What does "Live Help' actually DO??

Hi,

I have yet to come across a single case of any friend of mine in SL with a problem having it resolved by Live Help. In every case they are told to email the problem in to some department or other, billing etc.

A quick scan in the forum also seems to bear this out.

It would be useful to know what the terms of reference for Live Help are. What can they really assist with, and get resolved, and what things they will tell you to email, which we can then do without involving Live Help in the loop at all.

I'm not sure what historical purpose it served, but as far as I can tell, Live Help has always been a first aid stop, *not* a full support tool.

Volunteers can help with a lot of in-world problems, or at least help track something down, or suggest a more appropriate channel to get help, and report some emergency situations on the group if Liasons are around and monitoring.

Liasons can return/move prims grid-wide, restart sims, pass things like a sim that doesn't come back up on to the grid team, (temporarily) kick someone off the grid, check your L$ transactions and can read some, but not all ticket numbers.

Liasons don't have access to your billing information (they can work from home and would you honestly want your billing information to be accessible remotely?) so can't assist with billing problems, password problems (they can't verify identity), generally aren't full tech support (if a sim is down, the grid team will need to look at it), can't just reclaim and restore land, will not get involved with disputes or act on private sims, etc.

As far as the volunteers go, some sacrifice most of their in-world time to try and help others only to get a significant amount of abuse from other residents who use LH/HR, knowing fully well it's not the proper contact for their particular problem or who just want to vent and rant.

It won't matter in a few hours anyway since the 1.15 update removes Help Request in favour of the ticketing system in the next few weeks.

Live Help is (or was) mainly for answering "how do I do this?" type questions. Essentially, the kind of thing that you'd now commonly find in newbie help areas, but Live Help I think pre-dated most of them, and in general it can't be 100% guaranteed that every single new user will find one.

It also became handy as a way of contacting duty Lindens for dealing quickly with incidents that didn't require arbitration or similar involved processing.

In general, most Live Help question that are redirected will go to either [email]support@secondlife.com[/email] or [email]billing@secondlife.com[/email], depending on whether access to billing information is needed or not.

1 cause of live help was when some ition rezzed dozen of those following sound boxes that boxed u in, every one in the help island public sandbox got stuck.

contact a linden to remove them asap and was dealth with within minutes, was their own land and newbie place so would explain the quickness but otherwise every one going their would have gone stuck and the region crash as lag was going higher and higher

try that with an email ^^

Summon a Linden to remove a nuke. Answer a question for a friend about how to get her menu bar back.

Been a while tho.

Live helped worked pretty well for years but the massive influx of new players very quickly overloaded the live help feature and made it innaffective. In their defense LL have addressed this issue and implemented a new system. Whether is will be affective or not has yet to be seen. At least they are attempting to address the issues.

Refferencing the forum for opinions on Live help is counter productive as the majority of people only post on the forum to winge and moan. Majority of people who have a positive experience with live help generally go along on their merry way to enjoy their second life rather than posting the positive experience on the forum.

If more people had complained on the forums and less on Live Help - maybe it wouldnt be going away.

It used to be great - someone from Live Help would come to your location and help solve a problem. They do a brilliant (unpaid) job but there are simply too many people in world now.

Same with the Welcome Area. Some people there have run wild whereas a couple of years ago there would always be at least one Linden to calm things down.

I guess its the price we pay for SL residents expanding at such a fast rate.

hmm...

maybe im weird, but every (two and a half?) times ive resorted to asking for live help, i got a real, live linden dealing with my problem. but then, i didn't ask stupid newbie questions, i only used live help when i exhausted other resources.

for example, after one update or other, i had the 'fifty copies of each folder' bug. after relogging, clearing cache, searching on blog and forums for answers to this conundrum, i asked live help. okay, no, they didn't SHAZAAM and fix it. but they put me on a list to GET fixed.
(and yes, this was within the past 2.5 months)


but i can see where a buncha idiots slamming live help with stuff addressed elsewhere would bog down the system and make it pretty useless.

Live Help has always been very helpful to me.

In the begining days, they answered those "DOH!" questions of where to go to find the right answers (ie RTFM *snickers*).

