Support Forum Transcript

Support SLDev Forum Tuesday 4 Dec 2007 Jack Linden Voice session (summary)

Introduction & Current Support

Jack - There have been lots of changes last year with new support program and portal, including a new support system, called Parature, that has worked very well for us.

We are currently rolling out a Solution Provider Support Program with a tight SLA. If you want more information, you can contact Glenn Linden or me.

Availability continues to be a focus area for support; Concierge and Premiums have access to Live Chat and ticketed support, with Concierge also having Telephone support; in addition all accounts have 24/7 billing telephone support.

Tech support, level 1 billing, Concierge and the Inworld support teams are all now 24/7, 365 days per year.

Support has about 75 people in all world wide - in Europe, the US, Australasia, Japan and Korea. We now get about 700 support tickets a day; amounting to around 100,000 tickets since the new support portal went live.

We've had nearly 50,000 phone calls - mostly billing, tech or concierge support. Our average wait time on calls is consistently under a minute.

We've taken over 15,000 livechat sessions. We're particularly happy with livechat because as an agent can manage several live chat at the same time, it scales well and provides residents with a transcript automatically in their support history.

Going forward - we know it's an issue that the Knowledge Base is behind a login, partly due to way the software is designed. We're working to change that, so you should be able to pull from behind login, so you can directly link to articles. These are big improvements to make it clearer and easier to use.

Also we're staffing around ticket load because we need faster response times - so yes, we are aiming to substantially reduce ticket time.

Abuse Reports

• Q: abuse reports for Concierge users.
• Jack: The governance team can't be directly contacted. We're considering adding an appeal process. Concierge customers tend to contact concierge to raise visibility or get assistance with abuse, but Concierge can only make sure the issue is looked at and acted upon; Concierge doesn't escalate anything related to abuse reports; Concierge status is not part of whats considered in evaluating abuse reports. The Abuse team looks instead at overall patterns of abuse.

Automated Invoice

• Q: When is there going to be an automated invoice send to us for our islands fees and L$ purchasing, with VAT. Companies need invoices produced automatically on each purchase, like any other website does. When do you think this will happen? It's an important issue for companies?
• Jack: We're updating the system to allow you to pull your VAT receipts from your account pages; you'll soon be able to go to My Account, pull the receipts. This may be available within a month to 6 weeks. Because there are areas of Europe that are VAT exempt, it's fairly complicated. The system may be crude to begin with, but you'll be able to get something soon.

Update: as Jack stated, this has now launched; Financial Statements for Everyone]

IE and Land Store

• Q: When can I use IE with the Land Store?
• Jack: Land Store has a number of issues related to the way that IE works. We're in early phases of completely redeveloping land Store and expect to have a first iteration out in Q1 of 2008. It may be a simple interface, but will enable buying islands. We will then add new features around land services, including renames, grid moves and transfers. We have up to 40-50 pending island transfers going on at any one time, a large volume of grid moves including obtaining permission from multiple people, so we want to work on ways to make that automated.

Support is 24/7

• Glenn: I want to make sure everyone noted that service really is 24/7 for Billing phone and Concierge support now.
• Jack: It was a big change to arrange our resources to enable 24hr. coverage.

Traditionally many of you have gone to a Linden who has provided them with assistance. We encourage you to go directly to Support, rather than using multiple routes which causes confusion and actually slows things down.

Alts and griefing

• Q: People who create alts for griefing multiple areas - can you track individuals who grief against multiple areas?
• Jack: We do know about alts, but we don't automatically filter in that way. We're more interested in enabling residents to understand and respond to griefing on their land/estates, rather than always relying on us responding to it; You'll see a lot of activity there in 2008.

Age Verification

• Q: When will new age verification be available to general public? I'm getting increased questions form people I work with. The age verification process requires information that is illegal to use in some countries (Canada), and is not really voluntary if you require it to access some content.
• Jack: We've run a test of age verification and it had too many fails, so we've tweaked the algorithm and expect it to go live fairly soon. The Community team will message soon. Given our international audience and requirements, we try to make our processes as open and free as possible, but at the same time, we need to address these concerns.

Update: Optional Age Verification has now launched

• Q: In Canada, the use of a social insurance number is prohibited for non-taxation reasons and passport number is prohibited; I understand in other countries there are other or no restrictions. It's a minefield. My suggestion is a strengthened TOS and a declaration of birthdate at registration and on entrance to Adult areas; false declaration gives legal protection to the content holder and Linden Lab.
• Jack: We will pass those concerns along.

Search

• Q: The new search is very different.
• Jack: It's an evolving system, you'll see a number of changes over the next few weeks as we tune it to improve results.

Rating & Land

• Q: Rating land so you know who to trust
• Jack - We used to have a rating system in the old days. It had all sorts of issues, and was regularaly gamed. We are always looking at reputation systems and ways to score - community based ideas with no reward; but I've no information to provide on that front.

Group Support

• Q: Does a group qualify for concierge support if they own more than half a sim
• Jack: Today it's based on individual ownership. If we enable it for groups, it might have hundreds of people who make no land contribution, and clearly we couldn't offer them all concierge support. If one is contributing at half a region or more, they're eligible, and they can ask on behalf of the group.
• Q: Could you enable the group founder to be Concierge level? Owner is more difficult because of multiple owners.
• Jack: We'll consider that, there's only one group founder.

RegAPI email confirmation

• Q: RegAPI - sends out email to confirm before activation. Ran into oddity with public API for community sites; a problem with use abuse for alt creation.
• Jack: The RegAPI is being redeveloped, and email confirmation will be RegAPI v2 which is in QA now.

HTTP Requests

• Q: Have a question about HTTP requests, causing major connection issues with server.
• Jack : I know of some problems with poorly performaing regions; please post a support ticket and we'll try to find out more.

Response time for Tickets

• Q: After submitting a support ticket, How many non-response days should I wait before taking it to concierge phone/IM?
• Jack: We're working to improve tickets response time. If your issue is urgent or time sensitive, then I would suggest using Livechat or telephone. If you have already created a ticket, give the CSR that ticket number when they answer. If not time sensitive, then tickets should be sufficient.