7 ms·

I think this is going to be really big. But it might require actual customer service; that must have made them think twice.

by pg 13y ago

wtallis 13y ago
They've already started to bite the bullet and provide real customer service with Google Fiber. We could be witnessing a huge change in their institutional attitude toward customer service.
- OJKoukaz 13y ago
  Will better service from Google Fiber, and other large providers, push Comcast to provide a better customer service/support experience?
  - Laremere 13y ago
    No, those who care about service will switch to google fiber. Then Comcast will see that the number of complaints about their service is decreasing, and go on to praise their employees. For now companies which should be scared of Google Fiber aren't. It took the US years and lot of tax money to build the infrastructure which current ISPs own. Google has done parts of one city with only 2 more on the way. It will take a long time until their business practices cause them failure against fiber competitors. ISPs aren't interested in improving their networks, only in making money off of the money they've invested into at this point.
    - mellotron 13y ago
      Didn't Google already buy up a ton of dark fiber backbone? GFiber may be closer to disrupting the national ISP market than we think
joosters 13y ago
That didn't stop them from rolling out Google Checkout with any (human) customer service, as I painfully discovered :( Google seem allergic to phone or email contact with users.
- JoeKM 13y ago
  How true is this still? Google Checkout was rolled out ages ago (in tech years). The Google today is quite different. I have been reading about "poor Google customer service" for years, almost like it's a running joke of anecdotes. Years ago it may have made sense, but today Google has Android/Fiber/plethora of web services. I can't imagine they haven't clued in on customer service yet with all their paid services.
  - joosters 13y ago
    I can't confirm since I closed my checkout account. Try navigating throuh their help pages to see if you can find an email address to contact a human. Used to be impossible. All they had was a selection of multiple choice boxes with predetermined solutions.
  - DanBC 13y ago
    Adsense users often complain about this. They don't seem to realise that they're not the customer. They're not even the product being sold. They are trying to sell product to Google - "Buy this space on my web page / youtube video". Google has strict rules, and sometimes makes mistakes, and doesn't have any way to sort out those mistakes. It sucks for those people. And since those people are (by definition) the kind of people with websites you do hear about it quite often. Having said that, you do sometimes hear about people with large numbers of adsense viewers being called (real telephone call!) by Googlers offering advice about better results. And you hear from people with adword accounts that they get to speak to real people. I don't know any numbers, but I bet Google has a lot of people wanting to contact them.
    - monkeyspaw 13y ago
      Adsense "users" are actually business partners with google. You share revenue, pool resources, etc. In my mind, that arrangement should encourage a higher level of service than most customers. I'm saying that the poor service offered Adsense partners isn't excused because they're not customers. If anything, it indicates that customer service will be worse based on this totally made up hierarchy that I've just made up (partners more important than customers, should have higher priority service).
JimWillTri 13y ago
When there's a substantial amount of money involved Google has great customer service. Never had a problem getting issues resolved with my Adwords account.
sneak 13y ago
The exact same thing could be said about Google Apps, or PayPal - near-total absence of customer service didn't stop adoption of either of those. (To be fair, PayPal's customer service is pretty great now, but that's only in the last 18-24 months. They were the market leader long before they put any real effort into that.)
- enraged_camel 13y ago
  They were the market leader because they were the only noteworthy and reliable player in the market. Competition from upstarts like Stripe has pushed them to take customer service seriously.
  - vijay_hack 13y ago
    Not to mention, the great documentation they have now for their APIs! ( Go Competition! )
- blantonl 13y ago
  we're a PayPal customer and we've got a dedicated account manager that responds pretty quick and provides great communication.
- InclinedPlane 13y ago
  PayPal has plenty of customer service, and has for a long time. The problem has been that they had very shitty and abusive customer service, though I think they've started to learn their lesson on that.
jbigelow76 13y ago
Not if they say it's in "beta" for the next four years.
