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Face(less)book strikes again

Facebook is one of the most popular social media sites on the internet.

Most of the younger folk have moved away from Facebook to more exciting places such as Twitch, Instagram and such but the book of faces is still a hit with the middle-aged and with many businesses.

Unfortunately, as is the case with so many of these giant social media platforms, it is impossible to actually reach a human being within their organisation, if you need to.

AI bots and firewalls of anonymity seem to be the order of the day -- such that you can't simply pick up a phone and talk to "a real human ^TM when something important needs to be sorted.

And that's a problem, a real problem.

With so many businesses now reliant on Facebook as a way of connecting with their customers, a loss of access -- or even worse, being hacked and losing control of their account -- can be fatal.

A great example of this is shown in this story on Stuff.

Foolishly (IMHO), this small business relies heavily on Facebook for advertising and communicating with its customers.

This involves having a credit card stored with Facebook so that they can be directly charged for advertising as/when those costs fall due.

Who on earth would hand over their credit card details to a mega-corp that doesn't offer even a support phoneline to sort problems if/when things go wrong?

As a result, they apparently lost $5K to the hackers who, I guess, used their account to run their own ads which were then charged to that card.

Even though the money has been returned (probably via a chargeback through the bank), they still have no access to their Facebook "business account" so are still in an unenviable position.

And they're not alone... far too many businesses are discovering, to their cost, that when things go titsup, Facebook is just not interested and attempts to communicate meet with an impenetrable wall of nothingness.

Google is no better either. These corporations are now so huge that it has become impossible for them to offer a "human" interface to their users and their clients. Instead, all you get are some lame-arsed chatbots that masquerade as human.

Now I've got nothing against the use of technology to streamline a service or to reduce costs -- but I do find it offensive when such things are used deceptively. To be told you're chatting with "Cynthia" without being told that her full name is "Cynthia Bot" is dishonest... IMHO.

These bots have no empathy, sympathy or ability to operate outside of their programmed propensity to spew out boilerplate responses from a library of "terms of service" and other documents. That's *not* what you want or need when you have a very real issue that is costing you money and/or your reputation.

I'm not a fan of regulation but in this case I would be supportive of laws requiring all businesses that provide a service to NZers to provide a support line that is adequately manned by "real people ^TM" rather than just an email address or chat staffed by AI bots. At least then, those who had problems, might have a glimmer of hope that they could get them resolved.

Carpe Diem folks!

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