Customer Service Don’ts

The ever elusive FaceBook contact form

FaceBook used to have a decent support staff, but now, it’s completely automated. I’m not sure what happened. Maybe the mass popularization of FaceBook necessitated a change in how FaceBook approached customer service. Maybe the site is so widely accepted that people will still use it, regardless of how good the customer service is when there are problems. Maybe it’s just a necessary evil. But, I do know that once upon a time, when FaceBook still catered to college students, the customer support was much better. It wasn’t nearly impossible to find an answer in the help section. It wasn’t hard to find the form to ask FaceBook a question.

Now, the only place you can get help is the Help Center. And there isn’t really an option to contact FaceBook directly. If, by chance, you do find the “contact FaceBook” form, you’re still not guaranteed a response; you might just be chasing your tail.

I was fortunate enough to find a contact form link somewhere in the Help Center. It wasn’t listed anywhere by FaceBook staff. A FaceBook user recommended the link as the “best chance” for getting in touch with FaceBook support. After sending my message, here’s the response I received.

Facebook has received your message about FaceBook Pages. We are not able to respond to all Page inquiries. However, we encourage you to take a look at the Facebook Help Center (http://www.facebook.com/help.php). In particular, you might find the following sections helpful:

Facebook Pages: http://www.facebook.com/help.php?topic=pages
Facebook Ads: http://www.facebook.com/help.php?topic=ads

Thanks for contacting Facebook and enjoy the site!

-The Facebook Team

Not too helpful, considering I’d already scoured the help center, found the information inadequate, and needed to contact someone directly regarding my issue.

So, what can we as photographers take away from this experience of mine? Well, first of all, make it easy for your website visitors to contact you! If you do include links and text in an auto-responder, make sure that the text is relevant for a range of visitors. You don’t want to alienate your visitors before you’ve even had the chance to talk with them!

Update: By the time I got this article written and posted, Facebook had already removed the aforementioned contact form from their site. It looks like the search for way to contact Facebook will continue.