7 ms·

The most important products Google needs to launch are: Real Customer Service and Sensible Account Dispute Management. Without these two I would not touch any

The most important products Google needs to launch are: Real Customer Service and Sensible Account Dispute Management. Without these two I would not touch any of these services. They are, almost without a doubt, radioactive. Why? It's an old story, really: Get tangled with Google algo's for any reason and your account is suspended with no recourse. There goes everything: adsense, adwords, plus, gmail, drive, docs and whatever else was linked to that account. No thanks. Make a real commitment to behave like a real business partner with me and my clients and you have a deal. Until then, thanks, but no, thanks. Don't get me wrong, I would definitely like to use these services. I most definitely do. However, the risk of the totalitarian account suspension mechanism chopping your head off is just not worth my time. Charge me $99 a year (think Apple). Put me through the vetting process that Apple puts you through when you register as a developer (company data, etc.). Get comfortable with the fact that I am a real business. Then, from that point forward, let's have a real business-to-business relationship as opposed to a totalitarian-government-to-insignificant-ant relationship. That's a winning formula.

iwejfweoifjweif 14y ago
Have you had that happen with an account that you were paying for (like google apps?)
- earl 14y ago
  It's happened to a friend. And not a "friend who heard it" bs, a real live person who told me the story over beers in sf. And the gp raises a good point: what happens when the google magic fairies decide you did something wrong with your adsense account and lock you out of your compute infrastructure? What a nightmare.
  - robomartin 14y ago
    Right, that's the point. Google keep putting more shiny things on the table but neglect to fix what we are all clamoring for: having a proper business relationship.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - ryanpers 14y ago
    my account got suspended for 24 hours. its very bad. no recourse is the biggest problem. I had 2 phase auth turned on, dont spam, etc, etc. google = an algorithm stomping on a human face.. forever!
- aioprisan 14y ago
  It's happened to me, thankfully I created a Google Apps account and has Adsense on it but for some reason the Google fairies decided that the click-through rates were to high and suspended the account for 2 weeks. No thanks, I'll stick with Amazon and real CS
- robomartin 14y ago
  This isn't about paying or not paying for a service. These days I am heavily leaning towards paid services because, well, I want them to stick around. If Google needs to have some of my money in order to ensure that the relationship is, well, sensible, so be it. Give me that option. A few months ago I posted a set of ideas on how a more sensible approach could work. It focused on AdSense, which seems to be where most of the friction originates. Here it is: First of all, don't make the process an digital on/off decision. Create a system of staged penalties leading up to account suspension and then, if abused, closure. New accounts should have an "on-boarding" process in place. It would be OK to tell the site that, for the first 30 days ads will be presented and NO revenue will be paid to the site. This is a monitoring period where Google can just watch and see how the site behaves. During the following 90 days revenue is slowly notched up from 0% to 100%. Again, close monitoring and feedback during this period is critical. If and when a problem occurs, Google is to provide clearly understandable data on the relevant violations and suggestions on fixing them. One argument against this is that, if they made their violation detection data public, spammers will use the data to get even better. Well, so be it. Use this to develop even better detection technology. Last I heard Google is staffed with pretty smart folk. Solve the problem! After clearly flagging the relevant problems give the account owner a reasonable length of time to fix it. Say, three days from receipt of the notice. If the problem is not fixed in