Second Life Needs Live Call Center Trainers to Grow (Comment of the Week)

Good points from Oobleck Allagash, who's now a successful SL entrepreneur, reflecting on his own early challenges with using Second Life, and the high rate of visits to the official website, which somehow doesn't translate into user growth:

I think the curiosity aspect has been and is always there, especially given all the hype lately with VR. But what we have always known is that retention is the issue. A steep learning curve seems to be the stumbling block of getting these new users through the door and actually investing the time and money to learn the platform.

It seems so simple. If a real effort was made by Linden Lab to provide actual services and landing point assistance (tours, workshops, and live tutorials/concierge services). While I see this exist to an extent it's clearly not enough. The new user island (whatever it's called) is often empty other than noobs and I recall back in the day that the only way I stuck was that someone I met actually helped me in real time.

Interestingly enough, I always felt that this is something LL could actually do with real people that are, perhaps, at an offshore style "call center" which could have an actual paid (with minimal costs) group of "trainers" who would be avatars positioned to help and answer questions in-world. The bean counters of course know better than I if this would effective. What is the lifespan cost and reward of retention per avatar? 

Certainly seems worth trying. Some quick back-of-envelope math:

I bet Linden Lab could hire, say, 12 offshore trainers from English-fluent countries like the Philippines or India, and pay them a very good wage by local standards -- say $5/hour, working 5 days a week. (Philippines' average annual household income is about USD $5000, so a full-time trainer working at that hourly rate would make nearly double that amount.) Factoring in rent, office supplies, etc. that would cost roughly cost $125,000-150,000 -- i.e., 12 live trainers would roughly cost the equivalent of one (1) engineer based in San Francisco. Which do you think would be more likely to grow SL usage, and therefore revenue?

The screengrab above, by the way, is from this video that perfectly illustrates just how confounding and off-putting the first-time user experience is without skilled, live help.

Comments

[irihapeti]

in the latest chat with Ebbe Linden (on Inara Pey's blog) he says again that LL have tested Greeters a number of times. The evidence is that it doesn't make any difference to retention rates.

from my own experience of being a Second Life Mentor back in day on the starter islands, what worked to retain people was friends. Not just greeting new players but also friending them

a peer friend who would chat to the new players in IM on subsequent logins, answer their questions, be sympathetic to their learning curve frustrations, and actively show them in world where to find stuff and how to do stuff inworld.

doing stuff not only like how to rez prims and open boxes and why do I have 3 hairs on my head? But also stuff like how to drive a vehicle. How to sail a boat. How to couples dance, how to understand what this game/shopping/activity HUD does, and all the other inworld activity howtos that confront new players

Peer friending is quite a time-intensive activity though

[Lagomorph7]

When I joined Second Life in 2013, I spent the first few visits so frustrated that I almost gave up. (I still do not understand why there isn't a mechanism to prevent people from wearing things that haven't been unpacked. The embarrassment of a box on your body is, alone, enough to drive some away.) What helped me figure this all out were YouTube video--usually produced by random people who weren't associated with LL at all. I don't see why there can't be a library of tutorial videos of this kind all stored together somewhere in-world that is easy for newcomers to access. And maybe there is, but it sure wasn't obvious to me back then.

[sirhc desantis]

Throw in a comp premium and hell I'd do it at 5 bucks an hour with the bonus - would take it in L$.

[patchouli woollahra]

we had a team like this. Perhaps LL should look through its rolodex and see if the V-Team wants to get back in action with them.

(Hermia Linden probably still does NOT want to ride on anything that flies though)