Wednesday, April 14, 2010

Customer Service in the "facebook era"

I have some feedback for facebook that I think would be valuable to their product managers and software people. I have no way to get it to them. Their "customer service" is almost impenetrable. It is clearly designed for idiot prevention, and I can sort of understand that, with 100's of millions of customers who use the site for free.

However, I think that this doesn't serve them well. Because there are people like me out there, who know how software like this works, who might want to report a bug, or a design flaw, and help them out a little bit. There is absolutely no way to get through their Customer Feedback Prevention mechanism. Other companies are like this, too.

What I think would fix it is a way to say, in effect, "I promise that you will be okay with what I have to say." For example, I could check a box that said, "I authorize you to delete my facebook account and add me to a Russian spam list if you think I'm abusing this privilege". In return, my message should go to a *real* person, in a reasonably high-placed position, who might actually want to hear what I have to say. I know those people exist, because I've worked at places like facebook and the product managers and engineers and marketing people want to know as much as possible about their products and how they are received. It's just that there's no way for someone like me to reach them.

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