After a time, I'd ask the real questions needed to be asked on LH. Sometimes LH would know the answer, sometimes not. SL is huge, vast, and diverse. There's not a single person that knows everything, and I doubt even all of LL together has teh knowledge to answer every question. Even though LL made SL, there are things that happen that they just never thought about.

Lately, I use(d) LH to contact on-duty Lindens. Usually for support help on sim troubles, or to report griefers and grid attacks when I'd see the larger scale ones that regular Residents could not deal with.

The last is the reason I fear for LH going away. Help on doing things in SL can always be found. NewCommers Inc (NCI) has always done this in-wrold and they do a marvelous job at lessons, tips, and help to new Residents. However, we NEED a real-time contact to Linden Liasons. I'm not sure what LL is planning, but if they take that away...*shrugs* I don't think it'd be a good idea. Might be wrong (I often am).

For all those who volunteered thier time (and migrains) to answering the flood of questions in Live Help (Help Request)...

Thank you.

~Jessy

I always found live help very good - they sorted one or two problems I have had in-world...

Overall the majority of LH calls wasn't "how do I get this box off of my head?" (actually hand now ).

There are people who've been on SL for months or years and just happen to do or run into something they've never done before and they're stumped, or aren't sure where to look things up, or it's just not documented anywhere. Surprisingly (to me anyway) that includes a number of sim owners.

There's also a range of problems that come up again and again, which are very easily solved, but where you just have to know how to solve it. The fact that you can hit debug shortcuts without having the debug menus activated also causes a lot of problems for people when they hit the wrong key combination.

In a lot of other cases people don't even know what their actual problem is and without someone to recognize the signs that what they're outling as the problem is actually caused by something else entirely they won't get helped because if they do research they'll be pointed to the wrong solutions.

I won't miss all the ranting and misplaced anger (the very last LH call was one of those unfortunately enough), or the "I refuse to look anything up, you can just tell me, now!" attitude, but I do feel sad for the many people who genuinely had non-newbie questions and who for better or worse will have to fend for themselves or just keep on living with their problems, or who in at least some cases will simply give up and quit.

This wasn't my experience when I lost my $L and my land due to a sim crash/restart, as referenced on another thread. I was told to email support, by a Liaison. The Liaison told me they couldn't help me, and from my perspective, it looked like they didn't even try. They did not come to the parcel, nor apparently even look at my account.

So far nobody from Linden Lab has helped me. The only thing that has happened is that I have had moral support from my fellow residents. For which I thank you all very much. It's not like I am asking for the unreasonable. I only would like to receive what I have paid for, or not be charged for what I did not receive.

Live Help Liaisons cannot view your account, and I don't think they're allowed to change land ownership. Coming to the parcel wouldn't have made any difference, and meanwhile, 40 other people are waiting in the Live Help queue. I hope you can understand that this wasn't any wilful attempt to be unhelpful!

It would have made a difference in my perception of Customer Service offered by Linden Lab.

Not to be rude, but to decied between the perceptions of one customer, or the actual need of 40 others in the queue, I have to side with the Liasons on this one.

They can't do anything with your account. Only Billing can since they need to verify all sorts of things first, and in-world Liasons had neighter the time, nor the resources to do such.

@Kitty:

Agreed, but that's what NCI is about. They do as a group, what we all should do in-world. Help others in those little situations. I try, and I know a lot of others do as well.

OI and HI...well...they suck for information. Sorry to whatever Linden team put them together, but what information is there might as well be put on a one page notecard and stuffed in thier inventories. Instead of trying to teach people BASIC things about SL, why not just teach them the basic MEANS to find out information?

Oh, sorry. There I go using logic again. My bad ^.~

~Jessy

Live Help and Help Request were always helpful to me the few instances I needed them. I was sorry to see it go but in preparation, I forced myself not to open that window again to see if I could just "make do" with the resources in the KB, in Jira and through my friends in world. Aside from a region down, there really wasn't anything that I couldn't get help for when I needed it through other means. You just have to be calm and patient. You get a lot more with sugar....

Just wondering where people are getting the perception that there were 40 other people in the queue who lost more money/got billed for something they didn't receive/had a worse problem than I?

I explained to the person answering the Live Help message what the problem was, and they are the ones who decided to summon a Linden for me in the first place. Why was a Linden summoned, and why did one answer if one was not needed or could not help?


