This evening I arrived home from work and after indulging in a traditional Friday evening meal of Fish and Chips opened my email to find an an offline IM regarding a sim being offline. Logged in and sure enough the sim was offline. Therefore I decided to contact concierge live chat, for the first time in quite a while.
After being pointed to the SL Grid Status page that indicated that hardware maintenance was in progress, I was eventually told to file a ticket, the live chat operator informing me that all offline region reports should be submitted via a support ticket and that this was pointed out in a previous blog post. I couldn’t recall reading about this in a blog post, but then again I rarely notice the blog these days. However I think I’ve found the blog post in question, it’s in the SL Grid Status report linked from the original SL Grid Status report I was pointed to:
“Ongoing Issue with Offline Regions
[POSTED 10:28AM PST, 12 November 2011] We are aware of a problem that causes regions to go offline more frequently than normal. Our developers were alerted to the issue over the weekend and continue to work around the clock towards a solution. We understand how disruptive this is to your inworld experience. If your region is offline, please go to your support portal and submit a case using the following types: “Land & Region” > “Report an Offline Region”. This queue is being closely monitored to ensure the fastest turnaround possible. We will post an update as soon as we have more information on resolution.”
Now I appreciate that I probably should have checked the SL Grid status page quickly and the issue was resolved extremely quickly once I submitted a ticket but there are a couple of customer service issues here, if I contact live chat they should be able to submit support tickets, indeed I had one created for talking to live chat. The sim was up within around five minutes of me submitting the ticket and Izzy completed the case shortly afterwards, but why can’t live chat submit a ticket on my behalf?
I’ve worked in support for years and whereas we actively discourage people from grabbing technicians and asking them to do jobs without contacting the helpdesk, if someone contacts the helpdesk we wouldn’t then tell them to email in a request unless there’s a particular reason why you want a written request, such as it’s for accessing a secure area and you want a record of the request so that if someone one day asks why person x has access to area y, you have an audit trail.
There’s nothing wrong with the manner of the live chat folk, they are extremely polite, but it’s a little frustrating to contact them, talk to them and then be told to go and submit a ticket. I mean what do they do? Are they there for a chat if you’re feeling a little lonely? A nice chat about the weather? What support cases do they actually deal with?
They did point me in the right direction, so my case was resolved after live chat assisted me, but it would be useful if they could submit support cases, especially when it’s a region offline issue which isn’t one where you need too much detailed information to report. Maybe this is the purpose of live chat, to tell people to go and submit tickets, file a Jira or read a forum, but if that is the case, then it’s a pretty neutered role.
I would also find it a lot more useful if the grid status page was far more in your face, either when going to the support section of the main website or logging inworld, this would save both live chat and the ticket system a lot of tickets.
It would be helpful if a scope of support and best route to resolution chart/table were posted for typical issues so folks don’t get the runaround.
Region Unavailable… do X
Unable To Connect… do Y
etc
I can understand the push to get people to file tickets for region down if LL does the same thing the company I work for does… reboot tickets are automatically routed to the appropriate queue for investigation and handling, as opposed to calls/chats/misfiled tickets without the reboot flag that need an additional step or two to get handled. Plus, when the root cause for all the reboots comes out, that answer can be copy-pasted and sent en masse (copypasta for everyone!).
Also, a lot of support portals are a hodge-podge of lashed-together products for chat, tickets, call logging, asset tracking, etc. The chat module may have been written with marketing and sales in mind, jury-rigged to deal with technicians, too… the call logger might not even grab info from the phone switch/application, etc. It’s highly possible that the chat module doesn’t have a quick way of porting customer requests/assets into a ticket, and the chat tech is handling multiple issues at a time, so treating them like a secretary throws a wrench into the works. (Never mind that the label is Concierge, which you’d assume takes your request at the hotel desk and owns the issue until it’s resolved.)
If it’s cheaper to throw people at bridging the gap between what the support modules need to do and developer hours to actually make them talk, the company will stick to people, and they’ll get grumpy with the weak tools they’re stuck with… adding to the “*grumble* DIY” response likelihood.
And, yes, I agree that @SLGridstatus and other status indicators should be front and center during major customer-affecting issues. But sometimes the customer-facing statements take a while to come out while an issue is being reported… aggregated… examined… pattern recognized… issue acknowledged, and documented for assignment to troubleshooters.
-ls/cm
Sure, I agree with pretty much everything you say, it does look like they handle region down issues in the same way you do, the grid status page said they go to a high priority queue. I design quick call buttons for the call loggers on the system we use for regular or easy to define issues. Once I submitted the ticket the issue was dealt with in five minutes, so from that flow, the system works very efficiently.
You also make a good point about putting in people to bridge the gap between developing modules, because this is the situation we have at work, well they do more than just log calls but the development time to try and make those modules work with a ticketing system isn’t currently a high enough priority for me, what we do find though is that the helpdesk staff can often get better information from a customer than allowing customers to email the helpesk does, we get emails along the lines of “The system is broken”, with no location, no detailed fault or really any clue what the issue is, so there is added richness with talking to people.
I also agree about how the issue may not have been identified when someone contacts support, although my issue is more one of getting the technicial side to acknowledge the need to inform the helpdesk of details of the issue(they complain that by doing this it slows them down from fixing the problem, I explain that a two minute delay so that we can explain the issue more clearly is worth a two minute delay and that they’ve spent more than two minutes complaining about this to me, I usually win but it keeps coming back up).
I really didn’t mean this to come across as sounding like I was criticising the live chat staff, they were polite and pointed me in the right direction, they did their job. I just feel a little tweaking would make it a bit more satisfactory but with any helpdesk, there are always a lot of variables that make processes seem a little off under certain circumstances.
” I just feel a little tweaking would make it a bit more satisfactory but with any helpdesk, there are always a lot of variables that make processes seem a little off under certain circumstances.”
Strongly agreed. If there’s an input for Support, it needs to be functional and able to not just inform the customer, but guide folks through resolving it with a minimum of hoop-jumping for the customer.
-ls/cm