So, my company is working on a Facebook application that we recently released. (More on that in the future). This is a new venture for me, and one that I’m totally thrilled about because it’s great, relevant experience. Being that we’re a startup and we all wear multiple hats, I’m handling some of the customer service for now, and I’m finding it uniquely challenging to any customer service I have done before.
Discussion board is dismal
Facebook provides applications with an app profile with a wall and its own discussion board. These forums are so basic and simplistic, that they’re unwieldy and frustrating. You cannot sticky posts, or make announcements. Threads that are created by the developers are not highlighted (although individual posts are, thankfully). You can’t edit your posts after a certain amount of time (not even if you’re the developer). You can’t move threads around, create sub-forums, or generally maintain these boards at all. They’re basic forums from circa 1996.
No individual user contact
There isn’t actually a way to reach out to an individual user having a problem in order to help them. You can reply to their discussion on the forums, but you have to hope they’ll read the alert and come back. You can’t send inbox messages to many users, or Facebook thinks you are a spambot and will ban your account. We don’t get email addresses of users (I presume for privacy concerns) so you can’t reach out by email to troubleshoot any issues.
Users are more vocal
Facebook game players are by far the most vocal of any community I’ve ever worked with. They’re very demanding and they post tons of problems. There are lots of false positives because of the demographic and the nature of the social gaming space. Debugging these issues are challenging because of the lack of ability to individually talk to these people. It’s not all bad though, they post a lot of legitimate bugs and useful feedback. Keeping tabs on all of this is difficult. The volume of incoming feedback is immense compared to the volume of users.
These users also have a very short session time when it comes to checking out the wall and forums. They often post their issues without reading any of the announcements first. They don’t read any forum threads but the one they posted in. They ask the same questions over and over again. They’re an interesting bunch. 
No additional customer support tools
Being that there are businesses running their entire companies with millions of users on Facebook, you would think Facebook would provide a suite of customer service tools to be able to support the volume of customers that they essentially “provide”. But no, there isn’t much of anything to help us out. Relying on an external customer service tool (we’re using Zendesk) to handle support requests only disconnects the issue. You end up with some users reporting on the wall and forums, and some emailing in issues (which you can’t actually match up with the users because you can’t match their email addresses with usernames) and so on. Expecting Facebook users to migrate to an external support ticket site is fruitless.
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What are your thoughts? Are you a Facebook application developer who has any tips or tricks?
Tami Baribeau is the Associate Producer for Metaplace, Inc, currently working on Island Life. She is also the Lead Editor of feminist gaming blog The Border House, and the National Facebook Games Examiner for Examiner.com. She can be reached on Twitter or by email.
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Perhaps get volunteer super-fans to handle most of screening and stock standard replies (how do I get money, how do I add a neighbour etc)? Then have the bug tracking system for the more meaty cases? PS – I have no experience in Facebook game support, just fwiw
We did a facebook game but there wasn’t enough people playing it in order to have that problem. You could ask that people leave contact information and then set it up so that you have somoene doing the ticketing for them and then you can contact them back through their prefered method of communication. Think of it as a comment policy for issue tracking.
ask zynga how they manage. if someone knows… they do.
Have now caught up with which app you mean, and you weren’t kidding about the vocal users
I did find something I planned to report, but so far was discouraged from doing so because of the time it would take to make sure it hadn’t already been mentioned. I should report it anyway; better you hear a hundred times than not at all…
A known issues list would help a great deal, especially if it’s a technical beta rather than a marketing one
Off-topic, I like the look of the JS-kit comments gadget, but I can’t even read them from some computers (such as the one at work, where I don’t even have the authority to know what NoScript is blocking). Don’t think there’s anything I can suggest, other than maybe a stronger ‘this feature requires JavaScript enabled’ warning.