In today’s digital age, customer service is paramount. With social media and online review sites, customers have many ways to voice their satisfaction or frustrations with a company’s customer service. For businesses, providing fast, helpful customer support is crucial for retaining customers in an increasingly competitive landscape.
LinkedIn, the professional networking platform with over 660 million users worldwide, is no exception when it comes to the importance of customer service. With a huge global user base relying on LinkedIn for networking, job searching, recruiting, and more, LinkedIn customers expect efficient, timely support when issues arise.
What options does LinkedIn provide for customer support?
LinkedIn provides a few different channels for customers to get help:
- Help Center – LinkedIn’s help articles and FAQs, searchable by topic
- Message Support – Customers can message customer service through their LinkedIn account
- Request a Call – Fill out a form to schedule a call with a LinkedIn representative
The Help Center and messaging support are LinkedIn’s main avenues for customer service. Phone support is available for technical issues or account access problems.
What do LinkedIn users say about the speed of support?
To evaluate the effectiveness of LinkedIn’s customer support speed, we can look at data from customer reviews on sites like Trustpilot and other forums:
- On Trustpilot, LinkedIn has 2 out of 5 stars, based on nearly 700 reviews
- 50% of negative reviews cite poor customer service as an issue
- Many reviews mention slow response times taking days or weeks for issues to be resolved
- Customers complain about receiving canned, automated responses that do not address their specific issues
Here are some examples of actual LinkedIn user reviews highlighting slow customer support:
“I have tried contacting support and I don’t even get a response. I have tried everything possible and get no where.”
“Awful customer service. When you try to reach out to LinkedIn for help they take forever to get back to you.”
“Long waits to connect with an actual person and responses are clearly just a list of automated responses.”
LinkedIn Help Forum Threads
Beyond reviews sites, LinkedIn Help Forum threads also echo users’ frustration with delays in receiving support:
| Thread Title | Sample User Comment |
|---|---|
| Why does it take 3 days for LinkedIn to respond to messages? | “Is there any way to get faster support? 3 days without being able to use messaging is ridiculous.” |
| 1 month and no response from LinkedIn regarding a hacked account | “This is awful customer service for LinkedIn to not respond for a month!” |
| LinkedIn Customer Service Takes Forever | “It’s been almost 2 weeks and no response from LinkedIn after reporting impersonation.” |
These reviews and forum threads indicate there is widespread dissatisfaction with LinkedIn’s customer support speed and responsiveness, especially when contacting their support team via messaging.
What factors cause LinkedIn’s slow customer service response times?
There are a few key factors that likely contribute to LinkedIn’s slow support speed:
1. High User Volume
With hundreds of millions of users, LinkedIn has to handle an extremely high volume of support requests. Their customer service team is likely overwhelmed and understaffed compared to the user demand.
2. Reliance on Automation
To handle the influx of support requests, LinkedIn appears to rely heavily on automated responses instead of direct communication. While automation scales, it frustrates customers who feel they are not receiving personalized service.
3. Issues Require Human Intervention
Many support issues like compromised accounts and harassment require nuanced human engagement. LinkedIn’s automation fails in these cases where users need empathetic, situation-specific help.
4. Bugs and Platform Issues
Bugs and performance issues with LinkedIn’s platform can spike support requests. Server outages, app crashes, and software bugs all contribute to an influx of users simultaneously needing assistance.
5. Feature Misuse
Misuse of LinkedIn’s many features also drives excess support tickets. Users may over-message others, misconfigure ad campaigns, or violate LinkedIn’s community policies, all issues requiring support.
With LinkedIn’s expansive platform and user base, their support team faces immense pressure to address a wide array of issues and inquiries. Their systems are likely buckling under this weight.
How does LinkedIn’s customer service speed compare to competitors?
LinkedIn is not the only professional networking game in town. Major players like Xing and Viadeo provide similar services to LinkedIn. How does LinkedIn’s customer support speed compare?
- 17 million members vs LinkedIn’s 660 million
- Headquarters in Hamburg, Germany
- Offers options like Help Center, email support, and phone support
- Average response time is 1-2 business days
- Members report much faster resolution than LinkedIn users
With smaller membership and localized operations, Xing appears capable of providing faster, more personalized support.
Viadeo
- 65 million members, primarily France and China focused
- Email and online form support options
- Slightly slower response than Xing, averaging 2-3 days
- Not as many complaints as LinkedIn around support delays
Viadeo also outpaces LinkedIn’s support speed due to smaller user base and geographic concentration.
Comparison Summary
| Company | Users | Response Time |
|---|---|---|
| 660 million | 1-2 weeks+ | |
| 17 million | 1-2 business days | |
| Viadeo | 65 million | 2-3 days |
With an order of magnitude more users, LinkedIn clearly faces much greater support challenges compared to niche competitors. Their scale hampers their speed.
How could LinkedIn provide faster customer service?
Here are some potential ways LinkedIn could improve their customer service response times:
Hire More Support Staff
The most direct solution is to hire more customer service agents to handle the immense volume of incoming requests. More manpower would lighten the load and let LinkedIn respond faster.
Improve Automation Accuracy
LinkedIn could invest in more advanced automation to resolve common issues quickly. With better AI, their automated systems can pre-empt more requests with self-service solutions.
Prioritize Common Issues
Analyzing support request data patterns could reveal the most frequent issues. LinkedIn can optimize routing and staffing to resolve these common problems faster.
Offer Live Chat
Live chat on LinkedIn’s site and apps would provide instant, real-time support. Even if only for common questions, chat could substantially speed up resolution.
Provide Phone Support
Expanding phone support beyond just account issues would give users a quicker way to interact directly with representatives and get answers.
Temporarily Limit New Features
Slowing the rollout of new features could allow support teams time to catch up. Less change means less confusion and fewer new issues to solve.
With a combination of better staffing, training, and user options, LinkedIn could make meaningful strides in improving their customer support speed.
Conclusion
LinkedIn faces immense challenges in providing fast customer service at their massive scale. Hundreds of millions of users naturally means hundreds of millions of support requests from every corner of the globe. Managing this volume would strain even the most seasoned teams.
The data on LinkedIn’s support speed paints a clear picture – they are slow to respond, often taking weeks to resolve issues by message. Users complain that engaging support feels like dropping questions into a black hole, rarely receiving timely or personalized responses.
Compared to more specialized professional networking sites like Xing and Viadeo, LinkedIn lags far behind in temporal effectiveness of their customer service. Their sprawling user base and platform surface area are partial culprits.
To improve, LinkedIn may need to invest heavily in support staff, improve their automation, and optimize their processes. Additional user options like live chat could also help speed up interactions.
In the era of viral backlash, providing quality customer service at scale is table stakes for major online platforms. For LinkedIn to maintain their leading position, improving support speed should be a top priority. Their users deserve no less.