Is Big Tech the End of Customer Service?

Customer service is a differentiator. A great customer experience can be a source of competitive advantage. But what happens in a world without competition?

A lot of ink has been spilt on the dangers of “big tech”. Usually, these discussions focus on consumer choice, impacts on innovation, and even national security. Here, I want to focus on different aspect; how tech monopolies affect the customer experience. Specifically, I will highlight a series of interactions with Meta as a cautionary tale. Along the way, I will consider why service matters even without direct competition. I will also reflect on corporate culture, and how a customer-centric organization is more resilient and better positioned for long-term success.

Background

I know a thing or two about the customer experience. For ten years, I ran a consulting program which helped some of the world’s best known financial services providers monitor, benchmark, and improve contact center support. I later launched the Customer Experience Audit program, which looked at the totality of service channels and self-service tools to provide a holistic view of the customer journey. I have led service transformations, cultural realignments, and publicly recognized best-in-class providers with a client list that includes 高盛 , J.P. 摩根 , Nationwide , Pacific Life , and more.

I later leveraged my CX expertise creating a scalable Customer Success function at FilledFrame , a startup which empowers photographers to leverage their social media profiles to sell fine-art mounted and framed prints. Considering FilledFrame’s business model, advertising with Meta was a natural fit. I decided to set up ad partnerships, which would allow us to sponsor ads targeted to our photographers’ followers and look-alike audiences.

Meta's Customer Experience: A Cautionary Tale...

The actual details of my own experiences are less important than what we can infer from them about the culture at Meta. They do, however, set the stage, and are therefore worth reviewing. It is important to note that this was not a single bad experience, but rather a series of interactions over six months, with a slew of service requests, a multitude of agents, and dozens of touchpoints. The requests all related to advertising, which is a paid service that makes up over 95% of Meta’s revenue.

User Interface

I like to get my hands dirty, so I jumped right into Facebook’s Ads Manager. Anyone who has spent time on Facebook, Instagram, or WhatsApp will likely agree that, aside from some feature bloat, Meta’s consumer apps have a clean and intuitive design. Meta’s B2B tools, like the Ads Manager, Meta Business Suite, and Commerce Manager could not be more different; they are a mess. The interfaces are confusing, functionality overlaps in mysterious ways (with many tasks requiring switching between apps), and much of their core functionality is buried in Settings menus.

I am not an engineer, but I am tech-savvy. I have led multiple software development projects, launched several websites, and designed software frontends. If I am not able to figure out a company’s interface, they have a problem. It took longer than it should have, but I eventually figured out the prerequisites, set permissions, and sent a partnership request to a photographer I was working with. The problem was, while they received the invite from Meta, the link brought them to a page saying, “Sorry, this content isn’t available right now”.

Instructions

If at first you don’t succeed, look for instructions. Alas, all of the documents I was able to find (including those sent to me by Meta agents) were outdated. Screenshots did not match the actual user experience, options did not align, and selections brought me to strange and unanticipated places.

Instructions are low-hanging fruit. If intelligent people want to figure it out for themselves rather than contacting support staff, companies should do everything they can to facilitate. Instructions are also a vital resource for agents, as they provide a script to guide customers, and can even be used to train AI models.

While I could not find any clear instructions, I could also not find anything to suggest any of my settings were wrong, or that I had missed any steps. It was time to contact Support.

Customer Support

I reached out through live chat. The chat experience, in both the initial and subsequent interactions, was not bad. As is often the case, the interaction began with chatbots and was eventually routed to a live agent. While the agents could have been faster and relied heavily on canned responses, there was clearly a person on the other end and they seemed genuinely interested in helping me resolve my issue.

Unable to correct my issue via chat, the agent wanted to give me a call. This is an effective strategy. Start with lower cost options and only move to more costly channels if the problem is not resolved. While there was a 15-to-30-minute wait after the chat ended, it was nice that the same agent contacted me so we could pick up where we left off. The agent I spoke to was friendly and handled the interpersonal aspects of the call well. Where the agent failed, was in actually resolving my issue.

My ticket was escalated to the next tier of Support. Having to wait to for a response from a different team was frustrating, but not unexpected. The agent did set a clear 24-to-72-hour expectation to hear back.

The Expectations Game

Setting realistic expectations is one of the most important aspects of good service; unfortunately, Meta consistently failed to meet them. This breaks trust; it tells the customer that they are simply not a priority. Meeting expectations is particularly important in a B2B context, where there are often dependent workflows waiting on the timeline set.

The irony here is that customers care less about what the quoted time frame is than that companies meet them. If something is going to take two weeks, just tell me that. I will set expectations on my end, adjust my schedule, and circle back when I can move forward. As it is, Meta’s customers are happy with the agent when they hang up the phone, and only become angry when the promised reply doesn’t come. Meta appears to be prioritizing the agent experience over that of the customer.

I waited. After 72 hours, I reached out for a status update. I was told that they were hard at work on my issue and that I needed to be patient. A week passed. I reached out again to the same reply. After reaching out weekly for six weeks, I finally received Meta’s suggested resolution, “As per Internal team investigation in order to fix this issue they are recommending to do the Report a Problem process for User profile and the issue will [be] routed to our Facebook Team.” To be clear (and as I forcefully let them know), that is exactly how I initiated the ticket to begin with.

After a month and a half of waiting, their suggestion was that I start the process over again, without giving any indication that anyone had actually done anything on their end. I objected to them closing my ticket and repeatedly asked to speak with a supervisor. Every time, I received the same response (grammatical errors and all) with the only difference being the name of the “person” replying.

