Open Letter to Philip Linden about Customer Service

Dear Mr. Rosedale,

I participated in a L$ auction for a parcel of land in my home region yesterday...I own around 90% of the sim, and can always use more prims. I was the successful bidder for the property, a fact which was confirmed by Linden Labs in an email to me.

The email also outlined the billing for the land..but did not provide any way to actually PAY for the parcel...or any way to actually claim the land...so I followed the rules.

I opened a support ticket. I used concierge chat to try to resolve it. I even called the concierge toll free number to try to get the matter resolved.

36 hours later, I found out two things. First, no one there seems to be familiar with the auction system at all, including the people whose job it is to provide customer support on it. Secondly, I found out that it is more important to Linden Labs to try to solve an internal system failure, than it is to provide even minimum customer service.

No one there is able to tell me at all, why it is that you have to figure out where your system failed, before you can transfer the land to me. I am an IT professional myself, and whenever we have a system failure, our first priority is to take care of the customer, and then do a post-mortem on the problem...Other businesses do not wait to resolve their own internal issues before taking care of a customer...If a bank teller can't balance their teller drawer...the bank does not suspend all customer transactions until they can do so, do they?...I note that your other auctions continue unabated as well...one would think that you would suspend or delay them, if you really had to resolve a system failure issue.

Several of your people have told me that they must resolve their internal system failure before your company can deliver the parcel to me. Forgive me, but I don't really see a correlation between you resolving your issue, and me having a parcel set to sale for me, even if someone had to come and do it at the land itself. Your own auction FAQ states that if it had been MY failure to pay for an auctioned parcel within 24 hours, you would have debited MY account L$8000. I was under the impression that any Linden had the ability to set the land to sale for me...so I can only assume it is a policy to put customer service second that is causing the delay.

Please respond to this...I enjoy this game...I own dozens of businesses in the game...and I wish to continue to enjoy the game...but what seems to be a lackadaisical attitude towards responding to your customer's needs is making it difficult to enjoy today.

Temporal Mitra

You do know that Mr. Rosedale does not read the forums? Yeah, I thought so.

Sorry to hear about your trouble, but as major trauma goes, not getting a parcel right away doesn't seem that bad. Maybe give them a few days to work the bugs out of the new auction system?

Not to detract from your overall point, which is pretty good, but it is the case that bank tellers stop all transactions and make you and everyone else wait when their till falls out of balance. I know because this happened to me. The teller handed me the wrong amount of cash, and I had to wait, with a line of other customers behind me, for the bank manager to come over and for the entire drawer to be counted and checked against what the computer said it should be before it could get my cash. I didn't really mind. They were a pretty good bank overall. If it happened more often i wouldn't be as patient.
Anyway... just thought you should know that. Sorry to pick nits.

I was just thinking the same thing Adz. LOL. I'd hope to God my bank stopped everything and made sure they had what they thought they had. I've seen them do it, too.

Its a great point you have...but they simply dont care.. if they did it would be fixed by now...this isnt even close to being a new bug

Oh man i had nothing but bad luck with Customer NO Service (or FOR SHORT CNS ) for 1 week now. Before i had good luck but now F-O-R G-E-T I-T!

Billing is a total joke, and how they are dealing with account payments. What going on now the grid monkeys are now getting payed in bananas and Not the Billing monkeys are now too getting paid in bananas results in Monkey business? Blaming the CC holders is not the right way to deal with billing issues that suppose to be handle but reasonable billing poeple problem solvers?

well, I didnt get to enjoy my game playing experience the next day either...or the next...it is now two days after the auction ended...and linden labs has not initiated a single contact to me in any way to try to resolve this...I have contacted them numerous times...and been put off every time...the last response was "we'll let you know when you can claim the land"...

I am still wondering what correlation there is between them working on their auction system...and them coming in world and just setting the parcel of land to sale for me? This is analagous to a hospital having an issue with their billing system, so they stop patient care until they fix it...and ignoring the corpses stacking up in the hallways...The whole premise of putting the customer first, seems to have escaped them.

You people who think LL cares what any of us think are so cute. *pats head*

As a side note, I am wondering how many people work in Customer Service real life here ...

Did it for five years and I'll be the first to admit that it is one of the most thankless jobs one can work.

That said, Linden Labs' idea of customer service is a joke, in which they are laughing at us. It's great once you get an individual Linden to actually WORK with you, but it's getting to that individual that is the catch. Every where else, one can reasonably expect that when one calls Customer Support, one would get a living person, but with Linden Labs, you get a voice mail that never gets check, except maybe to pull the plug and clear the memory.

Most companies, when one emails, one does get a response back, usually within 48 hours. LL.. *snort* They don't even have email, it's a support ticket in a system that I see fail more often than it actually helps. I am coming to hate these support ticket systems, because they only show you how long it has been since you opened and still no response.

In my job, we had to answer the phones. It was what we were hired and paid to do, not what we felt like doing. We had to be polite and try our best to help even the most irate customers who fully believed it was YOUR fault for them running over a brick and completely ruining their lawn mowers. We had to do some stop-gap diagnosing on products, walk people through parts buying and such. It was part of OUR JOB.

YOU!! That was YOU!!! Your lawnmower ruined my brick. I love my brick!!

LOL

I think there's going to be a period of flux with all the changes going on, and especially with new staff. I do keep offering to work for them ... lol.

The SLA at our place is 2 hours, the normal initial response rate tends to be about 18 minutes on average (looking at the stats here) but that doesn't automatically mean resolution is anything like so fast.

I have sympathy for CS people, I've worked in various CS jobs in the past, it is a hard thing to do, The Customer is Always Right , etc. I have been lucky in that I've never needed any CS help so far in SL, and the experiences told here make me infinitely grateful. But poor CS is not unique to LL. So many companies go on the cheap nowadays, it frustrating.

*tries to look innocent and fails* Probably was! I'm the Easter Bunny of Bricks!

Ours was running around 5 minutes to respond on phone (email wasn't an option back then) and resolution could take up to a week depending on season/number of calls per tech and if parts had to be ordered.

When they went with centralized call-taking, response time tripled as did resolution time as we were then forced to reschedule the other 20 calls that the idiots decided one tech could handle on top of the 8 he/she already had. I'd hate to see how it would have been if they had introduced the 'ticket' system.

Do you know how many customers/users don't even KNOW how to explain exactly what is wrong in terms that might remotely be useful to the tech types? At least over the phone, one can kind of get the idea and squeeze more info out of the person by asking the right questions.

So, personally, I prefer the personal touch when dealing with customer support.

Do you know the person I had answer my ticket seemed to use some kind of translator. Because their repl why............not very clear. 3 reopen tickets it had taken to take care of my billing problem.

^^ Yeah that. I've worked on a technical support team, and having to deal with both irate callers, and the lack of respect some team members had for callers, was a very stressful experience.

The cycle of hate in customer services and tech. support departments could probably destroy a business if not managed properly. The place where I worked has a terrible reputation for both now, and undoubtedly results in fewer people buying their products.