is just a bunch of tokens that can be exchanged for goods & services within the physical world. Gambling chips & video game tokens work the same way, and as far as I know governments don't usually allow their creators to revoke their monetary exchange value without giving a warning to their customers first. Not long ago, a man stole a large quantiy of gambling chips from a Nevada casino. In response, the casino revoked the monetary value of that style of chip, but not without anoucing a 30 day notice that anyone holding those chips could exchange them for new chips. (If the robber tried to exchange his chips, he'd be caught, since they had his image on video tape.)

We buy monetary "tokens" called lindens, which aren't really money, but which most US courts would probably view as being equivalent to money. Linden Labs knows this. They want us to believe they have all the power & we only have the power to play in their sandbox or go somewhere else, when really, we have the power of being Customers of a service that is answerable to the laws of Califorina & the United States.

 

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This^^

 

[Setekh Ichtama]

 

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Siofra Alter wrote:

Every time I blink, LL is telling me how much they've improved the ticket system and I am NOT seeing it!  Is ANYONE seeing improvements?  Am I just whiny?  (ok - bad question, obviously I'm whiny today *grins*).  However, would love to know if anyone's actually getting service for their membership $$.

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Perception is everything

"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it."
-- Joseph Goebbels

To answer your question, your concern and frustration is completely justified in my opinion, especially when comparing response times (my biggest contention) with other companies I've dealt with since forever. Linden Lab has been struggling for a long time in the customer service area and they openly admit it but as far as radical change goes, I wouldn't expect a department this uncoordinated to correct itself overnight, as we all would like to see.

As far as service for membership goes, I dropped premium and have no reason to go back. As mentioned before on this message board, I got it mainly to improve customer service but it had absolutely no benefit whatsoever and live chat is rarely useful if ever.

[Lyra Blackthorne]

No I see the same kind of response as always.  I had a ticket in for a month before it was replied to and the reply mad me more frustrated than ever...it was some canned response that spoke to me like I was clueless and told me to read the wiki.  So no help, nothing new in that and no change either.

Live chat is no better since they seem to hire people who know nothing about SL

[Darrius Gothly]

 

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Lyra Blackthorne wrote:

No I see the same kind of response as always.  I had a ticket in for a month before it was replied to and the reply mad me more frustrated than ever...it was some canned response that spoke to me like I was clueless and told me to read the wiki.  So no help, nothing new in that and no change either.

Live chat is no better since they seem to hire people who know nothing about SL

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There is a methodology employed in the support departments of almost all technical companies these days  It is borne from an old saw known as RTFM (which stands for "Read The F****** Manual").

Basically it boils down to the observation that approximately 90% of all support questions can be resolved by simply reading the documentation already provided. Thus, if you provide a first-level support service of people that are hired and paid to RTFM to the customer, you will resolve 90% of the problems. Makes sense, huh?

Well .. yeah, but no.

These services use a form of "Scripting" wherein the Operator (in SL's case they were named Ontyne and now Scout) listens to the user (over the phone or by reading their support ticket) and then navigates their way through the script, following multiple-choice menus or typing in specific search words .. and eventually winds up at a canned response. One push of the button and that response is delivered to the customer. Presto, problem resolved.

Except when you get to complex environments like Second Life. True there are a large number of support issues that can easily be "Scripted" like this. Region Restarts, failure to rez properly, inventory issues ... issues of this nature almost always wind up at a Wiki or other document that explains and resolves the problem perfectly. But what happens when the delivered response doesn't resolve the issue? And what happens when the issue itself veers off the script into unknown territory?

In most support organizations, there is a methodology for escalating the problem to a Tier 2 or Tier 3 level support person. In the case of SL, this would be a Linden. Most support scripts contain pointers "off script" that give the Triage Operator instructions on how and where to pass the issue along. In the event the Triage Operator stays completely on script but the response given does not resolve the issue, there is a method for the customer to indicate so and then the issue is automatically escalated.

In the case of Lyra's issue above, there was no method provided to say "Gee thanks but .. WRONG. Give me someone with brains to answer this please." There was no path to Tier 2 or Tier 3. And even if there was, there isn't a person within Linden Lab either designated to resolve that type of issue or, if they do have knowledge about the issue, that will spend any time resolving it.

There used to be. It used to be that the Lindens recognized a need to handle support that rose above Triage level. Because the support team was staffed by Lindens, they also had internal knowledge of when, where and who to escalate issues as well. But now?

Every issue starts at Triage. Every issue ENDS at Triage. If you don't like the answer given, or the answer doesn't resolve your issue .. you go BACK to Triage and start again. You have to raise holy terror (or contact someone way up the chain like Rodvik) to get the issue resolved. There is no "Flow" upward in the support chain.

Recently Linden Lab posted a job opening for a support manager. We can only hope that the person hired understands the issues, the methodology ... and the failures that exist in their system now. If not then I fear we will be forever trapped listening to fleshy robots reading canned responses .. and growing ever more dissatisfied with the platform called Second Life.

(/soapbox)

[TonyTitan]

I can't complain with it.  I just joined Second Life last night, coming over from IMVU and had an issue where I purchased an item from the web catalog.  I received confirmation that I received it, but the item never appeared in my inventory....ANY WHERE.  So I filed a ticket, and within 3 hrs I received a response that the item would be delivered again.

 

So in that sense, I feel that I did receive a pretty fast response.  At IMVU, even with owning their VIP Subscription, I would have waited 24-48 hrs for them to respond.

[Abby10 Lenroy]

Me & my wife are premium members, and our tickets are always getting answer real quick. All the tickets that we send in get a response within the next 24 hours. Sometimes within the next 12 hours. And sometimes right after it went in the system.

My experience with LL support has always been good, never bad. Sometimes it gets frustrating, but we still get the answers. And we dont live in the US.

[Phil Deakins]

I can't say that I've noticed any improvements in the ticket system or deteriorations in it. Tickets do tend to get dealt with but it does take time.

Also, I haven't noticed any improvements or deteriorations in the AR system, which I've always found to be incredibly bad - perhaps apart from griefing that's going on at the time, they still appear to rubber stamp ARs rather than look at any facts concerning them - very similar to the way that this forum's moderation works.

I always found live chat to be excellent, right up until the time when they farmed it out to outsiders. Since then, it's been almost useless. "Almost" because they did restart this mainland sim for me when it was necessary to clear some ghosted prims.

[Vania Chaplin]

Maybe I am lucky, but I didn't need to fill a ticket or go to live chat for long. The last time I need, was before the cut of 30% of LL employees, so even if I use it today, I have no base for comparison.

On AR, after more than an year not using it, I’ve ARed a bunch of big, ugly, floating, turning around advertisement signs put in 3 plots in the sim were I have my store (yes, the guy was capable to break ALL rules on advertisement). In few hours, the sim was cleaned. So, I have no complaint on this service.

Maybe I am lucky, but I didn't need to fill a ticket or go to live chat for long. The last time I need, was before the cut of 30% of LL employees, so even if I use it today, I have no base for comparison. On AR, after more than an year not using it, I’ve ARed a bunch of big, ugly, floating, turning around advertisement signs put in 3 plots in the sim were I have my store (yes, the guy was capable to break ALL rules on advertisement). In few hours, the sim was cleaned. So, I have no complaint on this service.