We all know Facebook is the behemoth of the social media world, our clients have to use it, and now it’s gone pay to play, we all have to spend our budgets to use it to get some kind of decent reach, unless you are in the camp that says it’s time to ignore the platform altogether. So with that in mind you would think that Facebook would have a killer customer service team that would be agile, friendly, adaptable and helpful to get you to spend your money in the correct areas right? WRONG!
Firstly, try finding their phone number, then try finding their email. You will be hunting for quite a while trust me.
According to our recent request Facebook apparently doesn’t have the time to speak to us small companies that are spending several thousands of pounds a month. I have just checked Prohibition’s Facebook’s advertising account, and in the last twelve months and we have almost spent £30,000, which I feel would make us a pretty decent quality client to any business. Sure we are not Virgin but we have been doing social media PPC for more than two years and we are spending with this business regularly. Not only that but this Christmas, as we have several well known retail brands in our portfolio, we have significant PPC budgets which means we are going to be spending more than we have ever spent. In other words, we are looking to invest our budgets better and more strategically as it is all about the ROI – so we felt maybe it was time to ask them for some useful advice.
Now to make sure we were getting the best results, and to see if I could get a few of my more junior team trained up with the back end, we decided to reach out to Facebook for the first time to see if we could get someone at their end to give us a helping hand with a couple of things. Here is their response:
“Thanks for reaching out to Facebook.
I understand that having a personal account manager would be very helpful. However, please take into consideration that because of the huge amount of requests at the moment we are only assigning personal manager to very few clients. This option might become available in the future, and Facebook will reach out to you when this happens. I am sorry I can’t be more helpful on this request.
Additionally, please note that our Global Marketing Solutions team at Facebook will be able to answer all your questions within 24-48 hours, including those related to assisting in setting up and optimizing your campaigns. You can use any of the available contact forms: https://www.facebook.com/business/resources.
Best regards,
XXXX”
Or in other words: “No, you cannot have any special Facebook training on our simple to use system! Just Google Facebook and that should help you out!”
So there you go, we can get answers online via Google, and nobody wants to help the team with providing best practice reporting. I find this bizarre, we want to spend money with you, we want to demonstrate the best ROI to our clients, and we are looking for a little bit of advice but you can’t be bothered as you have far more important clients.
Is that arrogant?
I thought the aim was to help your customer and make them happy? Surely with all of their billions they can look to sort this out and start providing a good quality B2B customer service team with a dedicated manager for clients that spend more than £25K a year – or am I crazy and unreasonable? Google does it, so why don’t you Facebook?
Chris Norton is the founder of Prohibition and an award winning communications consultant with more than twenty years’ experience. He was a lecturer at Leeds Beckett University and has had a varied PR career having worked both in-house and in a number of large consultancies. He is an Integrated PR and social media blogger and writes on a wide variety of blogs across a huge amount of topics from digital marketing, social media marketing right through to technology and crisis management.
