LIVE CHAT!!..Whats the point?

[Bronte Wade]

Has anyone ever had a problem solved by Live Chat?

I am a regional manager for a sim which hosts a 5 year old club. We have been receiving the most shambolic service recently, lag, crashes, hours of out take etc, yet anytime I contact Live Chat they offer little information and just point me to grid status - thank you I am over 5 years in sl I'm know where to look.

Live chat offers a lot of 'sorry for the inconvenience' 'we understand your frustration' 'we are doing everything to help' and they are exceptional at the shrug off but what I want to know is - who has had a great service from Live Chat or is it a service that irritating and pointless ....false hope even..

Please share your experiences ... Bronte



 

 

 

[Marigold Devin]

My own experience of Live Chat has mainly been positive, although I have had the impression that they don't all sing from the same hymn sheet, and as with all the Support services in place in SL, there needs to be much more consistency and training. 

[Peggy Paperdoll]

Out of roughly 8 (maybe up to 10) times using Live Chat (and the earlier Live Help) I've had only one instance where my problem was not resolved (and I believe that was the time I had made some changes in my preferences that caused my problem).  I'm not sure why people have problems with Live Chat but I think people actually believe the live helpers are sitting in the server room with access to everything that could possibly go wrong and can jump up out of their chair and go fix it on the spot.......that's not the case and most people would know that (but, from the gripes I read about Live Help, it seems that some do believe that).  Lag on a sim (especially lag in a club that is 5 years old) is often beyond LL's control........maybe they could boot some of the people on the sim it would help (but, as a club manager, would you really want that?).  Sim crashes are pretty rare now days........but excessive scripts could be the reason (maybe the sim owner can monitor that and resolve it if that is the case).  So many times LL gets the blame for problems that are not of their making........and when Live Chat can't fix it, they take the heat.  Not really fair if you ask me.

 

You asked for my experiences..........there they are.

[Bronte Wade]

I completely agree and if we weren't so particular in script management and keeping prims low I would be running off and sweeping up (if my sim was up and running).  But we restrict all staff personal scripts we create our own scripts where we can do keep lag to a minimum and I would never post here if I knew the fault would be down to us...

 

But we only have a quarter of prims spent, scripts are very low ......

[Marigold Devin]

You might also want to keep an eye on Oskar Linden's forum posts. It's probable your problems are to do with recent updates affecting LeTigre, Magnum, etc.

Transcripts of Oskar's User Group sessions can be enlightening for sim owners/estate managers also.

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Beta_Server_Office_Hours

Snippet from this week's User Group

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Beta_Server_Office_Hours/Minutes/2011-11-10

[15:08] Coyot Linden: We made an attempt on Tuesday to reorganize the grids to make it faster for everyone one.

[15:08] Coyot Linden: It didn't quite work

[15:08] Coyot Linden: for operational/technical/network reasons

 



[Caitlin Tobias]

In my 4,5 years I have had to contact Live Chat maybe 4 or 5 times and all the occasions they helped me out really fast and polite. I have had Lindens and Scouts in chat, and can't say I have had trouble.

I must add I never contacted them about crashes, lag or general performance issues, but about prims that stayed visible after deletion and ghosted avatars that kept on appearing - even after sim restarts. All solved within an hour maximum, in most cases I saw some Linden pop up on the sim while I still was in chat.

 

 

 

[Peggy Paperdoll]

What about the prims and scripts your patrons are wearing or using?  A 5 year old club has proven it's success so I can image it's one of the more popular clubs in SL.  There is going to be prims and scripts that are beyond your control........just like those that are beyond LL's control.  And you expect some "helper" who's experience in SL may range from extensive to almost nil to have the answers at their finger tips to give to you?  I agree with Marigold that the training should be somewhat more involved.  But, just like here in the forums, most the the issues and problem people experience don't require all that much "knowledge"........the problems are simple and easy to have the answers.  It's the tougher ones that stump even the most experienced and knowledgable among us.  Sometimes it's even the fact that we don't even get an accurate discription of the problem........the Live Chatters, I'm sure have the same problem about getting enough information to even offer any substanial help.

 

I'm not saying you aren't giving enough information.  I'm saying that for Live Chat to help most people, the Live Chatters don't need to be experts.  Just familar with the most common issues and the most common procedure to fix it.  That's all you can expect with a platform that has so many potential problems that can come up.  Manning the help lines with the grid monkeys and network programmers would probably help out a great deal........but that's a pretty big waste of man power for any company.  There's only so much that can be done by support when access to all the workings is not possible.  Maybe that's why I've had what I consider excellent Live Chat support..........I don't expect a fix on the spot but, instead, just information so that I can (more often than not) fix it myself.  Almost all the persistant problems I've ever had with SL were on my end or, occassionally, on my ISP's end.

