Back on December 14th I pointed out that Local Payments were coming to an end. Local Payments, were a billing method for people outside the USA, which allowed people to pay tier and fees in a local currency. The information in the email advised people to update their payment information.
However there was a missing step, which seems to have caused confusion, it did for me anyway. The issue was that when I went to update my information, the information was already there on my account. I left it there, I didn’t see the point in adding it again when it already existed. D-Day passed, billing went fine and then came the second email, with a title of Final Reminder (which is always worrying):
“Dear Ciaran
This email contains important information that affects your Second Life account and requires action in order to continue any payment transactions with Second Life.
Due to the conclusion of the Second Life local payments beta program, it is required that you add a new credit card or PayPal account by going to your billing information page on Secondlife.com:
Although our local payments beta program ended for a small group, we have extended the deadline to update payments information to another date.
If your payment information has not been updated, your next automatic payment will fail, and you will receive automatic delinquent account messages notifying you of this failure. You may update your payment information at any point, but to prevent this failure, you must do so by a certain date.
If you have any questions or concerns, please visit our Knowledge Base.
Best Wishes,
Linden Lab and the Second Life Team”
Now this created great confusion for me, more confusion came later when a support ticket was created on my behalf to deal with the issue, indeed in the support ticket I mentioned how confused I was. a Scout then contacted me both inworld and then via the ticket telling me to delete my information and add it again, this is something I’ve done in the past when there have been billing issues, however by this time I was three sheets to the wind and decided to go back and do it today.
Today, I found my billing information had been deleted for me, by some kind soul, which made the whole process far more intuitve, but I can imagine that some people will be as confused as I was by the whole issue. I must say the response from the Scouts was polite, prompt and an excellent example of great customer service, I hope they keep it up.
I used to complain about the Scouts, their service can seem very erratic. It is important to realize they are worker bees in the LL hive. They work off a script and a set or rules. They have the ability to be extremely helpful if they are not swarmed with work, or suffering from a cold, or if it is not the last 10 minutes of their work day! Since I began reminding myself that they are just workers doing their job as best they can I have had no problems with the Scouts and sometimes I have had help beyond their call to duty.
Support people, those on the frontline, often get the flack for procedures and policies of those above them, a while back I was complaining that they couldn’t create tickets for me when I contacted live chat, but that’s more likely a policy issue than the person being unhelpful, of course support folk have bad days where they are unhelpful, that’s human nature but yes, they are just doing their job, in this instance the support was very good.