I'm happy to ask the right team at Google about this and point them to the post on hizook.com.
I had a big issue with AdWords earlier this month. Google made it all but impossible for me to reach anyone about it. Earlier this year, I had an issue with my bank denying an AdWords bill (to protect me against possible fraud). It took one minute on the phone to resolve.
You make a hundred times what my bank does off me. Why is human contact only possible if we speak the secret password into the telephone disguised as a shoe which is stored in the unused broom closet marked Beware of Leopard.
From personal experience, finding an Apple employee who can even find out what is going on with an iPhone app waiting for review for months can be difficult if not impossible without connections inside the company. However, if you have a development-related question or a bug report you want looked at, there's plenty of Apple employees on Twitter that would be happy to answer such as Chris Espinosa (a manager on the Xcode team and Apple employee #8, @cdespinosa) and Michael Jurewitz (developer tools evangelist, @jurewitz).
No, but you might get a call from Phil Schiller.
Google, on the other hand, is just incompetent.
(And PayPal is, too, but they seem to be slowly learning.)
The credibility of Don't Be Evil is taking a lot of hits these days. Some of us were never really convinced.
This is what most fear from market consolidation and extremely large companies. They squeeze more profits from doing things that a company without monopoly-like characteristics could not get away with. To me, when you cross this line, you have become evil.
fyi, I spent more than 2 hours last night getting my PayPal personal account unlocked. It was an awful web and phone customer support and terrible security practices.
It does seem like this is an endemic problem in Google and comes right from the top. Some startups focus on customer service and use it as a differentiator. Others focus on product and believe they can build their way out of support.
Google is and always has been in the second category. The mindset is from what I understand firmly held by Larry and Sergey and manifests itself through the whole company. Until they change, it seems unlikely the support teams will change.
I'm guessing they won't change until they see their profits effected. As to PayPal, I have chosen other providers. So I only have to deal with them if some vendor only accepts PayPal and I really want to use that vendor.
As for Google, for now, I don't need to serve up ads. If and when I do, I will spend time to see if alternate ad brokers can give me equal or better returns. Google knows that their hold on the ad market stays as long as buyers and publishers do not move in sync. That is, its very hard for a publisher to use a different brokerage when all the buyers feel they need to use Google (and vice verse). This movement is probably best done by market segment. Specialty brokers ("we only do blogs", "we do sports very well", etc) should be the ones to disrupt this space. I guess this is already being done, but it certainly isn't happening fast enough. Ideas?
Given the hundreds of millions of users, tens of millions of webmasters, and many advertisers and publishers that Google interacts with, it would be difficult to have one-on-one conversations with all of them even if everyone at Google did nothing but try to provide that support. Historically, we try to tackle that challenge by reducing the need to talk to a person at all (e.g. our webmaster tools let people diagnose lots of issues without talking to a webmaster expert at Google). We try to pursue scalable communication methods such as forums and keeping an eye on the blogosphere too. I wouldn't claim that we're perfect--I'd be curious to hear more about the AdWords issue that you had--but our first instinct is to look for ways so that people don't need to telephone Google in the first place. I think a lot of companies do that; I can't remember the last time I needed to talk to Amazon or Facebook or Netflix on the phone, for example.
But I take your point, and while we do have support channels, I think it's good to keep an eye out for blog posts because that feedback can help us improve so that future people interacting with Google don't get as frustrated.
Here's the short version of my recent experience:
Half of my business comes from AdWords and I'm pretty happy with it. Actually, you could go substantially farther than that: I'm literally a case study for it, recommend it any chance I get, and despite what I'm about to tell you continue to recommend it.
One day, for no reason I could be certain of, AdWords just stopped serving my ads. Google's automated diagnostic said that you had no credit card on file for my account. That was contrary to reality, as you had already successfully billed me for $300 that week and about $12k total.
I respect that you would rather I use the self-help automated diagnostic, FAQ, and whatnot. But either the diagnostic was broken or your data was, and the FAQ didn't address "What to do if our diagnostic tells you untrue things". So I tried to contact support.
After digging through about 5 separate redirects to get to "contact an AdWords representative", I wrote up a detailed bug report (or as detailed as the 512 character limit would accept) and sent it in. As for what I got back, you can read the above blog post, but it was non-responsive and appears to be computer generated for me.
In the wake of the above blog post and further attempts to use the "scalable communication methods", I was contacted by an AdWords representative. This is now several days after I had first contacted Google. She successfully summarized my issue (which proves that she was not a computer -- an oddly comforting notion to me by this point) and said she would escalate it to a specialist to investigate.
That was a month ago. I still haven't heard back.
On the plus side, the symptom which was of most immediate concern to me (my sales dropping by half because my AdWords ads were not showing) recovered before I missed my entire busy season, and things are more or less normal for me now.
I never understand people who go to all sorts of lengths to get something done and then don't get back to you to let you know that it's been done. It always seems suspicious to me (though I like to remind my self not to ascribe to malice what can be perfectly well explained by incompetence).