dennisgorelik 13y ago
I think that Google Checkout team, as usual, would screw up execution. On my web site users have choices to pay directly (Stripe), PayPal and Google Wallet. New users virtually never use Google Wallet (former Google Checkout).
- entropy_ 13y ago
  Given those options I always go for Google Checkout, actually. Paypal doesn't support my country(Lebanon), so that's out of the question. And I try to minimize the number of places that have my CC information. Checkout already has it from my use of the play store on android.
tcdent 13y ago
Not "might", will. They state it on the linked page: "... our customer service team will help resolve any questions you might have."
plusbryan 13y ago
Google's phone service for business accounts is actually pretty good. I've heard they've been investing a lot in improving their customer service.
iuguy 13y ago
The amount they pay for bug bounties has just become worthless. The value of an XSS or even CSRF bug in Google products has just shot through the roof. I hope it works. If it does it'll have a massive impact on the world and hopefully utterly screw paypal, but the potential for fraud is huge. It's one thing to secure a payment portal, but a complex mail app with a combined payment portal is a massive challenge. I hope they can live up to it.
- jordanthoms 13y ago
  It depends on how the chargeback and tracing system works. Credit cards and ACH have virtually no security (especially ACH, the "secret" is on the bottom of every check you write), and the world keeps turning. If it's hard to get money out in a untraceable and irreversible way, hacking someones account is not so valuable.
tar 13y ago
I am a regular AdWords user and Google's customer service for it has been pretty spectacular.
blantonl 13y ago
I suspect that this year Apple will soon release hardware and software that will leverage all those iTunes credentials to provide something similar. However, Google will be in a great position to profit from a new source of consumer purchase info, which will flow to Adsense/Adwords and their other revenue generators. Privacy be damned? :) The battle for your complete purchase history is now officially on!
jcampbell1 13y ago
Many years ago, Google made statements like "we only do things that scale, and customer support doesn't scale". It was a strong guiding philosophy for many of the engineers, but that philosophy has eroded. If we look at some of Google's biggest successes, it has been things that don't scale: - The Ground Truth team in India, manually drawing the world's maps. - Manual spam detection in search results - Customer Support for most adwords accounts - Customer Support for Nexus devices I think the executives at Google have enough evidence that "do things that don't scale" can have a big payoff and it is really not that bad. They are clearly no longer too chicken shit to tackle problems that require customer support. The old Google only did things that match the business model of search, today's Google does what it takes to win. I wouldn't bet against their ability to provide customer support. In the last 2 years, Adwords support went from non-existant to impeccable.
- phillco 13y ago
  Not to mention, scanning many thousands of books manually.
  - sickpig 13y ago
    I thought the same thing till I saw this http://hackaday.com/2012/11/16/google-books-team-open-sources-their-book-scanner/ http://hackaday.com/2012/11/16/google-books-team-open-source...
- Fuxy 13y ago
  Anything of real value doesn't scale. Just look at Google Maps a lot of companies tried to make their own Map apps and failed. Why? Because google invested a ton of money into doing things that computers can't a present and require manual work this can't be replaced by any other map app without doing the same thing. There's real value in recognizing what computers can't do and investing into doing it anyway and it can make your app irreplaceable.
- TrevorJ 13y ago
  As Google's product offerings evolve, the cost/benefit of providing customer service scales too. Providing personal support to customers who use search isn't scalable because Google makes fractions of a penny per interaction from these customers. Customer support for things like Google Fiber, Google Wallet, and Adwords is a whole different ballgame in terms of the amount of money Google makes on the average user so it is likely that there's enough margin there to actual scale customer support along with the growth of the userbase.
InclinedPlane 13y ago
They already have enough relationships with governments around the world for all of their data centers and other projects (maps, mail, youtube, etc.) that I think they could do a decent job on this. I expect it'll still be several years before it's a decent competitor to paypal but it'll be nice to finally get some competition in that space (low overhead global payments without a merchant account).