[Bronte Wade]

thank you Marigold will look in to them - fustration has boiled over now, The past 10 days we have had so much down time and when we are up we are endlessly restarting and then when we are operating we are all glidng over the place and crashing.  We have dropped 15k in traffic too :-(

[Marigold Devin]

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Caitlin Tobias wrote:

In my 4,5 years I have had to contact Live Chat maybe 4 or 5 times and all the occasions they helped me out really fast and polite. I have had Lindens and Scouts in chat, and can't say I have had trouble.

I must add I never contacted them about crashes, lag or general performance issues, but about prims that stayed visible after deletion and ghosted avatars that kept on appearing - even after sim restarts. All solved within an hour maximum, in most cases I saw some Linden pop up on the sim while I still was in chat.

---

I had one of those "ghost avatars" that kept on appearing, even after the sim was restarted several times. Turned out it was actually on a bot program, and was auto relogging! I'd thought it was a ghost, because it was greyed out except for it's attachments and I could walk through it (this, by the way was a couple of years ago, before I got quite so involve with ghosted avs).

Sejong Linden was so patient with me. I didn't get him out via Live Chat though; it was a very fast response to a support ticket I submitted. I did feel rather foolish though for wasting Support's time that time. :matte-motes-confused:

[Freecilla Kuhn]

I've always had problem solved via live chat on the spot. The tickets are another story though, they go for days or weeks for a response / solution and in one instance months without being looked at. It all depends on how deep in the system the troubles are, if it due to a rolling restart or a UI update then yes many problems can occur that one even knows about at the beginning.

[Shaeria Greymoon]

I'm a bit confused here Peggy... Live chat personal have little to no experience with SL? what are they doing on the support staff then?  I myself had to tell the support the one time I called to check if my avatar was stuck. Couldn't log in for 12 hours.  It never even occurred to the person!! I was shocked honestly, as I was relatively new to SL at the time.  I find the Live Chat about as helpful as calling customer service for most companies where the person has never used the product.  Maybe Labs should train their personnel better?

[Peggy Paperdoll]

Well what do you want me to say?  I've had Live Chatters with less experience than I and they did help.  I believe the primary focus on "training" for a live helper is the ability to search the Wiki and Knowledge Base.......that's where the vast majority of the answers are after all.  Yeah, I think I agreed with Marigold that a little more extensive training would be nice (maybe even some minium age in SL requirement).  I don't know what the requirements are to be a Live Chatter (wouldn't want the job myself since I know the abuse some of us volunteers in Answers take from some of the posters, but I can walk away anytime....if I was on some type of "payroll" that option does not exist).

 

Most people expect "expert" support which is understandable.  But with a platform as complex and dynamic as SL who can truly be classified at "expert"?  Of the few who can claim that expertise, support is not the place to place that person.  I'm not even sure these live chatters are actually paid at all.......maybe they just get a free premium account for their compensation (who knows).

[Explosivegirl57]

hi !  Is it that someone french ?

[Mericatherine Quinnell]

Back during a reorganization I did some digging about live support.  This might be old data, but they did outsource live chat to a company that hires people to work from home at specific hours.  I went to the site and read the help wanted advertisement for doing live chat on SL.  I do not know what technical requirements are necessary for such a job, such as training, equipment and so on, but in my experience they appear to do their job.

If you have had any experience with live chats on sites such as your cable company, phone company or an ecommerce site such as Dell, you must realize that they have limited access to everything that company does.  Same with live chat for SL.  They can tell you where to get information, they can request a sim restart, how to file a ticket or check on the status of various functions in SL.  They CANNOT fix a host of other things such as sim problems -- that stuff is referred to the Lindens via a ticket.

I have had a number of live chat sessions for problems that were resolved to my satisfaction.  I had one experience that was sub-standard - I was getting the run around and was in a hurry - I broke off chat and started a new session with a new agent.  It made all the difference.

 

[Phil Deakins]

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Shaeria Greymoon wrote:

I'm a bit confused here Peggy... Live chat personal have little to no experience with SL? what are they doing on the support staff then?

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Live chat used to be manned by Lindens. Then LL farmed that particular support out to a support company in England (surnames were OnTyne). Then they changed support companies to one in the U.S. (surnames are Scout). In other words, Since LL staff stopped doing it, Live Char workers have little to no experience of LL and SL, and Live Chat support has deteriorated a lot. They can do some things but they are very limited.