Having only 50k employees is something they control. Their Net income is ~20B/year at that’s enough to pay for about 1 million low level customer service agents.
I am not saying they need to do so, but the solution is to make it unnecessary to call not simply to have nobody to reach.
Why would they pay out all their net income, provide better customer contact/service, and go from being massively profitable to break-even?
What’s in it for them to do that?
Even if they went 25% of the way there, does it make them a stronger company in the long-term? That they don’t do it suggests they don’t think it would.
25% would probably be vast overkill. The point is they could have say 100,000 people doing customer support without a massive hit to their profitability, especially if that support ended up increasing revenue.
In other words the real limitation isn’t their current number of employees or really their business model. They are simply acting like a monopoly which lacks competition. I am sure they think simply buying any social network that starts to get traction is cheaper than providing a better product.
I would say that “over $2 Billion/year” is a massive hit to profitability for any company, even if that is “only” 10% of the total income.
If your boss came to you and said, “Retric, we’re making the world better, but as a side-effect, we’re cutting your pay by only 10%,” how would you react? That’s probably close to how the board and shareholders would react to Google doing it.
That assumes having a large dedicated support staff had absolutely zero positives for the company. I think that’s extraordinarily unlikely as even just the feedback from support calls is valuable information. Remember, Facebook etc is making money by directly selling advertising and individual support calls can be quite profitable for them.
Sometimes a support call from a tiny new account that costs them 2$ can be worth a new 20,000$+/month revenue stream. Or that same account can walk away with a bad taste in their mouth. Similarly, if their getting thousands of calls about something that’s often a fixable problem which they would otherwise never know about.
Which isn’t to say it’s profitable in the short or long term, just significantly less expensive than the sticker shock suggests.
As a global company Facebook is not bound to pay US workers US wages. Around 300$/month is the Median wage for a call center job in India. They could pay ~3x as much and sill have plenty left over for the overhead involved.
Even just assigning call centers based on the callers country of origin would be dramatically cheaper than US wages for everyone.
I am not saying they need to do so, but the solution is to make it unnecessary to call not simply to have nobody to reach.