Google (Non) Service: Is This Any Way to Run a Content Technology Company?
We've been making good use of Google's AdWords service as part of our "eating our own dog food" for using contexutal ad services to promote premium content. However, In the past week, the links to the Web pages used to maintain this service seemed to have conked out for us. Resetting routers, etc., didn't seem to help, so I decided to drop them a note on this issue. Like many portal services the links for contacting support are pretty well buried (no phone support, of course), but eventually I was able to find a link to "help@google.com" that seemed to be an appropriate bucket into which to place our request. The email reply autobot got back to us right way and let me know that they "try to send personal responses to each message." Well, 48 hours later, and they haven't tried thus far. Hopefully this is just some weird little anomaly that will make us sheepishly aware of our human limitations, but in the meantime it makes one wonder just how ready Google is for real prime-time operations as a services-oriented company. The concept of "Beta" services as revenue generating capabilities breaks down when customer service is left out of the revenue loop. Technology-oriented companies, even "friendly" ones like Google, tend to skip lightly over many of the human-oriented support issues that make up an important part of the value of an information experience.