SL Sunday

What do the SL residents get today? How about a slowdown of grid performance as noted by this post in the Linden blog. A second post approximately an hour later gave everyone this stellar news,

We continue to investigate the crash bug — it remains one of our highest priorities. In addition, you should see improved network connections tomorrow as we begin the upgrade process, with further improvements due as we bring more fiber online.

Shortly thereafter, the Linden blog announced changes to Customer Service. Nothing that watchers haven't been predicting after LL first tested the resident response for these types of changes. The Lab mentions a desire for feedback. I'm not sure why. The changes appear to be set.

Before this is implemented, however, we’d like to get your feedback to these plans in a series of meetings. Our plans are to schedule a series of five meetings, with 20 residents in each, in December. We’ll schedule these meetings at different times in Second Life so everyone can participate. If you’d like to attend a meeting, please IM me (Robin Linden) in-world. Let me know the best time for you to meet and we’ll try to schedule the groups to accommodate as many of you as would like to participate.

I'm actually going to stay positive about increased staffing, changes in the phone system and the implementation of a ticket queue. Additionally, dividing the support team into functions for Governance and for System Support is a good move.

The final paragraph is pivotal.

To provide service levels consistent with expectations we propose 1) revamping the channels of support and 2) changing the priority of support based on account type. What this means is that we will improve the Knowledge Base and restructure in-world support as mentioned above. In addition we will add a live chat channel through our website. Depending on the type of account you have (basic, premium, concierge) you will have unlimited access to the Knowledge Base and email support, but limited access to live chat and phone support. We are currently still considering whether it is preferred to make live chat and phone support available to those who aren’t eligible for an additional fee per use.

I suppose this is sort of what happens already. The real question is whether the support for anything other than concierge level service will be acceptable. Maybe this is the revamp that will kick them out of the customer service funk they're in. I'm taking a wait and see attitude.