Despite $REP_NAME's assurance that the matter was being looked into and that I would be contacted again when the investigation was complete, I have not heard anything about this matter since August 5th.
I value my business relationship with Google. So much so, in fact, that I am increasing my ad spend -- you have the best solution for advertising for small businesses, bar none, warts and all. However, Google's recent performance has not caused me to think that Google values its business relationship with me.
It contains exactly one piece of "useful" information, the link to the disabled account FAQ. The rest is just simply terrible. It starts with a very serious accusation, intoning "significant risk" and "financial damage", but Google wasn't "compelled" or "forced" to act, it "decided" to, implying not that some mandatory threshold was reached but that someone sat down and worked it out and reluctantly agreed that this was the way to go, or worse, that sometimes similar situations might go the other way.
Immediately after accusing the person of being an evil bastard, it turns on the smarmy fake politeness. "Please understand" that we think you're an evil bastard. "Thank you" for understanding that we think you're an evil bastard. And thanks for "cooperating", even though you actually have no choice in the matter at all. If you have any questions, kindly fuck off and don't use the same method of communication we just used to reach you, here's a link to more standardized dehumanizing copy.
It reads like Google is breaking up with you while checking its phone, acting like you've done something horrible enough to merit no discussion on the matter, trying to act nice enough so you don't think it's a bitch, but making it clear it doesn't give a shit and really never did.
What I find distressing (and would find even more so had I been the victim) is that Google refuses to to identify which part of TOS have been violated. Police and courts have to specify which parts of criminal code a defendant is accused of violating. Can we not get similar fairness from corporate America?
Are you afraid that such clarifications would give too much useful info to actual spammers?
Well, maybe a slight edge. But I might compare this to the dilemma that clarifying legal defendants their constitutional rights ("Miranda" in the U.S.) deprives law enforcement of some opportunities to tap some useful self-incrimination: It's part of the cost of valuing Constitutional rights. Would Google dare to offer its customers some Consumer Bill of Rights?
Bingo. It's optimized to stop spammers, not be inoffensive to false positives.
Except it's not just breaking up with you, it's breaking up with you -- and stealing your TV, your sofa, and your cat!
I do agree though that this is a big enough problem that Google should devote more time and effort to improving the systems they use to flag Adsense accounts, and certainly improve the letter and general customer support experience once your account has been flagged.
I haven't heard either way but if you're an advertiser, does goog credit your account - "we believe these x number of clicks you paid for were fraudulent, so we're not charging/crediting you for them."
When you do get to speak to someone (via above hidden shoephone method) it's still like speaking to a clumsy CIA agent. In fact I spent most of this morning doing that. It seems very clear that the googlers on the other end of the shoe phone aren't allowed to disclose much. They allude. They read out the relevant policies to hint at what might be going on. [me]'Has a trademark complaint been made?' [Googler]'All I can say is that your ads have been manually disabled at some point last week?' [me]'Would it help if I got the trademark owner on the phone?' {Trademark owner has already told us that they don't know what is going on. Google has been impossible to get on the phone and answer emails extremely vaguely} [googler] 'reads some policy that hints at a recent complaint' [me] 'Can you email me the procedure for trademark exception.' [googler] 'Google it'
challenge Try & find the form you need to have filled in order to get approval to advertise using someone's trademark.
We are talking about customers that have spent hundreds of thousands with google over time. Google allows itself to unceremoniously damage their business as if they are doing something shady. They then make it impossible to contact them and when they are contacted, well they make phone companies look good.
Answering blog posts is great. Writing your blog is great. It isn't instead of normal customer support though.
I've also specifically tried to contact AdSense via the contact form, email, and the forum about a missing payment. Never heard a peep back, so I stopped running AdSense.
I'm happy to read the FAQs, search a knowledgebase, and communicate via email or a ticket system, because I know its not feasible to talk to all customers on the phone. But you can't just leave people in the lurch when you want to be their business partner.
Successful companies see customer service as an opportunity to right a wrong and impress their customers, not as a nuisance.
Lets say I was in the OP's position and I have legitimate reasons to believe that Google is at fault here and they banned my account by mistake - but after weeks of trying they didn't get back to me (I only received automated e-mail, which are vague at explaining what going on). Assuming that scenario, my best option to get someone noticed is to make a blog post and submit it on HN and/or e-mail you about it or hope that you will notice it here?
Surely, there are better way to handle this?
This is not the only case, there are literally 1000s of such stories for many years all over the blogoshphere and forums.
A high call charge would prevent random crazies from calling (e.g. "why isn't my website top of the search rankings!?!?"), but would at least give the chance for people for whom Google's service has financial implications the chance to talk to a real person who can get appropriate answers from within the company.
And if random crazies do end up calling it, then maybe that's a new revenue stream for Google?
While I'm willing to pay $x for a call, if I'm in the right I want to be reimbursed for it (MS is actually quite good about this).
But I agree that reimbursement for the cost of a call that results from their inability to deal with your problem through any other channels would be appropriate.
