; Customer Service in the Early Days of Google | Google Operating System News

Tuesday 26 July 2011

Customer Service in the Early Days of Google

Customer Service in the Early Days of Google

Many people complain that Google doesn't offer customer support for most of its services and it's really difficult to receive an email from Google that actually answers your questions. Here's a story from the book "I'm Feeling Lucky", written by the former Google employee Douglas Edwards. Back in 2000, Max Erdstein was Google's sole customer service rep and he could only use a laptop and a copy of Microsoft Outlook.
Max never envisioned customer service becoming an omnivorous blob consuming all his time, but soon he found himself responding robotically to more than a thousand emails a day from users around the world. Crushed under the load, he could do little than succinctly reply, "Thanks! Keep on Googling!" Non-English emails presented the biggest problem. We had no idea if people wanted to praise us or harangue us. We tried using off-the-web translation software, but it left us more confused than when we began.

Meanwhile, there were rumblings from sales VP Omid that supporting advertisers and search-services customers should be a higher priority. Could Max help with that, too? After all, unlike users, these people were actually paying us. Max was emptying an ocean with a teaspoon. As the backlog of unanswered emails began to swell, Sergey offered a useful perspective. "Why do you need to answer user email anyway?" he wanted to know.

To Sergey's thinking, responding to user questions was inefficient. If they wrote us about problems with Google, that was useful information to have. We should note the problems and fix them. That would make the users happier than if we wasted time explaining to them that we were working on the bugs. If users sent us compliments, we didn't need to write back because they already liked us. So really, wouldn't it be better not to respond at all? Or at best, maybe write some code to generate random replies that would be fine in most cases?


11 comments:

  1. Many people complain that Google doesn't offer customer support for most of its services and it's really difficult to receive an email from Google that actually answers your questions. Here's a story from the book "I'm Feeling Lucky", written by the former Google employee Douglas Edwards. Back in 2000, Max Erdstein was Google's sole customer service rep and he could only use a laptop and a copy of Microsoft Outlook. Max never envisioned customer service becoming an omnivorous blob consuming all his time, but soon he found himself responding robotically to more than a thousand emails a day from users around the world.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Customer Service in the Early Days of Google

    ReplyDelete
  3. Customer Service in the Early Days of Google

    Max never envisioned customer service becoming an omnivorous blob consuming all his time, but soon he found himself responding robotically to more than a thousand emails a day from users around the world. Crushed under the load, he could do little than...

    ReplyDelete
  4. Google: Patent war is assured destruction
    4 hours ago

    WASHINGTON: Google Inc General Counsel Kent Walker said the smartphone industry is using patents in an arms race that hurts consumers, leaving the company trying to "sort through the mess" of litigation. "It's hard to find what's the best path --...

    ReplyDelete
  5. Customer Service in the Early Days of Google
    Google : Google Operating System.news

    Many people complain that Google doesn't offer customer support for most of its services and it's really difficult to receive an email from Google that actually answers your questions. Here's a story from the book "I'm Feeling Lucky", written by the former Google employee Douglas Edwards. Back in 2000, Max Erdstein was Google's sole customer service rep and he could only use a laptop and a copy of Microsoft Outlook.

    ReplyDelete
  6. The early days of Google, and hiring women
    Enjoyed this brief interview with Google's Marissa Mayer in Newsweek.

    She was Google's first woman engineer, and she shares a couple of insights about their early days and how they overtly and openly considered and talked about hiring women as an asset and important to their team. They also made sure at least one woman was on every interviewing team...a tactic I absolutely love.

    Apparently they didn't worry about securing "diversity instead of quality", which is my number one most-hated straw man argument and bad excuse.

    There's a little unintended irony, though, as Mayer talks about not encountering obstacles as a woman engineer in her career. I'm quite sure she didn't (and it didn't hurt to be at one place for virtually all of her adult career, and being engineer #8 to boot).

    But right there in the comments of Newsweek, only a half dozen of which are on display on the landing page, you see one comment about her physical attributes and another asserting she got her job because of her looks.

    As I tried to say on Facebook, before it cut me off without alerting me that it was going to:

    Sad and unsurprising how some of the comments, of course, are talking about Mayer's looks and physical attributes. Mayer says she never encountered obstacles being a woman...and I'm sure in her direct interactions she didn't. But it is an obstacle. It is a problem. It is an issue that no discussion of a prominent woman in tech can happen without this being an accepted part of the discourse. And it is *is* obviously accepted, since it is not deleted.

    Mayer estimates the percentage of women engineers at Google is at about 20%. I'm going to guess the percentage of Google users who are women is at about 50%.

    This interview, which I generally love, and the ensuing comments, which I do not, are part of the reason BlogHer launched our new conference for women in business and technology.

