Facebook Applications and Customer Service
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The recent article on the YoVille monetization debacle has led me to write a follow up article on the state of Facebook applications and customer service offered by their developers. As a result of monetization efforts by developers a key aspect has been overlooked, namely customer service to application users. There are currently two popular monetization methods in addition to traditional advertising such as banners and they are: Incentive based advertising and outright feature purchases.
Incentive based advertising is when a developer provides advertising offers to users and in exchange for clicking on the offers the user is rewards with points or virtual cash. For example clicking on a specific offer will give you extra bonus points which you exchange for items or features within the application that would not be available to other users.
Outright feature purchases is when the developer offers the user to buy the virtual points or items outright using a credit card or a PayPal account.
These two monetization aspects raise a very important question. If someone pays for a service, aren’t they entitled to some kind of customer service when something goes wrong?
In the rush to monetize their applications many developers have overlooked this critical point. In most application (most, but not all) developers provide little or no support. Case in point is Zynga who have recieved very negative feedback from their users when they launched their YoCash program. But Zynga is not alone in this aspect, as it appears that most developers are following in the same pattern. Either that, or they have simply been overwhelmed with requests for support that they simply lack the facilities to accommodate all the users. For example take a medium to high usage application with about 3 million monthly active users. Lets assume that only about 5% of those are paying users. That translates to about 150k paying customers, of those about 10% have some kind of issue (whether it is technical or otherwise). That means a developer need to service about 15k requests per month. If the developer is unable to provide support the result is a terrible backlog of customer service requests, and a lot of unhappy customers.
I believe that Facebook must intervene here and ensure that developers provide adequate customer service facilities. If developers are taking money from Facebook users, some of the responsibility for customer care falls indirectly on Facebook. There are many ways to provide cost effective customer service but since developers are not obligated to do so, they simply ignore this all together. Facebook must realize that it is in its best interest to keep its users happy and that providing customer care facilities should be a requirement to launching an application on Facebook, otherwise alienated users will eventually turn to stand-alone social games with far better customer care then what is provide on Facebook.
my account has been disabled, i sent many mail but not response
( what i have supoosed to do pls help me 
this past few weeks.i didnt ude my farmville thats why all my plant was wilted..how can use such program if i wasnt able to connect and if ever only white screen displayed..gope you can assist me in my problem
My account in FB, had an attack by someone, with the assistance of customer service I will be
able to see all back but I have to sign up with all different password every time open, and have to request security code all the time, please help to fix this problem, without opening another account .
ACCOUNT TEMPORARILY UNAVAILABLE, HOW MUCH LONGER?
Last night at 7:30PM, while harvesting my crops in FarmVille, my connection to the internet "dropped"!
I quit Safari, re-booted my computer, and proceeded to log back in. After three failed attempts, convinced I must be repeating the same typo, I stopped … looked up … and right in front of me … in the middle of my monitor a pink box with the following message read…
"…your account is temporarily unavailable due to site maintenance. It should be available again within
a few hours. We apologize for the inconvenience … "
Both concerned and intrigued … I set out to verify the authenticity of the FB "error message" .. after a couple hours of perusing FB blogs and discussion groups, such as this, I was relieved to learn and happy to share that the FB message is "clean" .. non-viral and hacker free!!
This morning at 7:30 AM, 12 hours now passed …still, I am unable to log onto Facebook!
Last night at 7:30PM, while harvesting my crops in FarmVille, my connection to the Facebook "dropped"
ACCOUNT TEMPORARILY UNAVAILABLE …. HOW MUCH LONGER?
there is something wrong with my facebook account..at first it's not opening it says that i have a wrong password then i tried to logout and open again after half hour then came but always closing…
it started when i open a link about sex scandal of obama and hillary clinton! it didnt actually opened but it's spreading now on facebook!
please do something about it. thank u
i forget to my security code
please send come back to my security code
dear sir I and my friend use chess application on facebook on same p
c but my all profile is share with my friend so please help me
Happy birthday sami shkor, may GOD bless ur day.