The problem with being a dominant company comes when one treats customer service as another expense.
Judging from what we’ve heard over the past few years, getting in touch with Google’s customer service for AdWords and AdSense isn’t quite the same experience as you get when calling a company that really gets it, like apparel cataloger LL Bean.
Google wants very much to shunt its customers to the Internet when they have problems. The oft-repeated “post your question in our forum” isn’t just about convenience; it’s far less expensive to conduct customer service this way. When it’s staffed efficiently with fast responses, online support through forums and email can be a good experience.
Or, as Smackdown noted, such service may come across as ineffective and unintelligent. An email exchange started with a question from Google as to why Smackdown hadn’t been running any campaigns recently.
That came as news to Smackdown, which had run some ads a couple of weeks prior to that email. A reply to Google’s query brought back a response that simply had no bearing on Smackdown’s question.
We’re not going to bash customer service. It’s not an easy job, the pay generally stinks, and call centers notoriously micromanage their employees. But a clueless response sounds like an untrained response at best.
“It’s as if Google wrote an Eliza style program to handle their customer service questions, and almost got it right. Pick out key phrases from the emails, and see if there is a matching canned response,” said Smackdown.
Customer service centers do practice this, as a way to try and speed up the response to the customer. For frequently asked questions it can be effective when it addresses what the customer wants, and that seems to be the problem here. At least one customer service person, for whatever reason, didn’t analyze the question.
Smackdown mocked Google’s mantra of hiring talented, passionate people in the wake of this exchange. The problem really comes from companies seeing customer service as a necessary evil, a cost sink attached to the business of making money. It affects hiring practices, and end up delivering what Smackdown encountered: a poor customer service experience.
