LinkedIn's Pay to Play Customer Service Model

To paraphrase an old Saturday Night Live skit… LinkedIn has been “bery bery good to me.” My Print Production Professionals Group has grown to almost 21,000 members, and is securely with the top 500 of all 1,016277 and counting groups on LinkedIn. I am connected to almost 9,000 Print & Integrated Marketing Professionals; I have made friends, found partners, and clients, even helped a bunch of people make those same connections and get jobs along the way. On the other hand, I have also been “bery bery good” to LinkedIn. Through association or word of mouth I have promoted their platform, increased their membership, and every day serve as not only a good will ambassador but in many cases as a CSR helping people with issues or giving them advice on how to best work the system.

I have had a free account since I joined in March of 2007. In the past year, working up towards their IPO and addressing privacy issues, LinkedIn has taken features away from me, disabled my ability to see all the information of people wanting to join my group unless I “upgrade” to $1000/yr, and limits my search results in my OWN group and throughout the platform to 100 records. I am lucky in many ways as I was able to grow my network under a free account and more often than not I can get around some of the new limitations because it is extensive. If I joined today, it would be a whole different story and I doubt I could have achieved “Super User” status or have grown my group in the timeframe that I did… but just because I have a free account does that mean I am not entitled to the same level of customer service?

A week ago, I sent an email to LinkedIn regarding a problem I was having sucking my blog feed into their platform using their tools. After I pushed send I got this message in response:

“We’ve received your message and we’re working to get you an answer. If you have a Premium account or you’re a LinkedIn Ads customer, we strive to reply within 24 hours. For all other members, we do our best to respond within 48 hours. We’ll get back to you soon!”

For all other members we do OUR BEST to respond within 48 hrs?????? What kind of customer service strategy or methodology is that? Will I jump to upgrade my membership and PAY them to get customer service, or think (insert curse word) THEM!

I get that there are tiers to everything. I have sky miles accounts and am enrolled in rewards programs. I also pretty much set priorities for my day based upon the emails or calls that are more important at the moment – But I don’t announce it! I don’t say hey, you are only spending x amount for Project Management or Social Media Marketing and they are spending xx so I will get back to you when I can… oh and by the way if you upgrade your spending you will matter to me more. Imagine???

LinkedIn could solve this… let’s call it a slap in the face, by simply having one email address for Premium Members and one for the “others” just like the sky miles and rewards programs do depending upon your level. But they didn’t. They have chosen to point out that they care more about people who pay them and that, in my opinion, is a very poor marketing strategy to increase paid membership.

What would happen if you did that in your business? What is your strategy for customer service when it comes to the spending level of your clients? These aren’t rhetorical questions; I’d really like to know if you think I am off the mark being so thoroughly shocked (disappointed, insulted) by their response to my help ticket. And fyi, it’s day 5 and still no help.