    So, if you're a woman with a big idea in tech or media that you want to see implemented...whether by your own start-up or your place of employment...check out BlogHer|bet (Business, Entrepreneurism, Technology) this March in Silicon Valley. Mentoring, Networking, Programming...all designed to send you out from the conference with your next steps to make your big idea happen.

    ReplyDelete
  7. I find this article to be hilarious to a huge degree. As someone mentioned, Google does not fix the problems. This is not their concern. They allow old problems to be mowed down when a new version of a website/project comes out. If the problem is still there, they leave it until an even newer version might or might not override the problem. Where was Google when Chrome Sync destroyed thousands of my bookmarks? When it did this to anyone who dared use Chrome Sync? Where was Google when the bookmarks problem froze my PC because the bookmarks were being duplicated over and over, and stored in GoogleDocs locked down? Google has done some amazingly shady things with customer service. Very, very sneaky things. But, they've also provided services no other company is able to. As for services being free, that's also just not true. Do any of you know how many thousands of adverts you stare at all day? Do you have any idea at all?

    ReplyDelete
  8. Google needed a customer relationship management system to keep users happy

    In Google's early days, founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin argued that answering email complaints would be a waste of time....


    In Google's early days, founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin argued that answering email complaints would be a waste of time, and that Googlers should fix problems behind the scenes without interacting directly with users, according to a former Google employee who wrote a book about his time at the company. Touch Screen LCD Monitors

    Google's customer service remains a problem today, with users complaining that a Google Calendar notification problem went months without being fixed while Google employees rarely responded to complaints.

    ReplyDelete
  9. IN PICTURES: Visiting the Googleplex

    Even for fee-based services, Google support is limited, with 24/7 phone support for the Google Apps business edition available only for emergencies where you can't access the system.

    While Google has improved customer service over the years, it hasn't matched the levels offered by rivals Apple and Microsoft.

    "The company is largely managed by engineers," says Douglas Edwards, author of "I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59." "I think there may be a deep-seated belief that if there's a problem you fix it yourself. That's what engineers do."

    Edwards, who was director of consumer marketing and brand management from 1999 to 2005, says he had to convince Page and Brin that users would be happier if they received responses to complaints.

    "There was a point [in 2000 or 2001] at which Larry and Sergey said we shouldn't answer any user email," Edwards said in an interview with Network World. "Their solution was we should just have a random reply generator, with replies that may or may not have been relevant. We persuaded them that that was not the best way to go."LCD flat Monitor

    Before being convinced otherwise, Page and Brin felt that if customers were writing to compliment Google, no response was required because "they were already happy," Edwards says. And if customers were writing to complain that something wasn't working, "we should focus all of our effort on fixing the problem, rather than spending time on resources emailing back and forth," he says. "The end result is the user would be happier if we fixed the problem than if we engaged them in a long email conversation."

    The reasoning is logical, but it was eventually decided that, in addition to fixing technical problems, Google needed a customer relationship management (CRM) system to keep users happy. At first, Page and Brin went the cheapest possible route and bought software that wasn't stable and actually impeded Google's ability to answer email, Edwards says. A second attempt which involved hiring programmers to write code specifically for Google turned out much better.

    ReplyDelete
  10. Google got more interested in support during the years Edwards was on staff, he notes.9.7 inch Touch Screen Tablet PC

    "They had pretty good support when they launched the search appliance," Edwards says. "They had a dedicated response team that was very responsive. Part of that was they didn't want customers mucking around in the box."

    More recently, Google enterprise chief Dave Girouard promised that Google Apps business customers will eventually get 24/7 phone support for all types of issues, even minor ones, but no rollout date has been set. Today, even email support for business customers is available only Monday through Friday.

    In general, "I think if you point out problems that are significant, Google will try to fix it," Edwards says. But overall, "I think they have a spotty record on customer support."

    Co-founder Page recently replaced Eric Schmidt as Google's CEO, leading some analysts to wonder about the future of Google's enterprise products, given that Schmidt has a stronger enterprise IT background than Page.

    Page didn't offer any reassurances in a recent earnings call, naming three Google priorities and not including Google Apps for businesses.

    Edwards, however, says he doesn't think Page will de-emphasize Google's enterprise software.

    "My sense of Larry is that what excites him is new technology, and it doesn't matter if it comes in the enterprise space or the consumer space. He just likes things that work better," Edwards says.

    Edwards was 46 when he left Google, deciding to spend more time with his family after years of 16-hour days. Today, Edwards' work mainly consists of promoting his book, but he also serves as co-chairman on the board of Maplight.org, a group devoted to exposing the impact of money on politics.Dell d630 battery

    ReplyDelete