It's a similar situation to pay-for-inclusion in the search index: a search engine should include as many pages/sites in its index as possible, and if someone can pay the search engine to include their site, then it creates a weird incentive for the search engine to not do a great job of crawling the web.
At least on the organic/ranking side, that's at least part of the reason why Google has never done pay-for-inclusion or pay-for support for webmasters.
That's why the model stipulates that [the money] is refundable in the case where there's a genuine grievance
I understand this would involve knowing the content of billions of websites and figuring out which ones link to each other.
Who could possibly be expected to keep track of all that information?
So keep your pants on everyone. The scope of this problem is insurmountable especially since there are only thirty days in the month (or six) before you get paid for your clicks and impressions to discover fraud.
When I asked them to reinstate my account when I was blocked (a good couple years ago) for, what they told me, click-fraud, they took a couple days and said something in the line of "we looked into it and we were right, but we can't tell you what or how we identified it". In other words, people are punished and they can't even look at the evidence that bases the accusation.
That's really bad feedback.
And the balance was of about US$ 50.
What about starting with giving out the average response time and queue length when submitting a request? That'd be a good first step...
Can Google not follow in it's path? Not everyone's blog post is going to get this much attention or attention similar posts have received.
As I mentioned in my anti-Google Checkout article on Slash7 (which you commented on), not only has Google attempted to steal money from me by closing my Checkout account, but my husband lost over $2,000 of Adsense money when his account was arbitrarily closed.
He's the author of Scriptaculous - and the ads were on the Scriptaculous site - a totally innocent open source contributor.
So, support money was effectively stolen from a popular open source project.
Of course he appealed.
And he never heard back.
The commenter above is right: One-off help for those who are able to make a lot of noise, and hurt Google's image, is not enough. It got me my Checkout account back, and it will probably get the OP's Adsense account back.
But my husband never made a public fuss, and so of course all his attempts to reach out to Google were completely ignored.
Until there's a system in place other than "be famous and make noise," nobody should trust Google with their money, in any way.
Anyone who's interested in more back story (and my recommendations for improving the Google experience), these are the two articles I wrote:
http://slash7.com/articles/2009/3/26/google-is-evil-worse-th...
http://slash7.com/articles/2009/3/28/google-checkout-still-u...
For Google, it is a win/win/win situation... until people holler about it.
But yeah, not being in a country where Google has enough presence to bring them under its jurisdiction could be a problem.
You think they want that kind of precedent known?
Not saying it is easy or free to get there, but the same arguments can mostly be said for Microsoft and they seem to be doing pretty OK.
I've had excellent support from them, 24/7, on the phone, including weekends, where I've been assigned one person and one person only to fix some critical issues which had to be dealt with before monday 7am.
I have nothing but praise for the Microsoft support team. However just trying to find non-automated support for my google-services seems impossible.
I do realize Microsoft and google has different business models and don't mean to come off hostile, but Google upping their customer-service standards a little bit wouldn't hurt.
In any event, they really had to clean up their act.
That's going to happen with Google, too, I would expect, and there's no way they are going to be surprised.
If you ask me, it's no different than a chemical manufacturing company deciding that it is more cost-effective to pay the EPA fines than to clean up their act. It's about pure numbers.
That is a point of view I will never condone.
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.
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.
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.
There are tens of millions of Indians out there eager for such a job. This is a better opportunity for them than "outsourcing SEO services" where they mess up the Google index by low quality and high quantity "link building".
Automated response is not a solution to all problems.
1. Google knows how to scale computers, and perhaps engineering teams, but not people in general.
2. "You make a hundred times what my bank does off me" - Exactly, and hiring pesky call center employees, who would have to be good on top of it, would ruin Google's profit/stock price.
We're all desperate, depending on practically the only ad game in town, so we bark but have no bite. A higher-end (aka non-cpc|cpm) revenue model is the only way out, I'm afraid.
Personally, I think you are right that 'cost per click' and 'cost per impression' are both easy to game. The auction model, I think, might mean the beginning of a better way. Essentially, advertisers bid on what they are willing to pay per day. (now, personally, I think project wonderful's implementation is slightly flawed, but it is moving in the correct direction.)
No offense, but if it takes posting your gripes on HN to get customer support then something is very much broken.
The simple fact that a multiple billion dollar company should depend on outside channels for its support cues is very sad imho.
Maybe, instead of passing on messages like these pass the general message that Google tech support as perceived from the outside absolutely sucks.
I'm not exactly a newbie on the adsense/adwords front, have spent lots of money on adwords before giving up because of inactivity on googles part dealing with click fraud, still using adsense because of a lack of alternatives.
I can call a toll-free number about the 1 dollar pack of gum I bought. I don't get stellar interaction but it is still more than what we are talking about.
The Google search results are constantly being updated with new data and new algos because Google knows that to keep the SERPs relevant, they have to keep questioning their approach and improving on it. Why isn't the same healthy self-criticism of the AdSense termination process being portrayed in public? Every week we hear the same exact story, and it's now a regular feature in the headlines.
Maybe Google should hire the 10k "permanent temps" again it spit out a few months ago during the "financial crisis" panic.