Our Values
At Dream Seeker Estates we live and work by a certain set of values that define how we operate as a business and as members of the team, starting with the setting of long term strategic plans, through the marketing and sales process, and all the way down to performing every day operational support tasks.
We consider keeping with these values critical for the success of our organization as this is what ultimately differentiates us from the competition, allows us to consistently meet the expectations of our customers, and ensures the resilience of the organization to sometimes negatively impacting policy or market changes.
- Ethics and personal integrity
- High standard of support
- Fairness in issues resolution
- Honest and open communication
Following are examples of specific situations to demonstrate our commitment to these core values.
Ethics and personal integrity
In September 2008, Dream Seeker Estates has purchased the remaining regions from the TCH Estates. As part of the agreement, TCH Estates were to transfer to Dream Seeker the amounts of tier collected from existing residents so that Dream Seeker Estates could continue supporting these residents. Shortly before the sale of sims to Dream Seeker Estates, TCH Enterprises collected tier from a number of residents for as much as a year in advance. The collected tier, which amounted to over $600 US was never transfered. Dream Seeker Estates was found in a situation where we had a number of customers who we have not made any commitment to, who we have not collected any payment from, and who nevertheless have paid for the right to reside on that land. Instead of taking away land from these residents and asking them to demand TCH Enterprises to refund their money, Dream Seeker Estates decided to take a different approach and in February of 2009 prosecuted and won a legal case against the owner of TCH Estates in the Superior Court of Vermont. All residents were allowed to reside on the sims and in one case where we were unable to provide the type of service the customer required, we have refunded several months of prepaid tier, even though we have not collected a dime of it.
High standard of support
Dream Seeker Estates is an organization where the requirement to consistently provide high levels of support has become an expected norm by the residents and the management of the estate alike. At Dream Seeker Estates, we have a team of salary paid support agents who will handle your concern professionally and with appropriate level of urgency. We maintain full support history so that we can ensure highest level of service and professionalism. We have access to the priority concierge team and all our support requests to Linden Lab are responded to within a few hours or even immediately in cases of emergencies during concierge team operating hours. We regularly work with various members of the Linden Lab team to discuss market and technical issues and future ideas. This relationship allows us to reach out to appropriate management levels to address and understand occasional more complex grid-wide issues. Our support team members have years of technical experience in all areas of Second Life technologies, viewers, operating systems, server and network architecture, and are up to date with the current in-world trends and grid wide issues. These skills are complemented with second to none interpersonal skills, resulting in a support team that is the envy of Second Life estates grid-wide.
Fairness in issues resolution
At Dream Seeker Estates we have a policy of no tier refunds. This is because when a resident moves in, we commit to pay our own tier for the sim to Linden Labs and Linden Labs doesn't give refunds. Nevertheless, there have been situations when we have given refunds because we thought it was fair. For example, if someone prepaid tier for a couple months in advance and then decided to move out, we have regularly in those circumstances refunded the unused months. Or a new resident moved in, bought the land, paid the first month tier, then noticed that there is a terraforming limit and they can't just flatten all the mountains on half of the sim or that global ban lines are not allowed in multi-resident estates. In such cases, even though these things were clearly explained in the covenant which was agreed to at the time the resident purchased the land, we have offered to move the resident to a more appropriate location free of charge and if we were still unable to meet their requirements and they wanted to move out, we have refunded the resident's unused tier.
Honest and open communication
In October 2008, Linden Labs announced a significant tier increase for homestead sims (which were called openspace at that time). Dream Seeker Estates and all other estates in Second Life were forced to raise their tiers to compensate. Dream Seeker Estates announced its tier increase plan on our website and through groups in-world, and we posted in the description of all homestead sims and parcels listed for sale what their new tier will be following the increase. Unfortunately at the same time, several estates not only failed to communicate their own plans to their residents or prospective buyers but explicitly told their new buyers that their tier will not be increasing. This resulted in many residents moving out of Dream Seeker Estates in search of better deals and at the same time the sales volumes dropped down to nothing. In December and January the horror stories started rolling in from people who have found the good deals elsewhere and a couple weeks later lost their sims with everything on them as the estates collected the tier money and then abandoned their sims and went out of business overnight, with no warning and no refunds paid. At Dream Seeker Estates we do our best to keep our residents informed of any pricing or policy changes so there are no surprises.