Ears of the Audience, Spirit of the Company
The Customer Service team is huge, over 20 people. It always
was, since Zuck always understood the importance of
communicating well with his audience. And they got to sit in the
nice desks, better or equal to anyone else.
In some large corporations, customer service is a high turnover,
low status job. Some companies farm it out to call centers in
India or rural Utah, where computer generated metrics requiring
reps to churn through a certain number of calls/email an hour,
sometimes with only scheduled bathroom breaks. Some kids
hope for customer service jobs are a foot in the door to a big
company, but often outsourcing has now closed that door, if it
ever was a real career path in a single company.
When treated well, customer service folks are some of the best
problem solvers in a company, and have decided that they want to
be cheerful during their workday.
At Facebook, customer service embodies the student user.
Literally, customer service consisted of mostly Stanford heavy
Facebook users. So customer service often knew exactly what
52 Inside Facebook
Copyright, Karel Baloun, 2006. All rights reserved.
43 best looking, right after his gf of course. hey, his girl has the bod of a
marathoner.
student users meant, and could communicate that clearly, to the
heavy Facebook using student engineers who would immediately
make the change. Everyone was a user. On one of my first days I
asked Dustin what his IM address was, and he answered “There’s
this website where you can look that up. It’s called Facebook.”
How useful it was to have a large pool of smart, prototypical users
right there next to you.
And they were nice and fun to talk to! Not like all the boring
engineers I’d sit with all the rest of the time. The funniest regular
meeting presentation I enjoyed was by the CS team lead Paul
Janzer, and it won his entire group a relocation up to the nicer,
sunny 3rd floor.
The highlight was samples of real user questions, reproduced
here as best as possible from memory44:
• I’m looking for a girl named Cathy in Chicago. Could you please
tell me where I can find her, because I’d like to see her again.
• My college can’t even provide me an education, much less an
email address. Let us on the damn site!
• How can I find my own profile?
• I think my [boyfriend or girlfriend] is cheating on me. Let me
into their account so I can find out.
Karel Baloun 53
I’ve found something to put here. Your turn.
44 I can’t remember what I had for lunch. I wish I’d taken notes about important
items like these.
• (from a high school student) ... so please help me with that as
you can. because i want to look cool like my friends. at least i
hope they’ll think I'm cool.
Tom LeNoble, now director of CS and a very calm, capable,
balanced, organized guy, replaced me as the ranking member of
the age diversity program, and is the only person who ever asked
me for a printout of anything.
The Customer Service team is huge, over 20 people. It always
was, since Zuck always understood the importance of
communicating well with his audience. And they got to sit in the
nice desks, better or equal to anyone else.
In some large corporations, customer service is a high turnover,
low status job. Some companies farm it out to call centers in
India or rural Utah, where computer generated metrics requiring
reps to churn through a certain number of calls/email an hour,
sometimes with only scheduled bathroom breaks. Some kids
hope for customer service jobs are a foot in the door to a big
company, but often outsourcing has now closed that door, if it
ever was a real career path in a single company.
When treated well, customer service folks are some of the best
problem solvers in a company, and have decided that they want to
be cheerful during their workday.
At Facebook, customer service embodies the student user.
Literally, customer service consisted of mostly Stanford heavy
Facebook users. So customer service often knew exactly what
52 Inside Facebook
Copyright, Karel Baloun, 2006. All rights reserved.
43 best looking, right after his gf of course. hey, his girl has the bod of a
marathoner.
student users meant, and could communicate that clearly, to the
heavy Facebook using student engineers who would immediately
make the change. Everyone was a user. On one of my first days I
asked Dustin what his IM address was, and he answered “There’s
this website where you can look that up. It’s called Facebook.”
How useful it was to have a large pool of smart, prototypical users
right there next to you.
And they were nice and fun to talk to! Not like all the boring
engineers I’d sit with all the rest of the time. The funniest regular
meeting presentation I enjoyed was by the CS team lead Paul
Janzer, and it won his entire group a relocation up to the nicer,
sunny 3rd floor.
The highlight was samples of real user questions, reproduced
here as best as possible from memory44:
• I’m looking for a girl named Cathy in Chicago. Could you please
tell me where I can find her, because I’d like to see her again.
• My college can’t even provide me an education, much less an
email address. Let us on the damn site!
• How can I find my own profile?
• I think my [boyfriend or girlfriend] is cheating on me. Let me
into their account so I can find out.
Karel Baloun 53
I’ve found something to put here. Your turn.
44 I can’t remember what I had for lunch. I wish I’d taken notes about important
items like these.
• (from a high school student) ... so please help me with that as
you can. because i want to look cool like my friends. at least i
hope they’ll think I'm cool.
Tom LeNoble, now director of CS and a very calm, capable,
balanced, organized guy, replaced me as the ranking member of
the age diversity program, and is the only person who ever asked
me for a printout of anything.
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