Friday, October 9, 2009

Facebook and it's customer service

We've heard many great thing about how online communities can strengthen and increase the value of customer service, but what happens with the online communities themselves have poor customer service? According to Caroline McCarty, many Facebook profiles have suffered from a recent outage. They've contacted both her and Facebook for a response, but little has come from Facebook in terms of customer support. After contacting Facebook, users only got back minimal responses that stated that their information was in no way compromised.

Is this acceptable? As one of the most highly trafficked web pages, should they work to support their customers better? I think so. Because to stay on top of the social networking world, they must continue to connect and listen to their customers, instead of leaving their questions about their accounts to go unanswered for days.

2 comments:

Litanin said...

I just want to remind, that facebook is still start-up project. So it is not perfect as any startup project.

Reed Hedges said...

Facebook's business model (such as it is) can't really support personal customer support. Lots of websites have this model-- they create a generic tool, and the (hypothetical) value is that there will be an extremely large number of users using it, but Facebook's costs won't increase as fast as that network value increases.

Anyway, just because the response to complaints is automated or not personalized, doesn't mean it can't be smarter (by listing known issues, and also by filtering problems up to Facebook so they become aware of them).