Herding Cats

Once upon a time, on a virtual world far, far away, there was a noob, who looked nothing at all like the avatar in the picture above, except that she had black hair and blue eyes. Oh, and the same shape. So… yes, it’s a story about me as a noob.

I was doing what I do best, wandering Second Life, and I happened into a store where I bought some discount priced clothes. The room next to the clothes had jewelry, and I wandered in, and I absolutely fell in love with one jewelry set. I bought my first non-freebie jewelry that day. In retrospect, it wasn’t all that expensive, maybe $L200, but at the time, it seemed like a huge expenditure of Linden dollars when I was using my stipend.

So I was upset when the necklace didn’t fit my shorter-than-standard avatar. It floated up nearly to her chin! I was flustered because I had just spent all that money but couldn’t wear my new prized possession.

Well, I had mad noob skillz and knew that if something said it was modifiable, I might be able to move the bits around to make it fit. I checked, but the necklace was no modify. Disappointed, I decided that maybe I could ask the creator if he could help me. I wasn’t sure what he could do. Make me a modifiable version, maybe. So I sent him an IM.

I wish I still had the chat log from that conversation, because it was probably the most patient anybody has ever been with me in my life. The content creator explained to me, in IM, how to adjust no-modify attachments. I was embarrassed not to have known something so fundamental, but he never talked down to me or got impatient, even though I took a lot of his time to help with something related to an inexpensive purchase. That is customer service, above and beyond the call of duty.

I have quietly shopped from the creator ever since, both for myself and for alts. I have referred business to him. I have sought customized work from him. He never knew why.

Last week, Chris went to him to buy rings, and he asked for them to be customized to not be full bright, because I don’t like full bright objects. In the process, we discovered a SL bug where some formerly full bright objects appear full bright in some regions and not others. This content creator came out to our home to troubleshoot the issue and followed up afterward.

That’s what I call customer service.

But even better, I finally got to thank him, as a four year old avatar, for the kindness and patience he showed to a rather clueless noob who didn’t know that you could adjust no-modify attachments. Now he knows how customer loyalty happens.

So thanks, RH Engel. You’ve been my go-to guy for years because you are willing to go the extra mile, for noobs and SL middle-aged alike. That’s the difference between people who create objects and leave them set for sale and people who actually care about their customers, and you’ve got it.

I wish to point out that I am not always serious.

Every idea I have for this blog is weighty and serious, and I don’t want it to be a buzzkill, so I thought I ought to include something silly.

Nowhereville, the region next to the one where I live in Second Life recently had a fundraising concert event to benefit the Alabama Red Cross. As part of that effort, they managed to get the spot into the destination guide and onto the message of the day. The event is over, and the promotion of the location seems to be done. But the new users seem to keep coming.

For some reason, by the time they get all the way to the mountain in Edloe, they seem to wind up in the room under the mountain, which I had left empty. That’s not very hospitable. After all, if you went into doors that looked like these…

…you would be expecting a welcoming committee, right? I had the prims to spare, so for a limited time, the new users wandering in will find a warm welcome interested in eating their brains.

Love them or hate them, the Disney company is marketing genius. They know how to use language in such a way to set subtle, implicit expectations.

Disney theme parks don’t have visitors, they have guests.
They don’t have employees, they have cast members.
Their cast members don’t wear uniforms, they wear costumes.

Each of these terms has connotations without the organization having to explain them any further.

Which brings us to Linden Lab. I don’t think anybody is going to garner the Lab with the label of marketing genius, but somewhere, early on, someone decided to call the people who used Second Life residents. That was a pretty smart bit of marketing on their part. Let’s see what Dictionary.com has to say about the word “resident”:

res-i-dent
-noun
1. a person who resides in a place.
6. residing; dwelling in a place

That’s the literal, or denotative meaning of the word. The problem is the connotative meaning, the emotions and associations that the word brings up. While resident may literally mean to reside somewhere, it also makes people feel, as they do when they reside in a real life community, that they have set down roots in that place. They feel that they have a stake in is welfare, and they believe they should have a say in how things go in the neighborhood.

