Best laid plans of mice and men often go awry… the new Land Store is just not ready to ship.

Rather than inflict you guys with a tool that isn’t ready yet, we have decided to bring the old store back up with the new prices. All the old challenges remain (doesn’t work in IE, wait time for delivery) but you will be able to place orders as you have in the past.

You will still be unable to order Openspaces via the old store, and the delays there will continue to be long as we deal with backorders. New island orders will go up as quickly as possible, and we will keep you updated on the progress of not only those orders but of the new store as well.

Thanks much.

Starting today and updated monthly we will be publishing the support team’s general performance stats to the website on this page. Each month’s post will be accompanied by a blog post that provides additional context for the numbers; this will also be accessible from a link on the webpage.

So for the first time we are essentially setting a benchmark for support metrics. In this first month we have included results from a support survey we ran late last year, call volume, call wait times, chat incidences/successes and ticket submission rates. Please note: As we refine the data around other critical metrics we will publish those as well.

One of the most interesting lessons we’re learning as we work on support metrics is what the real impact of an incident is on support (ie. how much additional load and therefore cost does an unexpected incident lead to). Obviously we are always working to lessen the frequency of these incidents, but it’s certainly very useful for us to have as detailed a view of support as we are now getting. For those that have taken part in the customer service survey, or who take part in them in the future, thank you. Your feedback helps us to improve what we do.

As a quick reminder, access to some areas of support is based on your level of membership with us, but for certain things all residents have access 24/7. Those things include:

-Billing. Hey, it’s your real money; you shouldn’t have to wait to talk to us. If you have a billing issue, call us. The phone number is in the Support Portal. Keep in mind that most questions can be answered in the Knowledge Base if you don’t want to talk on the phone. For those of you outside of the US, we are working on getting toll free numbers for you as well.. in the meantime using software such as Skype can greatly lessen the cost of calling. In addition, our response times on billing tickets are low so if you are not able to call us, consider creating a ticket instead.

-Special Tickets queue. Even if you are not a paying customer, there are still things you need quick answers for, and that is what the special questions queue is all about. Login with your email address and file under the appropriate ticket heading, and we’ll get back to you as soon as we possibly can.

Anyway, we hope this information will be helpful to you in seeing how great (or less than great) a job we are doing in supporting you in your Second Life, and perhaps shed some light on the volume of issues we are handling day to day, and how far we have come in support over the last year.

[RESOLVED @ 11:00PM Pacific] Our Support Portal is back online! Thank you and have a good evening!

The support web page is temporarily unavailable, we’ll get it back up just as soon as we can.

Thank you!

In our ongoing effort to improve our support services, we have recently expanded the hours for billing and outworld technical support to 24/7. This was made possible through the use of an outsourced group based in the UK that we are working with very closely to provide excellent service for our residents.

What this means to you is that billing help is available by phone, live chat and ticketing all day, every day, regardless of your location. Outworld technical support (handles issues with your computer accessing Second Life: software crashes, graphics problems, connection issues) is also available via text chat and ticketing 24/7 for premium Residents. We will shortly be providing service in a number of international languages through this portal as well.

Concierge team is also announcing improvements. We have added a new team member (welcome Rowan!) who will be starting with us on September 1st as the Educational Concierge. With the addition of Rowan and another concierge specialist, we will at last be able to bridge that final 5 hour gap and provide 24×7 phone, text chat and ticketing support for the Concierge clients.

We are also very happy to announce that our phone wait time for billing is currently averaging 2 minutes – not the best we can do, but very much better than it has been. Concierge phone wait time is also between 30 seconds-2 minutes consistently.

You can access the support portal here: Support Portal

Watch this space for more improvements in support in the very near future!

Due to our inability to enable search for an extended time period this week, we have pushed the expiration date of every advertisement that was in the classifieds as of 17:00 PDT yesterday forward by four days. While we realize this is not of much help to those who had timed events, this does partially address our break in service.  You can of course edit any current classified advertisement to be more timely if you choose.

Thank you!

This afternoon the area of San Francisco where Linden Lab has its offices lost power. This outage affected our in house support staff, primarily the billing team. Other support teams, including the Concierge team which monitors for regions down and rollback requests, were unaffected. Similarly our support software, which is hosted offsite, remained active.

We apologize for any inconvenience the outage may have caused those of you who attempted to contact the billing team or other San Francisco based Lindens during this time.

Have a good weekend!

[UPDATE] Sorry folks, they posted to me in Eastern time, so we have to adjust 3 hours. Should be  Saturday, July 7th from 6pm SL time to Sunday, July 8th at 2am SL time. My apologies.

Our Support Portal vendor will have down time this weekend, Saturday, July 7th from 9pm SL time to Sunday, July 8th at 5am SL time. The good news is that this is the last in this series of major updates that they are running and from now on their downtime should mostly match ours, Wednesdays in the AM and only for short periods for patches.

You will not be able to access support via text chat or ticketing, or to access the knowledge base during that time. This does not effect the ability to file an abuse report however, as that is a separate system.

We will increase the time period available for rollbacks to accommodate this delay. Concierge customers and Estate Managers can make rollback requests by contacting a concierge via the in world Linden Estate Services office if they are necessary during this time period.

Thank you!

We have arranged with our Support Portal vendor to have down time this week at the same time as the rest of grid instead of overnight on the weekend. We hope this is a better arrangment than having, effectively, two down times. Support Portal down time is shorter however, from 8am to 11am SL time. You will not be able to access support via text chat or ticketing, or to access the knowledge base during that time, although phone support for those who qualify will still be available.

Thank you!

As we continue to adjust the Support Portal to reflect the needs of the community, we will be turning to you for guidance and feedback in various ways so that we are sure we have resident input into our plans. One of the ways we will be doing this is by holding monthly focus group meetings with a small number of residents on rotating topics. The first meeting is with Fritz Linden and me, and we will be discussing the Support Portal itself, how it is being used by residents, and how we can improve the experience. Other meetings will be with other support team members, and will include billing, technical support and concierge issues, and will generally be scheduled the last Thursday of the month.

The first meeting will be on June 28th at 11am. To attend, please IM me inworld. You will be added to a group the day of the meeting that will allow you access to the region where the meeting will be held. We are choosing to limit these to small groups so we can have an interactive discussion, so the invites will be limited to about 30 people. If we find that there is overwhelming interest, we will schedule a second meeting time.

This is just one of a few initiatives we are putting in place at this time to improve customer support. Watch the blog for more announcements in the near future.

We are aware of a problem involving LSL scripts and are currently working on a solution. We will update you as soon as we have further information.