Why is customer service/communication such a low priority?

To answer the OP's question, I believe it's because there is no viable competition and we are stuck here. For now...

I'd like to see that change. However, I've been reading these forums since February, and following press about Second Life since then. In six months, none of the customer service complaints I have seen on the forums have translated into bad press for Second Life. That makes me skeptical.

When the Open Letter went public there was some mention of it. For a day.

I think that's correct, Raymond. At some point in time (and I'm hoping it's damn soon), someone else is going to come up wtih some direct competition for SL, and they are going to spend then needed money to employ proper customer service reps. Believe me, people are a lot of times willing to pay a little more to get good service. I experience that all the time in my job. We price higher than our competitors in our industry, but still have good country-wide market share based on our reputation for quality and service. And our customer retention rate is very high. I would sooner have LL charge (perhaps after a 30-day trial or something) every user to be a resident in SL, and then to take that money and employ people who are trained and skilled in customer service and resolution. I can't even imagine giving my customers the same type of service and concern that LL displays. Let's face it....these are tech people, not customer service people. And you have to be able to offer a salary high enough to employ the best service people. But it would definately be to LL's advantage to do so. Give it time....once there's a sure competitor who learns from LL's mistakes, LL will crash and burn because residents will leave in droves. No doubt in my mind!

There's bad press out there, you just never see it on the home page where they list all the little sunshine articles about how wonderful SL is. Reuters has had a couple of articles lately on the whole Ginko collapse and how basically SL is standing on the edge of a bubble in regards to its economy and an upcoming recession. You wont find links to those from LL, you have to go out and dig for them..or check sites like Second Citizen and some of the independent SL webpages.

Bad press about SL has become a cottage industry lately, but it's not about customer service, or even about genuine problems. Mostly it's all sensationalist tripe like the meme about jihadists using SL to recruit and train which started with an amazingly absurd article in The Australian and has been picked up elsewhere, and the meme that SL is nothing but pedophiles and people into bestiality, thanks to the "I'm not a dork because I'm not with those people" school of journalism practiced by publications like The Register, and the "Second Life is nothing but fraud because I tried it and didn't make a bazillion dollars in my first month" meme pushed by self-proclaimed expert bloggers like Randolph Harrison at Capitalism 2.0. Now the echo chamber that is lazy journalism, where most writers just copy someone else's premise without doing any research themselves, is propogating these things. For evidence, this just appeared at Editor & Publisher:

And that is the simplest...most mind-bendingly good suggestion. I KNOW they wanted to grow the population by offering free basic accounts...but, I agree...get people involved in the game, and then ask them to pony up for a paid account. Take that money, and invest it in some customer service.

For the love of little baby Jesus, and all the happy elves in fairyland, LL needs to seriously get on its feet with this issue.

Amber Linden, I believe.

The problem with Live Help was that even _it_ was being rushed, and that volunteers couldn't handle it. Simply put, the very fact that volunteers _are_ volunteers precludes them from being seen as giving effective customer service.

90% of the "CS calls" (ie, not technical questions) were people wanting to rant, and they wanted a Linden to rant at. People would ask about problems on Live Help and pretty much all a volunteer could do is to tell people "they're working on it"; and from a volunteer, the typical reaction was "How can you really know?"! Actually, the Lindens did give the volunteers extra information on the Live Help channel from time to time, so that hearing it from a volunteer did actually mean something.. but then other residents - quite fairly - complained that there was no reason for this information to be given to volunteers only.

The bad press for LL is all over the net most people I chat to in irc and such know SL is just a borken toy and getting worse. If ya chat with gamers they laugh at people who play sl because its always broken. The word is getting out ... to bad to SL could have been great now its no where near great and falling way to fast

It's because of the Tao of Linden.

No one can ever tell anyone else what to do, and no one has to work on anything they don't want to.

http://blog.secondlife.com/2006/07/25/the-tao-of-linden/#more-174

coco

Don't mention the war.

Yup same here. Went and filled out the app and everything. I'm wondering tho, if, like Chip said a while back, that LL receives over 2000 AR's a day; there's not a whole lot we could do about most of that stuff. We can sit around and give advice till we're blue in the face, but we'd have no power to change any of it.

That brings up the old "residents policing SL" bugaboo argument... I don't see a clear way around it, unless LL decided to actually give its volunteer army (vetted and approved) limited Linden powers.

I COMPLETELY agree! I look at my RL job, and the reason we hold 69% of the market is because we give great customer service. Even if our product screws up sometimes (as all technology is bound), we hold our customers' hands every step of the way. We have an entire team of people whose sole job it is to go out to mines, troubleshoot the products, tweak them for individual mines, and teach the employees how to use our stuff. Of course, the customers pay a LOT of money for this.

I would be more than happy for LL to charge every user, much like World of Warcraft does. It's only fair.

Thanks! I'd say more masochistic.

(Already work in online gaming ... lol)

Yeah the Hippie management style sure isnt going to produce a tightly run ship.



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Then of course I think one of the underlying reasons is simply:

- Linden Labs doesnt want to govern the grid.
-They dont really want to manage the Grid.

- They just want to Host the Grid.

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They want it to be the 3D Internet - They only want to Host Servers that people use to show their content.

They want to rent server space, to whoever has the money - Of course they want Big Companies, they want to rent the server space to them.

They want to get the credit for providing the world and the way to access it, but they want to step back and not be involved in managing it.

Eventually when it grows too big, they just want to be PART of that Hosting solution.

-But-

Its Pesky Community things, RL Laws and Issues that keep cropping up thats cramping their style.

Yes. Stoners should not be allowed to touch Computer Thingies.

How'd you get them? You been going through Chris' drawers again?
/me does the Groucho Eyebrow thing.

Exactly! Any company that sells any product/service NEEDS good customer service to stay alive. SL has been here for several years...that's no guarantee it's going to continue to be here. If they don't move forward with quality and service, someone else will! It's only a matter of time really. In my RL job, even if the customer is wrong, you never, ever treat them like they are. It's a proven fact that people expect to pay premium prices for premium service. LL just wants to draw in corporations, they have the big money. But without the little people, with the little money, those corporations won't come and if they do, they won't stay. Let's all watch LL shoot themselves in the foot!