Not to be rude to you either, Jessica, but you may think differently when you are the receiving end of the problem, expecting Customer Service from a company who not only denied the service you paid for, but decided to charge you extra for the "privilege" .

Stormy,

Been there, done that, lost the tee-shirt to a failed rez, heh.

I'm not unsympathetic. Losing L$ sucks. I've been the victim of a loss of over 3000 inventory items in the past. Went the whole route, LH, Support, etc. End result? Nada. Out all the items, some irreplacable, and teh L$ spent on them.

I only picked the arbitraty number of "40" because it was picked previously. At any given time, I'd say there are closer to 400 in the queue than 40. The point is, there were prolly a lot more that needed help than there were LHers to help. As your problem can not be solved in-world, they redirected and moved on to those they could help.

LHers did right in steering you to a Linden. Your problem is beyond thier scope entirely. Though one could prolly have mentioned you contact Support and Billing. However, each LHer's knowledge is based on thier own experiance, not training by LL. They are volunteers.

Frontier did right in advising you to contact Support. He also informed you that nothing could be done by a Liason, more to save you from wasting time along that avenue, than to simply "get rid of you". He directed you where you needed to proceed. He can not do that for you.

Good luck in getting your L$ or the land back, and a personal shame on the landowner who ignored you.

~Jessy

I have lost a lot of inventory in the past as well. However, land is different than inventory.

Owning land is why I pay premium fees. Owning land is why I pay tier fees. Aside from a very small stipend, owning land is the additional benefit that ALL users get from their premium fees, and the ONLY additional benefit for paying tier fees. In fact, I'd venture a guess that premium membership and land ownership account for a great deal of LL's income as a business, aside from VC $.

It's not like this land mysteriously disappeared off LL's asset server, it is still there. It just doesn't have my name on it anymore.

I know there are Liaisons that can help with this. Guy Linden aka Land Guru to name just one. So for a representative of LL to tell me that Liaisons cannot help with problems like this, seems disingenuous to say the least.

I am not bashing Live help, I think they do a great job and I realize they are all volunteers. As a matter of fact some of my friends are or have been Live Helpers at one time or another. My personal feeling was that some of them were not treated very well by LL while working in that capacity, either.

However, I do feel that if LL is going to be charging real life money for a service, they need to have a support staff that is trained and capable of dealing with problems in a professional and timely manner. Not rely on volunteers or people who are not equipped to handle whatever problems their buggy system may dish out.

They helped us. Some one put a "pink spot" on our land that covered our avi's totally. All you could see was your name tag and you could not see yourself walking. My baby got on live help and the Linden's removed it immediately. I am not saying this is always the case. Then there are those times that you speak with two different Linden's and they don't agree on anything. I asked one why this was, she said "don't know, that is too funny".

Latley it seems with help request you have about a 50/50 chance of getting acual help or just getting the default email support response. The last time I asked for help was yesturday when something happened that could have cost me about 85,000L. I was paniced said "I really need help, I think I f'd up." I didnt get help I got a morals lecture telling me that this was a pg group because I used the F word. Last I checked sl was a game for 18 year olds and up and as an adult if the F word offends you even in a time of panic, you shouldnt be in sl anyways. But anywhooo, Latley it seems you have a 50/50 chance of real help. And one fast plug....Teeple Linden kicks ass on live help! Everytime he is the one who responds a feeling of relief comes over me because he always does his best to provide real help to the best of his ability, and has never once said "Just email support". Thank You Teeple!

PS. Phone Land Concierge is always awesome!

Which is what I said:
The Liason could have seen that yes, you bought land, but they probably don't see any more details in your L$ transaction history than you do so they would have no idea which parcel and as bad as it sounds, they can't just assume that you're honest.

With those failures there's also the very real chance that between the rollback and your call, someone else came along and bought the land. Blindly reclaiming and reassigning the land would make things worse rather than better.

No, there is not the chance between the rollback and my call that someone else bought the land. I was there, and the original seller was there. This all happened within minutes. As I have repeatedly explained, the land went back to the original seller's name. Someone else did NOT come along and buy the land.

However, since 4 days have now passed and no one has helped me, there IS the very real chance that the land has been resold.

This is part of the reason why LL needs to take care of these things in a timely manner.