This last part is where things go wrong. While we may be called residents of Second Life, our rights are outlined in the Terms of Service. You know, those terms that you occasionally have to click Accept to log on when they make big changes, but also sometimes stealthily change when you aren’t looking. Those are all of our rights. Residency is not the same as citizenship. It doesn’t entitle you to a vote on things, other than the vote-with-your-feet of leaving, or the vote-with-your-dollars of not spending money.

This isn’t to say that people in the user community don’t have great ideas that shouldn’t be heard by the Lab. They do, and they should. It’s just that when there’s a business decision made that we don’t like (and I include myself in the “don’t like” column for a lot of the Lab’s past decisions), the hue and cry that the Lab should Listen To The Residents as if they were the combined force of the major voting parties is just ridiculous. The Lab is going to make business decisions. The user base are going to cringe and try to tell them whey they are shortsighted, because the decisions are perceived as being made out of ignorance of the needs of the users. Ultimately, though, the Lab does what they think is in their own interests, not mine or yours.

Look at it like a favorite bar. You drop by after work every day. Everybody knows your name. (“Nooooooorm!”) But the money you spend on beer doesn’t entitle you to a veto on the hiring decisions for the new barkeeper. The money spent on beer and finger food isn’t an investment, and you aren’t a resident of the bar. You’re a customer.

Dictionary.com again:

cus-to-mer
-noun
1. A person who purchases goods or services from another; buyer; patron.

The word customer has connotations, too. That there are responsibilities on both sides of a purchase or exchange of goods or services. I advocate using the word customer rather than resident, because it subtly repositions us from the user-without-rights “resident” to a user-who-pays-and-expects-something-in-exchange “customer.”

It’s a small distinction, maybe, but an important one. You aren’t just a resident. Don’t sell yourself short.

Yesterday afternoon, I noticed another in a series of pleas to Rodvik Humble on Twitter to fix a billing issue that a customer had with their Second Life account. Rodvik responded: “@GreenandWild Thanks for the heads up. Will make sure CS gets in touch with them.”

He did the right thing by delegating the issue to the appropriate department. But every time this happens (and this isn’t the first time and wasn’t even the only time I saw it happen yesterday), I wonder if it pushes the CEO away from using the communication channel. If it does, then nobody at the top is listening at all, and the customer base is back to the good old days of M.

I’m not trying to blame the customer. I understand that we all have communities and causes we care about, and when it’s our cause or community, we take up arms to fight for it. Having the Twitter account for the CEO must seem like a great place to plead your case. Because it’s your cause. And your cause is important to you!

But your cause is important to you. Your partner’s cause is important to him or her. Your neighbor’s cause is important to your neighbor. A mainland land baron’s cause is mission critical to their business. An estate owner’s cause needs immediate resolution for their island group. A Zindra resident’s cause is important to them. A Marketplace merchant’s cause worries them and they want it addressed, too….

The conduit for communication with the CEO is so clogged with individual customer support issues that it becomes the head bitching post, and any sensible CEO staffs it out and walks away. If that happens, the userbase will have squandered a remarkable opportunity to get an ear at the top.

That said, I know full well that the Second Life user base will complain loudly on any communication channel they are offered if they feel wronged, especially since there are so few effective communication channels to fix problems once they get out of hand. How can the constant appealing of these issues directly to @Rodvik be alleviated? Anybody who has a billing issue or other customer support issue should have a clear escalation path available to them. It should be visible, documented, and responsive. A twitter account that is monitored by someone empowered to actually fix problems would problem be in order (@ComcastCares was an early case study for this), so that complaints on that service can be redirected easily to the correct channel and that people can see that responses are actually happening. If that happened, everybody wouldn’t feel the need to pull the coattails at the guy at the top for attention to many of the issues that are now being tossed his way.

I realize that the folks who have found getting the CEO’s ear to be effective are unlikely to agree with me. But the fact is, you have to use your access to the folks at the top wisely. It’s my opinion that it isn’t, and that can be fixed. Making such a cacophony that he tunes out doesn’t serve anybody’s interests. But that noise level may be, as your mother used to say, why we can’t have nice things.

(For the record, I’m not followed by The Man on on twitter as of the time of writing this post, and I’m not fishing for it. I’m just making an observation after sleeping on it and finding that it still bothered me.)

Edit: I’m still posting from my phone, so apologies for not having pretty pictures to go with this post. I don’t like walls of text, either.