LinkedIn: The Customer is Delusional

It’s fun being called delusional by customer service. Today, LinkedIn is trying to make me feel like I’m in that Jodie Foster movie Flightplan where she claims her daughter was kidnapped while on an airplane and everyone else thinks she’s nuts. The movie wasn’t supposed to be very good (it scored 38% on the Tomatometer), and I’m not sure this blog post will be any better, but I can at least empathize with Foster’s character based on the previews.

Several days ago I sent LinkedIn this message:

What happened to the feature under My Contacts/Other Contacts where you can sort contacts based on if they’ve been on LinkedIn recently? This is very helpful, as I have thousands of contacts, and it’s important to be able to prioritize recent users. I’d invite many more contacts to my network if you reinstated this feature.

Here’s the response I received back:

Hi David,

Thank you for contacting Linkedin Customer Support. The function that your speaking of has never been a feature on Linkedin. It would be against our own privacy agreement. If you have any further questions please feel free to contact us. Thank you for using Linkedin.

Thanks,

[Name omitted]
Customer Support Representative

So, either LinkedIn’s customer is delusional (I guess I’m more of a user than a customer since I don’t buy anything from them), or their customer service rep – one with 450+ contacts, no less – isn’t familiar with his own site. Better yet, the outcome may be that they have customer service personnel who don’t know their own company (and, come on, there aren’t THAT many features on LinkedIn), AND they may have been violating their own privacy policy for many months, if not a couple years.

Have you ever used that feature I so miss (that perhaps violated others’ privacy)? I’ll be happy to share your feedback with my new friends in their customer service group.