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.