Your2ndPlace

I'm one of LL's biggest critics when it comes to customer service. I think the ticket system is poor, I think the Jira as a bug reporting tool is abysmal and I think that performance is shocking.

However one area of LL's customer service that I have found to be excellent is in concierge support. I used this service tonight, a mega prim was around that I couldn't locate the centre of, it causes people to float into the air. I contacted live chat, they first started a region restart and when that didn't work, they located the offending item. Problem solved.

I know many of you will be thinking "Well that's all and well but what about the rest of us" but support the world over generally works this way. Pay for a support contract and you'll get better support than the customer who doesn't, so part of my tier fees go towards this service, I'm paying for it.

However the service I've received has always been excellent, not good, not passable, but excellent. Response times are wonderful, resolution times are fantastic, service with a smile.

Jack and Harmony Linden who are in charge of this service should be proud of themselves and their workers. This is the bee's knees in customer service, it's an area where LL excels. At work I deal with many support contracts, there's a trick in support, it's called the response time.

If I have a support contract that says that a fault will be responded to within four hours, a response can be someone from a call centre phoning me to say the fault will be attended to tomorrow, hey they've responded, that was the deal.

So why can LL get it so right with concierge support but so wrong in other areas? I guess it's a manpower issue. This doesn't excuse the Jira. The Jira is a techie tool, as a bug reporting tool it's a nightmare. Torley has had to post video tutorials on how to use it, video tutorials to report a bug? That's abysmal.

At work, we've seen fault reports rise 50% in the last 12 months, does this mean performance is 50% worse? Hell no, indeed our surveys reveal greater customer satisfaction. However what we did was introduce a system whereby customers are automatically emailed when jobs are logged, this gives customers a sense that someone is listening and hence they report more jobs. If we had the Jira at work fault reporting would be minimal, people simply wouldn't use it.

However by encouraging people to report more faults we can then analyse where problems lie, increased efficiency, increased confidence, score!

LL have a long way to go in terms of customer service, but credit where credit is due, concierge support in my experience has been above and beyond what most companies would provide. They deserve a pat on the back.

Technorati Tags: SecondLife