Another Go

If there was any other way to access the audience and data that Meta controlled, I would never do business with them again. Indeed, no company could possibly survive with such a blatant disregard for their paying customers outside of having monopolistic power. As it was, I tried again, and again, and again. In all, I opened six tickets with Meta for this exact issue. Despite dealing with different agents each time, the results were largely the same.

On one of my requests, Meta did reach out (on a Friday night) saying that they needed more information and that I had 48 hours to respond. Less than 24 hours later I received a follow-up email saying that since I had not provided the requested information, my ticket was being closed. You have got to be kidding me...

Misleading Metrics

At one point I logged into Meta’s Support Manager and saw that all of my tickets were labeled as “resolved”, despite my making it very clear that the issue had not been addressed and that I was not satisfied. This is actually very informative.

You have probably heard the saying “you cannot manage what you don’t measure”. Data drives effective decision making, allocation of resources, performance reviews, and incentive structures. Not having metrics in place is bad; having junk metrics is much worse. Anyone looking at the 100% completion rate would be left with the impression that Meta Support is doing an outstanding job.

Management’s ratings are being prioritized over customer outcomes. These priorities, and the implicit acceptance of dishonesty they reflect, are troubling. This simply would not, could not even, happen in a customer-centric culture.

#NotAllBgTech

To be clear, tech monopolies do not necessarily mean a bad customer experience. Amazon has excellent service, Microsoft has amazing documentation, 苹果 has intuitive interfaces, and 谷歌 products just work. Between my professional and personal life, I have used hundreds of applications and have never before been unable to successfully use core functionality.

Why the Customer Experience Still Matters

I finally gave up on Meta and shifted my advertising spend to Google. Is Google a direct competitor? No. Does Google Ads have the same potential in my specific use case? No again. At the end of the day, customers are going to find alternatives, even for the strongest monopolies. This is particularly troubling for Meta, as the clock is tikking and tokking on their industry dominance.

Even when there is not a viable alternative, ease of doing business is paramount in a B2B context, where the human capital required to use a tool frequently exceeds the cost of the tool itself. Reducing friction increases adoption, creates advocates, and ultimately leads to higher spend.

Companies that are responsive to customer needs are more efficient. Customer issues rarely happen in isolation, particularly with digital products. Addressing the root cause does not only solve the problem for the customer reaching out, it also corrects the issue for customers who are more inclined to complain with their feet, by taking their business elsewhere.

Finally, customer needs are always changing. Those companies that actually listen to their customers are rewarded with insight into what products or features they actually want.

Recommendations for Meta

Update Instructions

This is a quick fix. Updating reference materials is a low-cost solution that can eliminate the need for many customers to contact Support at all. Instructions can also be distributed by chatbots to resolve tickets before they get to costly human agents. In addition to producing new documentation, Meta should put a process in place to review and update instructions as needed. I would recommend both a review whenever significant changes are made, as well as periodic audits.

Leverage Complaints

While I never got an answer as to what caused my problem, it was most likely a bug. Listening to what issues customers are having is a great way to identify bugs in production systems that were missed by debugging tools. Squashing these bugs makes systems more efficient over time, allowing customers to spend more money.

More Effective Ticketing

I cannot speak to what Meta’s ticketing system looks like internally, but it is clearly not working well. The system should both flag cases that are well beyond quoted timeframes and provide transparency for customers. Perhaps someone actually looked at my case over the six weeks the ticket languished at Meta, but I was not given any reason to believe that was the case. Perceptions matter.

Measurements and Incentives

As a metrics guy, I understand the value of baseline data. I also understand that no data is better than bad data. Since my six “resolved” tickets are grossly misleading, Meta should throw out existing measurements and institute new performance tracking focused on customer outcomes and satisfaction, rather than arbitrarily closed tickets. Meta should also incentivize operational improvements. The Support department is well positioned to identify potential issues and make Meta’s products and services better. Incentivizing the discovery and correction of issues is a great way to leverage frontline staff and get broad buy-in for continuous improvement efforts.

Consolidate and Redesign B2B Tools

Though it is a longer-term solution, there is a need for a more cohesive design and fewer applications for businesses working with Meta. I am left with the impression that existing applications, like the Business Suite, Ads Manager, Commerce Manager, and Support Manager, are the results of the efforts of different teams with different priorities being slapped together. There is a definite need for an overarching design ethos, the best of which would be a user-centric design. While this would entail balancing the needs of different personas, Meta should have plenty of user experience data to produce a more cohesive design that would not only improve the experience of their customers, but would also increase usage and spend.

Look at Corporate Culture

While it may be last on my list, improving the culture at Meta is also the most important. One of my favorite practical definitions of culture is that it is how employees act in the absence of a specific policy or procedure. In all of my interactions and with all of my observations, Meta consistently failed to focus on the customer, indeed, their polices and procedures all seem to treat the customer as an afterthought. The experiences that I had with Meta would not happen at a company with a customer-centric culture.

The tricky thing about culture is that it cannot be dictated. It can, however, be influenced. There are certain levers that management can use to guide culture. Indeed, many of the recommendations above, like user-centric design, incentivizing customer outcomes, and treating complaints as opportunities would all start to shift the needle toward a healthier set of organizational priorities.

A customer-centric culture is a great source of durable competitive advantage precisely because it is not easily replicated. The impact of a new product or a cool feature will wane, especially once other companies imitate it, but a great service experience, even in a single interaction, can build loyalty that will last for years.

Final Thoughts

Monopolistic power can hide a lot of flaws. Meta may be able get away with a bad customer experience today, but the erosion of customer trust and goodwill that goes along with it will cost them in the long run. In the meantime, making it difficult for customers to spend money is just not good business. A consistent focus on the customer, especially if it is rooted in the company's culture, not only builds customer loyalty, it also creates a more responsive, resilient, and efficient organization.

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