It has been somehow a publicly known secret, that tech companies rarely have their own customer service for live support experience.
While they do have public relations and spokesperson, these people work to speak with news agencies and the media, on behalf of the companies. Tech companies aren't known for having a telephone line where people (end users) can call to reach the companies. Even in the age of AI, many tech companies don't even have bots where customers can chat with.
To address users' concerns and questions, tech companies provide throughout help center, with detailed Q&A section.
Meta is the company that owns Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and others, founded in 2004.
For all this time, users can contact the company through a dedicated contact form or through its Help Center, via chat, or direct email addresses, social media, among other methods. But most of the time, users won't be having a direct communication with a real human representative.
The company wants to change this.
According to a report from Bloomberg, the news agency quoted Brent Harris, Meta’s vice president of governance, who said that the Meta is "spending a bunch of time on" customer service.
The project began in 2021, when the company piloted a live chat support program that gave some English-speaking users a way to actually talk to a human representative at Meta.
With the feature, users could get help by speaking to real humans, to address issues, like for example, when they got locked out of their accounts.
At that time, the company said the feature was "the first time Facebook has offered live help for people locked out of their accounts."
According to Bloomberg, Meta’s focus for building this customer service feature is to fix its existing support experience, partly due to feedback it received from Oversight Board.
In 2020, the "independent” body more powerful than Mark Zuckerberg, was created to monitor and overturn Meta’s decisions.
But for Meta that has grown significantly larger than ever before, providing support for all of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Horizon VR, and other properties, would be a massive undertaking for the company.
With more than 2 billion users, Facebook is high up in the sky.
And the higher it goes, it needs to deal with a lot of weight under its feet, and wind up above. From dealing with competition, to addressing major content moderation problems, the company needs an army of representatives if it ever wants to have live supports.
This is why at least initially, Meta's customer service is meant to help users who accidentally find themselves flagged by its automated moderation tools.
When it is first announced, the effort is still in its early stages.