Mashable had an interesting piece yesterday about the market for applications which connect your company’s Facebook page to its customer service function (Facebook Pages Become Customer Service Centers).

They note two such applications — Parature for Facebook and Get Satisfaction’s Social Engagement Hub — and ask:

Do you think Facebook Pages can serve as an effective way to provide customer support?

Traditionally (as explored so masterfully in “Fort Business” section of Chapter 5 of The Cluetrain Manifesto) companies used “customer service” and “marketing” as a mechanism for keeping customers at bay: marketing by speaking at the market and customer service by funneling voices from the market into various queues, phone trees, and lines where their requests could be properly noted and ignored.

So could Facebook Pages serve as an effective way to provide customer support? They absolutely could – though to date few companies have effectively scaled their Facebook presence in such a way that it could be used as a real customer support mechanism.

My concern is that in trying to open up Facebook as another channel for customer service will mean closing down what’s most interesting about Facebook and turn it into yet another contact form which politely accepts your request/question/concern and then with equal, polite indifference adds it to a queue to be ignored in priority order.

I’m reminded of a Forrester report (I think it was a Forrester report) about customer service inquiries submitted via email or via web sites, and how long major retailers took to respond – including many who never responded at all.

If customer-service-via-Facebook results in yet another “we have received your question and you will receive a canned FAQ response in 72 hours” style of interaction, I’d rather keep the focus on improving the existing channels before introducing new ones.

That said, if this creates some mechanisms for interacting with companies who otherwise offer nothing but the phone, bring it on!