I think this is going to be really big. But it might require actual customer service; that must have made them think twice.

by pg 13y ago

I think this is going to be really big. But it might require actual customer service; that must have made them think twice.

wtallis 13y ago

They've already started to bite the bullet and provide real customer service with Google Fiber. We could be witnessing a huge change in their institutional attitude toward customer service.

OJKoukaz 13y ago
Will better service from Google Fiber, and other large providers, push Comcast to provide a better customer service/support experience?
- Laremere 13y ago
  No, those who care about service will switch to google fiber. Then Comcast will see that the number of complaints about their service is decreasing, and go on to praise their employees. For now companies which should be scared of Google Fiber aren't. It took the US years and lot of tax money to build the infrastructure which current ISPs own. Google has done parts of one city with only 2 more on the way. It will take a long time until their business practices cause them failure against fiber competitors. ISPs aren't interested in improving their networks, only in making money off of the money they've invested into at this point.
  - mellotron 13y ago
    Didn't Google already buy up a ton of dark fiber backbone? GFiber may be closer to disrupting the national ISP market than we think

joosters 13y ago

That didn't stop them from rolling out Google Checkout with any (human) customer service, as I painfully discovered :( Google seem allergic to phone or email contact with users.

JoeKM 13y ago
How true is this still? Google Checkout was rolled out ages ago (in tech years). The Google today is quite different. I have been reading about "poor Google customer service" for years, almost like it's a running joke of anecdotes. Years ago it may have made sense, but today Google has Android/Fiber/plethora of web services. I can't imagine they haven't clued in on customer service yet with all their paid services.
- joosters 13y ago
  I can't confirm since I closed my checkout account. Try navigating throuh their help pages to see if you can find an email address to contact a human. Used to be impossible. All they had was a selection of multiple choice boxes with predetermined solutions.
- DanBC 13y ago
  Adsense users often complain about this. They don't seem to realise that they're not the customer. They're not even the product being sold. They are trying to sell product to Google - "Buy this space on my web page / youtube video". Google has strict rules, and sometimes makes mistakes, and doesn't have any way to sort out those mistakes. It sucks for those people. And since those people are (by definition) the kind of people with websites you do hear about it quite often. Having said that, you do sometimes hear about people with large numbers of adsense viewers being called (real telephone call!) by Googlers offering advice about better results. And you hear from people with adword accounts that they get to speak to real people. I don't know any numbers, but I bet Google has a lot of people wanting to contact them.
  - monkeyspaw 13y ago
    Adsense "users" are actually business partners with google. You share revenue, pool resources, etc. In my mind, that arrangement should encourage a higher level of service than most customers. I'm saying that the poor service offered Adsense partners isn't excused because they're not customers. If anything, it indicates that customer service will be worse based on this totally made up hierarchy that I've just made up (partners more important than customers, should have higher priority service).

JimWillTri 13y ago

When there's a substantial amount of money involved Google has great customer service. Never had a problem getting issues resolved with my Adwords account.

sneak 13y ago

The exact same thing could be said about Google Apps, or PayPal - near-total absence of customer service didn't stop adoption of either of those. (To be fair, PayPal's customer service is pretty great now, but that's only in the last 18-24 months. They were the market leader long before they put any real effort into that.)

enraged_camel 13y ago
They were the market leader because they were the only noteworthy and reliable player in the market. Competition from upstarts like Stripe has pushed them to take customer service seriously.
- vijay_hack 13y ago
  Not to mention, the great documentation they have now for their APIs! ( Go Competition! )
blantonl 13y ago
we're a PayPal customer and we've got a dedicated account manager that responds pretty quick and provides great communication.
InclinedPlane 13y ago
PayPal has plenty of customer service, and has for a long time. The problem has been that they had very shitty and abusive customer service, though I think they've started to learn their lesson on that.

jbigelow76 13y ago

Not if they say it's in "beta" for the next four years.

