It’s untenable from a marketing perspective to advertise a phone line that just talks about the services you don’t offer. One could maybe hope for a statement on a help page that says “Facebook will never ask you to call a support number”.

I think what you've gotta do is say, "You can't call, but here is the number anyway," because customers aren't necessarily interacting with your page anymore. They're interacting with AI summaries of your page. Those AIs might be in house, or might be provided by a search engine. What is tenable or untenable will have to shift to the realities of how users are interacting with the information you present.

If you can't provide their AI with text answering their direct question (eg, "what is the support number for Facebook"), they'll find a document which does provide such text. If it's not you then it's a scammer or competitor. UX for these customers means presenting information in a way that sorts high in a semantic search and is robust to transformation.

If you provide text indirectly answering the question ("that number doesn't exist" rather than a literal number), you're liable to be scored as less relevant than a wrong but direct answer ("the number is 1555 SCAMMER"). You're also less robust to transformations, because you can't pull a valid phone number out of the text.

Or maybe I'm wrong, take any certainty implied by my language as rhetorical. That's just the pattern I'm seeing in these tea leaves.

Also, realistically, I don't imagine the phone number literally just telling you that the service wasn't available and hanging up. I imagine it would offer you options to get various pieces of information (the URL of the website, the legal address of Meta, how to navigate to the support knowledge base on the website, ...) and let you draw your own conclusion about how useful it was. Maybe it's occasionally handy to someone. At worst it's harmless.

I think in an ideal world, you could use speech recognition to let people leave a message, and open a ticket, as if they had emailed support@. When someone responds, the system gives them a call them back and delivers it using text to speech.

I like how we've suddenly accepted "AI" "summaries" as simply the way of the future, despite the inherent problems and repeatedly botched rollouts.

It could be rejected for sure. I personally don't think it's working well. I don't support it really.

I once had a Facebook rep I could call (they later ended this), and they didn't know that were two online newsletters about changes to internal Facebook apps used by advertisers (we used to be able to see who had clicked "interested" on an event). So they put in a bug report when the app stopped working, etc., but we later found it had been deprecated. All to say that dedicated support is often a cause of issues or confusion.

It is easy as hell

“There is a phone number for Meta online. When CBC called it, an automated recording said, ‘Please note that we are unable to provide telephone support at this time,’ and directed callers to meta.com/help.”

My mistake. Thanks for the correction.

> Please note that we are unable to provide telephone support at this time

Mealy-mouthed corporate lying horeshit.

They are able, just unwilling.

If free-market libertarianism is as great as the tech bros want us to think, why do companies lie so much and so often despite the need for participants in the market to be correctly and full informed so they can make rational decisions?

"Pls fix" proposed a market for bribing meta employees to deal with customer support requests.

So lobbying?

> Part of the problem here is that Facebook (though in fairness, they are not unique here) has left this traditional path of escalation void, leaving only fake numbers. They don't even have a real number to play a recorded message affirming that there is no ability to call.

Contrast with Experian, which has a number for consumers to call, but actually has an elaborate infinite loop in its phone tree that prevents you from actually talking to a human (this is by design).

If you're one of their customers (read: a business paying for their service), there's support you can call, but for individuals who have issues with their online Experian account or credit report, you can't, even if you're a paid subscriber to their consumer-oriented credit reporting services.

>Part of the problem here is that Facebook (though in fairness, they are not unique here) has left this traditional path of escalation void, leaving only fake numbers.

Frankly it's absurd to me that it's legal to do so. Any public facing company that is sufficiently large should be required by law to operate a phone service where you can talk to a real human being.

All of these huge mega corps are run with absolute impunity and there is often absolutely 0 avenue for regular everyday people to get in touch when they have issues. They direct you in these endless loops to FAQ's and "Community Resources"; even getting an email address is like getting blood from stone sometimes.

Just a matter of time. The adoption of expectations is dependent on the visibility of the occurrence.

They all are required to have a process service agent and address, legally.

For some cases, your local small claims court may be an efficient escalation path. If enough people do it, companies will learn that too much stonewalling doesn't actually save money, because now your customer support is done by the legal department.

My wife and most of her friends have all lost their original accounts. She got an email that password was changed. We immediately took action. They had changed the email associated with account. No way to change it back. Only thing we could accomplish was getting the account disabled. Zero way to contact Facebook. These are all woman that FB was primary storage place for kids photos.