Social Media Firms Unplug Their Telephone Customer Service

One aspect of the technology "revolution" is its nearly religious belief that greater efficiency leads to a greater good. This largely unquestioned perspective has created commercial drives in which individual users become data points rather than living, breathing human beings. When a tech firm's system doesn't work, does not adequately serve a user's legitimate expectations, or leaves a user puzzled, what happens?

Well, don't expect social media or search engine customer service over the phone, according to a story buried in slow-news Saturday editions of The New York Times, Reporter Amy O'Leary's useful article details how tech's titans disdain offering any telephone service at all. Instead, users are typically directed to a relevant website, where supposedly they will find succor from the service providers.

The delicious irony in the story is O'Leary's attempts to get firms to speak on the telephone for comment on her piece. "Officials at Facebook, Google and Twitter (all reached first by e-mail) say their users prefer to go online, finding it more pleasant and efficient than wading through a phone tree."

Ah, but social media business development is much more important than the "user experience." As Zendesk chief executive Mikkel Svane noted to O'Leary, the social media firms have "paved the way in large-scale customer service by keeping everything online." However, while social media and search engine firms' ambitions are certainly "large-scale," they have carefully considered how to "small scale" customer service expectation and interaction with a human being to its logical vanishing point.

Mikkel Svane
(photo from Twitter)

In tech's world view, absolutely nothing can be permitted to distract the enterprise from its focus. That includes interactions with human beings, who have an annoying tendency to act out of sync with algorithmically estimated probabilities of behavior. The Times story slyly makes this point by going inside the belly of the data-driven beast:

"In Foursquare's offices in New York, phone calls are considered a distraction to the developers and are conducted away from the main work area, in British-style red phone booths, the company's spokeswoman said, explaining that calls are not part of developer culture."

They aren't part of social media's arrogant perspective on service culture, either.

Tweeting for the Lord

Amy O'Leary
(photo from Salt Institute for Documentary Studies
and Public Radio Exchange)

I have a theory that the Saturday news contains the juiciest stories. Often, the articles involve dirt or unpleasant PR someone either wants public or desperately wants buried. Occasionally, a feature pops up in which a trend begins to surface. Such is the case with a story in today's online edition of The New York Times. Reporter Amy O'Leary wrote an excellent, imaginative piece on how Christian organizations use Twitter to spread prayers and other messages to its user community.

One delicious observation in O'Leary's piece is how Biblical verses fit the 140-character limit for tweets. Not only do the verses come in under the Twitter bar, there's room for hash tags. This fortunate combination is made to order for the successful creation of tweets. Also, knowing the message gets to a defined community of like-minded users makes Twitter a powerful, compelling tool to spread one's religious messages.

The Christian communities have traditionally possessed their own means of communication. They have bypassed mainstream media and do their best to ignore it. The fact is the Christians don't need and don't want big-time media around, unless it's their own outlets. In a way, the Internet revolution played right into the Christian movement's hands. O'Leary's article brought that point home, ironically using the very tip of the secular media spear -- the front page of The New York Times -- the Christian world has long avoided and regarded with suspicion.