I was thinking about the idea of customer support, in part due to the post “What happen to having Customer Service!” on XStreetSL. Many shop owners in Second Life have “IMs are capped daily, please send notecard” in their profile. IMs are capped in Second Life® because they have a finite amount of storage, and have to decide to put a limit somewhere; this makes sense to me. If you enable IM to e-mail this tends not to be an issue, unless the IM->e-mail gateway decides it doesn’t like you (happened to me twice so far).
Here’s the thing, though; I have paid for Jabber (same protocol Google Talk uses) IM service, as well as Google Talk account (e-mail address is in with any of my free products). Why, then, does it even make more sense for people to contact me in-world, through a proven flaky IM system? It’s like being forced to contact a website through one of the webforms where someone has decided that a 20×40 text field should be plenty for anyone.
There are things IM can’t do; SL needs for people to be able to talk to each other based on proximity. That just doesn’t map to IM. The groups system in SL apparently would turn even the hardiest of Jabber servers into a quivering wreck. However, what about combining the two systems? Let me use my own IM system to receive IMs from virtual worlds. Don’t tie my status for IMs to my in-world-ness, tie it to whether I’m available to chat.
Same for e-mail. Let people e-mail me directly from in-world. I understand not everyone wants their e-mail addresses published, but how about making it an option for those of us who work professionally in virtual worlds?