This week I had a LinkedIn scare! Yesterday morning I had just put the finishing touches on a branded LinkedIn profile for a client and made the profile ‘live’ for all his connections to see the great reveal. He added his new profile pic and all was right with the world. At about 2pm that day I got a frantic phone call from said client who indicated he had ‘a LinkedIn emergency’.
Client was the owner of 2 LinkedIn profiles, and had needed to delete one. We were slated to coach more about how to use the tool and cover necessities such as how to kill off that extraneous profile later in the week. Client decided to delete that other unneeded profile himself and ‘poof’!, he deleted the one with 95 contacts and the fresh face.
Ugh. Head-smacking ugh! I’ll cut to the chase…after regaining strength in my knees, I advised him to send an email to LI customer service and tell them what happened, asking to have profile reinstated. As you may or may not know, LinkedIn is famously and annoyingly inaccessible from the customer service perspective. You can’t call them, you need to fill out a form. I contacted them one time and got a response some 3 weeks later after I had forgotten all about what I even wanted.
With form filled out and client still shaken up, we located a phone number for LinkedIn (650-687-3600), and he tried calling over there. He told me he called numerous (I believe he said about a million) times: “I’ve been trying to find a live person. The operater did what she could to find a live person, but she made the comment that no one ever answers their phone. I went through the directory putting in any/all names that I could think of, but all of them went to voice mail.” Yikes, with 400 people supporting more than 75 million users, are they all so busy or is LI on autopilot?!
Tragic. Frustrating. Not shocking though, based on LI’s less-than-stellar reputation for customer support. I was convinced we’d have to wait this one out.
Near the end of business THAT SAME DAY, I got a shocking email from said client: “Determination paid off. I made a million phone calls and finally got a live person. They fixed it. The only thing missing was my photo. I will update that tonight. Thank you for all of your help.”
PHEW!
Now, the moral of the story of course is to make absolutely sure you are doing what you think you are doing before you delete ANYTHING on your LinkedIn profile, especially the profile itself. Another tip: be certain to export your contacts to a .csv file (located in the ‘connections’ tab), plus make a .pdf of the entire profile (located on either the ‘edit my profile’ or ‘view my profile’ pages) for your records. Lastly, under ‘personal information’, ‘email addresses’, PLEASE do indicate which is the primary email address and then go ahead and list all the other email addresses people may use to reach you. (this has nothing to do with closing your account), I think client got confused as to which account he was closing based on which email address he used to originally open it. LI clearly verifies which account you are closing, and gives you several tries to back out. Nonetheless, we as humans do make mistakes and the last moral of this story is that: persistence pays off, but don’t take the chance I just exemplified…leave certain things to the professionals, it will save you time and frustration!
This story has a happy ending, and so please stay off the ‘close your account tab’ and seek assistance if you have multiple profiles, you may not be as lucky as my client is!
Kelly Welch is a veteran HR professional, Certified Personal Branding Strategist, Professional Resume Writer, and Certified Career Management Coach. She regularly provides critical career insights and perspectives to the delight and success of her clients