Better Customer Support Systems

Posted: 2009-05-10

I posted earlier on the fundamental problem with customer support and i've been having some serious problems with Facebook recently. Although in the comments, all i've recieved so far is people having similar issues, i've thought of a few solutions on my own.

Firstly, companies like Google and Facebook could have (paid?) "super users". Now, i know that sounds like a bad thing. Everybody always hates the super users, but the only power these ones have is to be able to report bugs directly to the company. For example, i am a heavy user of Facebook and Google services, so i'm more likely to know how to use them, how they work, and when a problem is on their end. Their systems could detect that i'm a very heavy user, and they could look at my activity online (only things that are public, not go through my account activity), and invite me to become a super-user. This would put me in contact with the company over any problems that should be reported, and they could contact me to test to make sure something works.

Second, customer support could function more like a bug tracker. This way, every question submitted could be open for answers from other users (which is already the case), new posts would detect old duplicates (which should also already be the case), and real bugs could be reported as such. This could easily be combined with my first idea, and super-users could be the one with the privileges to confirm a bug as being on Google's end instead of a user error.

What do you all think? Do you have any better ideas? Post in the comments!