Second Life is a platform where it’s easy to complain about matters, I could write umpteen posts complaining about Second Life with my eyes closed, admittedly the posts may be incomprehensible because I can’t touch type well, so it might look like ghshsh ghgjh uays but it would still be a complaint.
However there are many situations where Second Life deserves praise and in particular, the support team. I am admittedly biased in favour of support teams because I work in support in my day job. However that also means I can often spot good and bad support situations from a country mile. I can also understand why support works in certain ways and that sometimes people may be helpful and another support person may appear unhelpful, in these situations if you dig deeper you find that the person you feel is unhelpful is following procedures and those procedures are designed for the benefit of all the support team.
For example in my day job we ask our team not to accept support requests directly and to refer a person to the helpdesk. Some of the team stick rigidly to this and others are more flexible, being more flexible gets good feedback from the person who received the support, but leads to us getting complaints from someone else who is awaiting attention for their fault, so hopefully you can see that support isn’t always cut and dried and that you can’t please all of the people all of the time, we also get feedback that techies who won’t help on the spot aren’t being helpful, but in terms of the bigger picture, they are being. However common sense is the real rule of thumb, if it’s a quick fix it’s better to do it there and then.
Over the last twenty four hours I have received fantastic support from the support team, I am a concierge level customer, so my support is at a higher level than a premium member but I’m not sure how big a difference that makes. I’m not going to go into the details of the support case, for a start it was not directly my issue, although it related to my sim. I submitted a ticket yesterday on behalf of another resident, something had happened on the sim and she wanted me to submit a ticket. However the situation was that my support request was initially turned down, for very valid reasons. I accepted these reasons and vowed to deal with my grumpy friend when I told her the news, and then I went to bed.
When I awoke this morning and checked my emails, I found that Reed Linden had added a comment to my case, the initial support request was still denied but Reed had gone beyond the basic reported issue and investigated the issue further. Reed then proposed an alternative solution. I then asked for that alternative solution to be implemented and TJ Linden informed me that solution had been implemented.
The person who asked me to submit the ticket is happy now, so I don’t have to face a grumpy resident. Reed stretched himself into seemingly impossible positions by going the extra mile, he didn’t have to do that but I very much appreciate that he did and TJ Linden has topped the icing on the cake by delivering the alternative solution and making everyone happy.
I’ve had good and bad experiences of Linden Lab support, generally they’ve been good but I have had situations whereby I’ve been left scratching my head. I once went to live chat over a griefing issue and they came out and fixed it. At a later date I had another griefing issue and live chat refused point blank to come out and told me to file a ticket. This made me grumpy but I filed the ticket and it was resolved extremely quickly, so there was no real issue. I highlight this because in such circumstances it may be that the first time I contacted live chat, the support person helped me when they should not have, following the official procedure was effective in the second case, although at the time I felt the support person was being unhelpful, they weren’t.
The bottom line is that I’m very pleased with the support I’ve received from Reed, TJ and anyone whose names I’m not aware of who may have been involved in the process.