One of the traditions of Lindenhood is the office hour, a set time when residents can come along to a time which a specific Linden will set aside, to ask questions or otherwise interact with the makers of the world.
Although they're not widely advertised, they're easy enough to find out about - there's even a public iCal listing them if you want to nip along.
The obvious point of them is to keep open a channel for people in-world to ask questions of Lindens, discuss various topics, and so on. What they're evidently NOT is customer service sessions: although open forums like this are part of the whole customer service experience, they can't be about answering specific problems for customers. If they are, then something is going wrong as their should be better methods of doing that (in Linden Lab's case, bug reports and JIRA).
Office hours are a great idea, and can work really well for companies beyond Linden Lab. However, there's a few things which can go wrong with them and limit their effectiveness – or even provide a very poor experience for the customer. So here's my five rules for running a successful "office hour" type of interaction session.
1. Set an agenda, don't go freeform.
Although office hours exist in a virtual world, they obey fundamentally the same principles as meetings in the real world. Indeed, they borrow their name from a form of real-world meeting - the academic "office hour" where a teacher promises to be in their office so individual or small groups of students can go along to discuss an issue.
However, office hours in virtual worlds tend to be more like seminars in size, with 10-12 people crammed into the same virtual space. This means that you get 10 people all of whom have different requirements and expectations of what they want from the office hour. Inevitably, this will mean that some people's expectations conflict - giving them a very unsatisfactory experience.
That's why, unless you have very small groups, the best office hour sessions always have a pre-announced topic. This allows people with a general interest in whatever you want to talk over to come along, and also discourages those coming along with more general questions. General questions should be dealt with through other means - email, IM, and so on.
2. Don't let other people answer questions for you.
This is a constant irritant to many people, particularly in technical sessions,
as Prokofy Neva has pointed out. Although, as is standard with Prokofy, she buries her point under layers of abuse and vitriol, it's still a good one: when another resident jumps in to answer a question, it's worse than useless. There's no guarantee that the answer is correct, and allowing other residents to answer questions encourages people to "show off" their own technical knowledge.
3. Don't be afraid to tell someone to be quiet.
Leading on from that, sometimes you'll find that a single resident dominates office hours, to the detriment of others. In the really bad cases, this will be someone who persistently asks the same question, over and over, and who other residents attack.
There's no simple answer to how to deal with this, but the best way is always private, rather than public. Do not, under any circumstances, tell someone to shut up in main chat - if you're going to ask them to back off a little, do so in IM.
4. Wait until someone finishes speaking before answering.
Despite the advent of voice, Second Life is still largely a textual medium, and the problem with textual, live chat media is that people tend
to talk in small bursts
without you necessarily knowing
when they've finished their sentences. It gets even more complicated when you've got other people's conversations interwoven in this too. So just bare this in mind when you're answering a question - type the whole of your answer in one sentence if you can, and allow others to do their own full answers too.
5. Never, ever lose it.
This one sounds obvious, but you should never, ever lose it with a resident - even to the extent of doing something like "/me rolls his eyes" at someone, even as a joke: your humour may not be the same as the person you're talking to. If you feel yourself getting angry, you're better off calling an early halt to the session than blustering on.
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