dennisgorelik 13y ago

I think that Google Checkout team, as usual, would screw up execution. On my web site users have choices to pay directly (Stripe), PayPal and Google Wallet. New users virtually never use Google Wallet (former Google Checkout).

entropy_ 13y ago
Given those options I always go for Google Checkout, actually. Paypal doesn't support my country(Lebanon), so that's out of the question. And I try to minimize the number of places that have my CC information. Checkout already has it from my use of the play store on android.

tcdent 13y ago

Not "might", will. They state it on the linked page: "... our customer service team will help resolve any questions you might have."

plusbryan 13y ago

Google's phone service for business accounts is actually pretty good. I've heard they've been investing a lot in improving their customer service.

iuguy 13y ago

The amount they pay for bug bounties has just become worthless. The value of an XSS or even CSRF bug in Google products has just shot through the roof. I hope it works. If it does it'll have a massive impact on the world and hopefully utterly screw paypal, but the potential for fraud is huge. It's one thing to secure a payment portal, but a complex mail app with a combined payment portal is a massive challenge. I hope they can live up to it.

jordanthoms 13y ago
It depends on how the chargeback and tracing system works. Credit cards and ACH have virtually no security (especially ACH, the "secret" is on the bottom of every check you write), and the world keeps turning. If it's hard to get money out in a untraceable and irreversible way, hacking someones account is not so valuable.

tar 13y ago

I am a regular AdWords user and Google's customer service for it has been pretty spectacular.

blantonl 13y ago

I suspect that this year Apple will soon release hardware and software that will leverage all those iTunes credentials to provide something similar. However, Google will be in a great position to profit from a new source of consumer purchase info, which will flow to Adsense/Adwords and their other revenue generators. Privacy be damned? :) The battle for your complete purchase history is now officially on!

jcampbell1 13y ago

Many years ago, Google made statements like "we only do things that scale, and customer support doesn't scale". It was a strong guiding philosophy for many of the engineers, but that philosophy has eroded. If we look at some of Google's biggest successes, it has been things that don't scale: - The Ground Truth team in India, manually drawing the world's maps. - Manual spam detection in search results - Customer Support for most adwords accounts - Customer Support for Nexus devices I think the executives at Google have enough evidence that "do things that don't scale" can have a big payoff and it is really not that bad. They are clearly no longer too chicken shit to tackle problems that require customer support. The old Google only did things that match the business model of search, today's Google does what it takes to win. I wouldn't bet against their ability to provide customer support. In the last 2 years, Adwords support went from non-existant to impeccable.

phillco 13y ago
Not to mention, scanning many thousands of books manually.
- sickpig 13y ago
  I thought the same thing till I saw this http://hackaday.com/2012/11/16/google-books-team-open-sources-their-book-scanner/ http://hackaday.com/2012/11/16/google-books-team-open-source...
Fuxy 13y ago
Anything of real value doesn't scale. Just look at Google Maps a lot of companies tried to make their own Map apps and failed. Why? Because google invested a ton of money into doing things that computers can't a present and require manual work this can't be replaced by any other map app without doing the same thing. There's real value in recognizing what computers can't do and investing into doing it anyway and it can make your app irreplaceable.
TrevorJ 13y ago
As Google's product offerings evolve, the cost/benefit of providing customer service scales too. Providing personal support to customers who use search isn't scalable because Google makes fractions of a penny per interaction from these customers. Customer support for things like Google Fiber, Google Wallet, and Adwords is a whole different ballgame in terms of the amount of money Google makes on the average user so it is likely that there's enough margin there to actual scale customer support along with the growth of the userbase.

InclinedPlane 13y ago

They already have enough relationships with governments around the world for all of their data centers and other projects (maps, mail, youtube, etc.) that I think they could do a decent job on this. I expect it'll still be several years before it's a decent competitor to paypal but it'll be nice to finally get some competition in that space (low overhead global payments without a merchant account).