Have you ever thought that you wait too long for a customer service representative? Facebook and Instagram serve nearly 3 billion users every day. The number of customer service employees in these companies is closer to zero.
Pity John Bacon, a 72-year-old retiree from Cleveland, Ohio. Facebook blocked his account after it was hacked last year, and he thought he could talk to someone about reactivating it.
welcome to the club.
Bacon tried to hunt down a customer service phone or e-mail address and discovered what many had discovered before him: there are none. “I have never been able to talk to a human being,” he said of what would become a months-long journey to recover his Facebook account.
Users of free services in the meta-empire, which includes WhatsApp, sometimes make a huge effort to get help. Few succeed.
The customer service on Tiktok and Twitter is more or less the same. There are Twitter users who hope that the acquisition of the company by Elon Musk will help. “I beg you to look into the issue of customer service,” one user recently tweeted to Musk, saying he needed to send a letter to Twitter offices via FedEx in order to address a minor issue.
Bacon says he patiently followed all of Facebook’s instructions. He changed his password, twice, and gave identification information. Nothing happened. He then begged for help in higher courts. He sent a registered letter to Cheryl Sandberg, Meta’s chief operating officer, at the company’s offices in Menlo Park, California. In the letter, he described his failed efforts to revive his Facebook account.
“I have no way of dealing with this issue,” Bacon wrote.
He signed the letter with warm greetings. Sandberg did not answer.
The mechanism locks users without access to the account
Meta spokesman Joe Osborne declined to comment on the experiences of individual users but acknowledged that losing control of the account could be frustrating and the company needed to improve. There are meta customers who are temporarily locked out of their accounts following decisions of social networking algorithms, or following human controls, for reasons that users sometimes do not understand.
Recently, people said in interviews that like Bacon, their Facebook accounts were canceled after they were hacked. They also said it was impossible to get help.
Some frustrated users have turned to IT charlatans who speculate about their ability to recover Facebook accounts. After paying hundreds of dollars, users say the money went down the drain. A woman in a video that was widely viewed on a Twitter podcast last week claimed to have slept with several Instagram employees to regain control of her account. Osborne declined to comment on the incident.
Other people have sent messages begging for help from random Facebook or Instagram employees or executives whose names they have hunted down on LinkedIn.
Facebook locked Amber O’Sullivan’s mother out of account this year without explanation. O’Sullivan turned to LinkedIn and wrote to almost 24 Facebook employees in Ireland, where the family lives.
Replied a guy who identified himself as “Thierry.” He referred her to a news article about a chat function that Facebook is looking at but did not tell her how to get to that function. “When I asked for more help, he sent me the same article from another site,” she said. Her mother’s account was later released, again without explanation.
In March, Facebook introduced Facebook Protect, saying it was an extra layer of protection for some accounts. Some users said that instead of protecting them the new feature locked them without access to the account. Thousands turned to JustAnswer, a site that connects people with experts from various fields.
Shortly after the introduction of the Facebook Protect feature, JustAnswer said that Facebook-related queries increased by 88% per week. The site receives an average of 3,000 questions a day about problems on Instagram and Facebook.
“People are shocked, and they do not understand what happened,” said Chris Angulo, a technology expert at JustAnswer. “They just want to hear someone’s voice. Sometimes they think we’re Facebook.” When Angolo and his colleagues can not solve a problem, they refer people back to instructions on the Facebook site.
Meta sees the call center as a weak point
Meta has not increased its customer service alongside its growth into a company with billions of users because of the sheer scale and cost of such an initiative, say people familiar with the company. The company also sees a call center as a weak point, and as a possible path for adversaries to gain access to accounts for criminal or other illegal purposes.
The company said it had made investments in customer service, including testing a chat option for users locked out of their accounts, and it fixed software bugs that made it difficult for people to access back.
Facebook and Instagram employees say they once had an internal process for getting help. Today this option is largely unavailable, some of them said.
When articles were published in the Wall Street Journal about the confusing platform rules last year, the spokeswoman said the company plans to “build better customer service.” In December, the company began what it defined as a small test of its live chat functions.
A recent employee search announcement for a meta-manager of customer service activity in the meta states that customer service handling “is a complex issue, and we have completed only 1% of it.”
A post on Reddit states that people locked out of their Facebook accounts should seek help from Andrew Burger, an employment lawyer and employee from Mandover, Massachusetts. He sent registered letters to Facebook for three customers, and he charges $ 250 for this service. “I always send them urgently for delivery the next day, to make them look important,” he said.
Facebook did not respond. In one of Burger’s letters, on behalf of a well-known network influencer, he wrote that because his network was unable to access her Facebook account, she switched to Tiktok, a competing social network. Her account was restored 12 hours after the letter reached Facebook, Burger said.
One of the common ideas last year on Reddit and the Quora website was to buy Oculus virtual reality glasses that cost about $ 300. The company, which is a subsidiary of Meta, runs a customer service department designed to help eyewear owners.
Bacon says he heard about this idea from his wife, who heard about it on the radio. After his letter to Sandberg was left unanswered, Bacon bought one of these head systems in December, now branded Meta Quest.
Two hours after talking to someone on Oculus’ customer service, his Facebook account was restored. The head kit, which did its thing, also retired. Bacon says she’s just lying on our TV shelf now. ‘