However, I would say that this thread is one of the first places EVER that I have seen someone say google support is good or sufficient or not terrible even. I have seen people have to post on HN to get things resolved by google employees reading HN threads! While it seems like a personal touch, people are resorting to it (and I assume googlers are helping) because there is not another avenue that works for MOST products that google has.
I must acknowledge have not used the google support for fiber (I dont have it) and that might indeed be great, as a man who does customer service stuff plenty of times, I know that there is a simple siloing process going on with their support departments.
Nonetheless google has a loooooong way to go to change the "anecdotal" consensus of the internet when it comes to their support, their comments about not doing things that dont scale entirely aside.
In other cases (if I'm the product) nonexistent.
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.
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).
When you're a small business and Google bans you for some unknown reason and seizes your money - here is what will happen.
* You might receive some type of form letter in response, but you will not be able to get an intelligent reply from a trained customer service agent. * You will not be able to reach anybody on the phone for any price that will help you out. * You will not find out what the issue was that caused a ban. * Your small business will die a slow death. * Depending on the amount of money the owners have (most small businesses don't have a lot) they will struggle to even pay their employees their final checks with this cash seized. * You are forever banned from using AdSense again, so forget starting up another online business ever again.
Google is an amazing company that has some frankly despicable business practices that more people need to pay attention to and call them out for.
People are in denial but some truth is coming out little by little.
But since I'm completely ignorant of your case, I'm gonna shoot my mouth off a bit, and hope I don't get in trouble for it.
Google spends insane amounts of effort tracking these cases. I've met lots of six-figure-salary folks who hours or days of every week looking into corner cases. And they're just the tip of the iceberg. Again, I'm not speaking to your particular case, but the thing we learn is that out of every hundred people who say what you're saying, at least 99 of them have repeatedly violated the rules, and more than 50 of them got multiple warnings.
And it's not like Google is keeping the money. Google's fraud-fighting effort is not a profit centre, by any stretch.
I'm not saying that Customer Service is Google's forte, but the internet is full of a lot of lies, and lots of them are told by people who tried to scam us, or scam our customers, and are hilariously outraged that we caught them.
We have documented everything and we are now in a much stronger position, thanks to our users. We have access to Techcrunch/Techdirt, and we have considered publishing a comprehensive documented story of our experience with AdSense, but decided to put it on hold, since we do not want to associate our name with any controversy. When our start-up successfully exits or if it fails, the situation may change.
I just want to add a couple of things to jholman:
You start from the presumption of guilt. An old adage is that your customer is always right, but your starting point is the opposite. This is probably driven by hubris, that's embedded in Google's DNA: you KNOW BEFORE your customer that your customer wants to commit fraud, BEFORE they have actually committed it.
My point is simple: when you threaten to turn off a $5,000+/mo client, provide knowledgeable PHONE SUPPORT. Have your specialist CALL the victim business. These amounts are not a small change to many people, they will lead to bad PR, like was linked in this thread earlier https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3803568.
And do not worry, you will not get fired for defending Google!
But customers don't have to buy from you, and they don't have to give you a reason when they stop buying from you.
I had a fun experience with that call a few years back, when Twiddla was in the spotlight and everybody was calling trying to give us money and free stuff now that we'd proved we didn't need it anymore. I got to explain to the cheerful AdSense Optimization Team guy how I couldn't use his help because we'd had our AdSense account permanently clobbered on a whim a year or so previous and hadn't ever been able to get it reinstated.
As you can imagine, our AdSense account was back up and in good standing the next day. We've never used it since. Fool me once, and all that.
Recently, I had trouble with gmail on my iPhone (due to the whole EAS shutdown) and was looking for help or info on account upgrades. Only userland help forums for me.
I would say: Google's tech support is terrific until you actually have a problem and need to talk to someone.