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"Given the hundreds of millions of users" - I doubt that anyone who is using Google for search purposes will need to contact customer support. Tens of millions
by Ardit20 17y ago
"Given the hundreds of millions of users" - I doubt that anyone who is using Google for search purposes will need to contact customer support.
Tens of millions of webmasters - I would suggest that only a fraction of them would need to call customer support, same with the publishers and advertisers.
Banks also have millions of customers, just when the call center is busy, they are put on hold. I think the best investment that Google cam make right now is not to sacrifice customer service in order to get on with throwing stuff on the wall and see what sticks. Instead, just hire some recent grads to deal with people's issues. How much would that cost, lets say ten grads, 100k a month each, that's 1 million, a drop in the water as far as Google is concerned. The return on this investment on the other hand would be so great as people can then continue loving Google rather than suggest that Google is being evil.
- MattCutts 17y ago"I doubt that anyone who is using Google for search purposes will need to contact customer support." You'd be surprised. There's still some people who think that when they type in a query, people at Google manually decide which results to show. For every result on the page. For every query. Hundreds of millions of times a day. A lot of those searchers do a search for "John Smith" and then want to talk about why their school friend John Smith wasn't #1 instead of that other John Smith. That's doesn't negate your point; I'm just saying that orders of magnitude more people want to contact Google than there are Google employees, and many of those people want to have prolonged discussions with Google. So the challenge is to find scalable ways to communicate with those people.
- netsp 17y agoI have heard answers of that nature coming from Google before. I think they are avoiding the question. Searchers? Fine. They are using a free, take it or leave it service. Almost anyone would understand that they will be shuffled in to some sort of 'scalable communication method.' Webmasters in your index? You have no commercial relationship with them. They may rely on Google. But there is still no real commercial relationship. Adwords/Adsense customers/vendors? That is a different story. As I have mentioned several times on this topic, I have encountered shocking responses from Google regarding large ($100k+) accounts. Google does not have that many customers & vendors.
- andreyf 17y agoWhy not just charge $80/hour for support, and refund it for when people call in to fix false positives in the fraud detector? Seems like a win/win - make money off scammers trying to cheat you, and give people an easy way to re-enable their account.
- invisible 17y agoI cannot stress how important this is! Matt, if you can give one thing to the AdSense team, let this be it. $100 a call, $80 an hour, whatever it may be. If I'm out $1000, I'll pay $100 to try and get it back (especially if I stand to lose $100 within a week of waiting). Snail customer support when it concerns accounts that hold money is not good.