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Sunday 24 July 2011

Customer Service of Google

Customer Service 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?

4 comments:

  1. Nice attempt at systematization, which assumes that we are rational and that complaint is just that and not tied in with anything else. It might work for consumer complaints or dealing with strangers. My opinion is that it wouldn't work for 99.99% of interpersonal problems. What we call complaint is ~90% something else, like: insecurities, power and responsibility issues, attention drawers, projections or plain inertia. Also, it needs effort, emotional maturity, objectivity, knowing thyself X2.

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  2. This is quite a timely article. As it would be nice if google would comment on this: http://www.twitlonger.com/show/bt2p2o

    I use a lot of google services, and it's always been a fear of mine that they'd cut me off by some misunderstanding and I'd have no one to talk to. I understand it might take a bit of time (days, not weeks here...) but I'd like to be assured emails to my gmail account continue to be accepted.

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  3. Yes, I remembered the story after reading an article about a Google account that has been disabled. "Something happened to Dylan's Google account, and it's been disabled. He doesn't know what happened to the account, and no one at Google with the power to help him is interested in acknowledging the problem or letting him back in to the cloud-based services where all of his correspondence and much of the digital trail from the last few years of his life is stored."

    It's time-consuming to answer user emails, but there has to be a way to solve important problems like clarifying why a Google account was disabled.

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  4. I would *PAY* to have Google fix several accounts that are stuck between apps and non-apps status. One of them (my daughter's) requires clicking the "Do later" every time we sign her in. Mine just has stuff split between two accounts with the same email address and a third with a gmail account that's somehow stuck in the middle of the mess. It's frustrating.

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