the alloted time then ad revenues start to be discounted based on some well-explained formula. Maybe 10% per day. This should provide enough incentive for a lazy site owner to take action. This could also come with staged penalization of the site-standing in search. This could be controversial. Maybe not. This could also have an element of a reduction of the CPM revenue on ads served into the site. Once the revenue reaches zero, ad placement stops. Perhaps there's the option for Google to serve non-ads with text noting that this site is in violation of AdSense rules. I can thing of few things that'll wake someone up more than having all of your ad locations populated with such a notice. Despite all of the above, the account is never killed off except for the most egregious cases. Having all ad revenue shut down the site is given a full report --with clear reasons-- of the violations and the timeline to ad-serving shutdown. AND, how to fix it. The site could be suspended from AdSense for thirty days, during which they have to show that they fixed the problems. Once the problems are fixed a staged restart of ad-serving would begin. At first the site would start being served with a few ads and they'd only earn, say, 50% of normal revenue. Over a period of three months of "good behavior" the sites ads would increase and improve. And, of course, the percentage of revenue earned per ad would notch back up to 100%. Oh, yes, if the account holder owns multiple sites on one AdSense account the sites ought to be treated separately. If one site is having problems but there's another that is in perfect standing account actions should only affect the site that needs to fix problems and not the entire account. I'm sure the above has holes. It is probably a reasonable start for a framework that could fix the problem. I've had the experience of having legitimate and above-honest clients get banned from AdSense for, well, we'll never know. The problem with the way Google runs this is that there's no way to make an honest mistake. This is very easy to do when you are just getting started. It isn't fair. It isn't right.
- gonzo 14y ago
  Yes, I haVe.
mrslx 14y ago
Customer service is not metric-able and has a high CPRD. Google will NEVER do what it takes. It's against six sigma. This against their operations team
- Peeda5 14y ago
  There's lots of other companies that'll step in and handle most of the customer service aspect, assuming google's provisioning of servers is reliable.
  - anentropic 14y ago
    assuming blah blah blah... if the problem's at google then no 'customer service intermediary' company are going to help at all
michaelt 14y ago
I work for a company that uses Google's apps internally. We have less than 1000 users. We get sales and technical contacts at Google with real phone numbers and everything. If you think there's a market for Google's products but with better customer service, you could form a startup reselling Google's products, with you providing customer service and escalating to Google whenever appropriate.
- FrojoS 14y ago
  And then Google will listen and help out when you "escalate"?
  - michaelt 14y ago
    Once you have a few hundred users I assume you'll get the same support level my employer gets.
- raverbashing 14y ago
  From what I heard of people running AdWords (that is, the people who pay for the ads to be displayed) customer service exists but is abysmal And this is not a one-off operation, it is an ad agency buying ad space on behalf of several customers
VigUi7vv8G2 14y ago
You know you can have as many Google accounts as you want, right? You could create a new gmail account just for this, to try it out.
listic 14y ago
For comparison: does Amazon (Web Services) have this?
- mnutt 14y ago
  For the longest time they didn't, but this year they launched Premium Support, and a few weeks ago they made it significantly more affordable. http://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/ http://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/
temphn 14y ago
Contact sales for enterprise level support? http://cloud.google.com/contact.html That is now at the top of the page. Not sure if it was there when you posted your comment.

