Mary Schmidt Marketing Troubleshooter

CNN: Facebook’s Mounting Customer Service Crisis

Apparently last week, FB had some technical problems. I didn’t notice – at least not more than usual. It has its quirks, but I also don’t expect much because I’m not a paying customer. Facebook doesn’t have those. It’s a cool idea in search of a commercial reality. (Lots of those around. Some make it; most don’t. And, you can have truly innovative technology…and it’ll never make any money, at least not in your lifetime. Example: Fax machines, first patent in 1843.)

Reader e-mails indicated quite a bit of frustration.

“I lost my job back in March and have been using this site as a networking tool,” one reader’s e-mail said. “It’s frustrating that it’s been down for so long.”

Some were paranoid that their accounts had been deleted and all their contacts lost. And many of the e-mails cited unresponsiveness on Facebook’s part despite multiple customer service complaints. Third-party customer service forum Get Satisfaction was filled with chatter about Facebook login and access problems, including at least one threat of a class-action lawsuit.

?!?!. “class action suit?” According to the article, FB has 300 million active users around the world and can’t be expected “to be able to respond to every inquiry it receives.” Well, of course not. The only reason I would expect them to do anything at all re customer service (it’s FREE, people) is they need to transform those 300 million users into a revenue source of some sort.

Facebook (and the rest of the cool kids, Twitter, etc.) are faced with the same problem we IT marketers had decades ago when trying to move from “free to fee” for hardware and software support. People got really nasty about paying for something they’d been receiving for free. And, these people had paid for the original hardware and software, so they were already customers. It wasn’t until IBM and Microsoft started charging that the transition finally happened. However, both of these companies had massive, entrenched customer bases (with real revenue-generating customers) so they were able to pull it off (and legitimize the paid support market for the rest of us).

So, what is a viable biz model for Facebook? Beats me. It’s fun to think about over martinis, but they’re not paying me to solve the problem. (One thought though – don’t cram and jam everything on the users pages. Don’t abuse user information. Don’t try to be all things to all people. Well, that was three thoughts…but it really does come down to delivering value, that people will pay for, regardless of the medium or technology.)

Now, I’ve got to go “unfriend” a few probably perfectly nice people who deluge me with sales pitches, breathless updates about their lunch choices, and…complaints about FB’s customer support….;-)

P.S. A free site is no substitute for real networking and relationships. And, the time to network is when you don’t need a job.(or investor funding, or a bank loan, or…). Otherwise, you’ll be like one of my former staff, who I’d not talked to in – oh – 15 years, who popped up asking me for a referral and reference. I felt badly declining, but…