Have LinkedIn forgotten its Customer?
Let me start by saying that I love LinkedIn. It's by far my favourite Social Network for the simple reason that you can do business with people you connect with. Never in the history of the world have business professionals been able to be part of a 300+ million network, where you can do business.
I also know that the culture inside LinkedIn is truly awesome and a great example for many corporates in the world.
I'm generally very generous in my compliments when it comes to LinkedIn, but I also know they know that there are some faults that they need to work on. Some issues with the platform do show up regularly, equally the ’connected’ app has problems from its original very release, which have caused me issues.
But that said we know no Social Networks are perfect and it's easy for me to sit here and criticise.
But, there’s no excuse for poor customer service. And here I believe that LinkedIn are seriously letting their customers down at the moment.
Overall they let us down as follows:
- It's not super easy to contact support. You have to search the forum/help pages first before you can access the ’contact us’ button. That's so old-fashioned. I understand why they do it, the answer could already be inside the forum and help pages. But when new entrants in the social world allow you to email them directly and receive a personalised response, you do wonder why LinkedIn is still using this approach.
- When support responds, you usually receive a very standard response, that clearly shows someone copies and pastes a template. Nobody is rude or unhelpful, they are really polite, but the style in this modern world is too robotic in nature and well you don't feel like a person, just a number.
- When you challenge the response they continue to be professional and robotic and usually it doesn't result in a satisfactory response. Answers like, ’we are aware and our engineers are working on it’ or ’we don't have a solution to this problem, but don't know when we will resolve it’. They tend to be answers that are never resolved, leaving us frustrated and wondering who is actually there at the other end working on the customer’s behalf?
Let me illustrate with a very recent and very specific case study.
- The other day I opened LinkedIn’s email and saw that upon composing an email a paper clip appeared to allow me to attach a file. I had never seen this before and was obviously excited that at last LinkedIn is allowing us to attach files to emails. Of course I immediately tested it by sending an email with attachment to my wife to show her this new feature and put it to the test.
- Then the next day I decided to send someone a file via LinkedIn email, to show off my new discovery. I also posted updates the previous day to all my channels sharing my excitement. However when I opened LinkedIn email, I noticed that the paper clip had now disappeared.
Below you can read the dialogue I had with LinkedIn and I'm sorry for sharing my frustration with them so publicly. Can you read how the support agent ’Vikas’ just isn't getting it? He completely misses the point of my question and is confirming back to me details I already know.
This isn't the first time this has happened to me either. I have several examples of mis-communication and non-resolved communication from LinkedIn. Plus I have heard stories from many professionals who are all left feeling frustrated with unresolved issues and desperately poor communication.
Please Jeff and team, can you review your customer service and examine whether it's working in a modern world without ambiguous responses. Thank you so much!