iwejfweoifjweif 14y ago

Have you had that happen with an account that you were paying for (like google apps?)

earl 14y ago
It's happened to a friend. And not a "friend who heard it" bs, a real live person who told me the story over beers in sf. And the gp raises a good point: what happens when the google magic fairies decide you did something wrong with your adsense account and lock you out of your compute infrastructure? What a nightmare.
- robomartin 14y ago
  Right, that's the point. Google keep putting more shiny things on the table but neglect to fix what we are all clamoring for: having a proper business relationship.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- ryanpers 14y ago
  my account got suspended for 24 hours. its very bad. no recourse is the biggest problem. I had 2 phase auth turned on, dont spam, etc, etc. google = an algorithm stomping on a human face.. forever!
aioprisan 14y ago
It's happened to me, thankfully I created a Google Apps account and has Adsense on it but for some reason the Google fairies decided that the click-through rates were to high and suspended the account for 2 weeks. No thanks, I'll stick with Amazon and real CS
robomartin 14y ago
This isn't about paying or not paying for a service. These days I am heavily leaning towards paid services because, well, I want them to stick around. If Google needs to have some of my money in order to ensure that the relationship is, well, sensible, so be it. Give me that option. A few months ago I posted a set of ideas on how a more sensible approach could work. It focused on AdSense, which seems to be where most of the friction originates. Here it is: First of all, don't make the process an digital on/off decision. Create a system of staged penalties leading up to account suspension and then, if abused, closure. New accounts should have an "on-boarding" process in place. It would be OK to tell the site that, for the first 30 days ads will be presented and NO revenue will be paid to the site. This is a monitoring period where Google can just watch and see how the site behaves. During the following 90 days revenue is slowly notched up from 0% to 100%. Again, close monitoring and feedback during this period is critical. If and when a problem occurs, Google is to provide clearly understandable data on the relevant violations and suggestions on fixing them. One argument against this is that, if they made their violation detection data public, spammers will use the data to get even better. Well, so be it. Use this to develop even better detection technology. Last I heard Google is staffed with pretty smart folk. Solve the problem! After clearly flagging the relevant problems give the account owner a reasonable length of time to fix it. Say, three days from receipt of the notice. If the problem is not fixed in the alloted time then ad revenues start to be discounted based on some well-explained formula. Maybe 10% per day. This should provide enough incentive for a lazy site owner to take action. This could also come with staged penalization of the site-standing in search. This could be controversial. Maybe not. This could also have an element of a reduction of the CPM revenue on ads served into the site. Once the revenue reaches zero, ad placement stops. Perhaps there's the option for Google to serve non-ads with text noting that this site is in violation of AdSense rules. I can thing of few things that'll wake someone up more than having all of your ad locations populated with such a notice. Despite all of the above, the account is never killed off except for the most egregious cases. Having all ad revenue shut down the site is given a full report --with clear reasons-- of the violations and the timeline to ad-serving shutdown. AND, how to fix it. The site could be suspended from AdSense for thirty days, during which they have to show that they fixed the problems. Once the problems are fixed a staged restart of ad-serving would begin. At first the site would start being served with a few ads and they'd only earn, say, 50% of normal revenue. Over a period of three months of "good behavior" the sites ads would increase and improve. And, of course, the percentage of revenue earned per ad would notch back up to 100%. Oh, yes, if the account holder owns multiple sites on one AdSense account the sites ought to be treated separately. If one site is having problems but there's another that is in perfect standing account actions should only affect the site that needs to fix problems and not the entire account. I'm sure the above has holes. It is probably a reasonable start for a framework that could fix the problem. I've had the experience of having legitimate and above-honest clients get banned from AdSense for, well, we'll never know. The problem with the way Google runs this is that there's no way to make an honest mistake. This is very easy to do when you are just getting started. It isn't fair. It isn't right.
gonzo 14y ago
Yes, I haVe.

mrslx 14y ago

Customer service is not metric-able and has a high CPRD. Google will NEVER do what it takes. It's against six sigma. This against their operations team

Peeda5 14y ago
There's lots of other companies that'll step in and handle most of the customer service aspect, assuming google's provisioning of servers is reliable.
- anentropic 14y ago
  assuming blah blah blah... if the problem's at google then no 'customer service intermediary' company are going to help at all

michaelt 14y ago

I work for a company that uses Google's apps internally. We have less than 1000 users. We get sales and technical contacts at Google with real phone numbers and everything. If you think there's a market for Google's products but with better customer service, you could form a startup reselling Google's products, with you providing customer service and escalating to Google whenever appropriate.

FrojoS 14y ago
And then Google will listen and help out when you "escalate"?
- michaelt 14y ago
  Once you have a few hundred users I assume you'll get the same support level my employer gets.
raverbashing 14y ago
From what I heard of people running AdWords (that is, the people who pay for the ads to be displayed) customer service exists but is abysmal And this is not a one-off operation, it is an ad agency buying ad space on behalf of several customers

VigUi7vv8G2 14y ago

You know you can have as many Google accounts as you want, right? You could create a new gmail account just for this, to try it out.

listic 14y ago

For comparison: does Amazon (Web Services) have this?

mnutt 14y ago
For the longest time they didn't, but this year they launched Premium Support, and a few weeks ago they made it significantly more affordable. http://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/ http://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/

temphn 14y ago

Contact sales for enterprise level support? http://cloud.google.com/contact.html That is now at the top of the page. Not sure if it was there when you posted your comment.