Following the likes of LinkedIn and Groupon, the maker of your favorite Facebook games,
Zynga, is preparing for an IPO. Showing that we as a society have learned nothing from the previous internet boom and bubble burst, internet tech companies are becoming some of the hottest stocks on the market...again. Following LinkedIn's debut of a valuation of $9 billion,
Zynga is estimated to have a market value of around $14 billion. That's a lot of Farmville dollars. Despite estimates of the company having $17 million in monthly free cash flow, the maker of Farmville, Cityville and the likes is one of the most complained about companies at
GetHuman.com because of the company's lack of customer service. Frustrated customers often have their accounts hacked, or lose important parts of their games that they have spent hours building, only to run into a wall put up by the company when customers are looking for simple answers.
Well there's good news and bad news depending on how you look at it. The good news is with every public filing, the company will have to not only open it's books to the public, but it will also have to list contact information for people to get in touch with the company. Whether or not it's a customer service number or not, frustrated customers will have a number to call, as well as a list of board members and management email addresses to send frustrated emails to. If enough people send these executives emails, you can guarantee there will be a better customer service department in the near future to handle these problems. It's not all good though (remember I told you there was bad news too?). The bad news is we could potentially be running into another Facebook issue with this ensuing IPO. Facebook is notorious for being worth billions of dollars all while having one of the worst customer service departments, while at the same time giving off the perception they don't care about their customers. Facebook could be showing
Zynga the same model. There's a chance with a huge valuation and pockets bursting with cash that
Zynga won't make any effort to service it's customers just like Facebook doesn't. Company advocates always argue that customers have no right to complain because they are receiving a free service so they shouldn't expect the company to respond to their every care. But once a company goes public and shows that it's making millions of dollars, it disproves the fact that it's a free service. Sure they aren't charging customers to use their service, but they are selling ad space and gaining valuable ad information which they are then selling to make a profit, so it's not exactly a free service. Hopefully once the public sees how much money a company like
Zynga makes, they will start demanding an increased standard of care to start getting what they actually deserve - better service.
For more on the upcoming IPO,
click here.
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Posted by GetHuman on Mon, 6 Jun 2011 3:42pm