Whatever Happened to Good Customer Service? Suck it Google!!!!

So as you can tell by the title, I’m ticked off at Google. I will use them as my example for my overall beef with a decline in quality customer service in this country. Who cares about your potential customers, if we just ignore them, maybe they’ll go away. Or if we make the two-way conversation impossible for either party to understand, maybe they’ll just give up and let it go. And well, when you refuse to talk to them and you’re a big time company and they are small potatoes, what are they going to do? They’ll get together and bitch about how you screwed them over, and maybe blog about it to whomever will read about it, but not much else other than that. Because you have deeper pockets than they do collectively and can afford fancier lawyers than they can collectively so what are they really going to do?

AdSense, part of Google, is the subsidiary that they handle their Internet advertising through. They make the deals with advertisers, and say that they will give those that publish those ads on their sites a piece of the action for it. But they cut me, and plenty of other people carrying their ads on their sites, off without warning, or reason for that matter. They have the same standard automated email that says you may be a risk to their advertisers and your account has been disabled. Funny thing, this happened right before I was supposed to get paid for the first time. And it’s a piddly amount compared to what they make, but when you add up the hundreds and probably thousands of people they probably cut off each month, it adds up to a lot that they are not paying out. I wonder how they report it on their books? Expense – Ad Revenue revoked to fatten our bottom line.

I will now tell you about the lousy customer service experience. So you can contact them via an email form on their site, but they will send you an automated response with some links that they already sent you when they disabled you. The message will say due to the high volume of emails we are sorry we can personally respond to you, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. No they aren’t. They would have to pay someone to do that and this saves them money apparently. So I finally found an appeal form. And conveniently they can’t find a publishing account with my email address. Well that’s probably because you disabled it. Of course you can’t find it. How convenient. So I guess I’m just out of luck.

The problem is I think customer service is trending in this direction. And having worked specifically in a customer service department as well as other jobs that required good customer service, I pride myself in knowing a thing or two about providing excellent customer service. It certainly sticks out to me when it’s terrible or sub-par. How many of us are ticked off when we call customer service and can’t understand the person on the other line and they can’t understand us? Google needs a VP of customer service, and I should be that person. And if they currently have one, they should can him/her. Because my theory is, bad customer service catches up to you eventually. There are other search engines, and there are other companies that you can sign up to publish their ads to get paid for. They aren’t the only game in town. They may be the top dog right now, but even the leaders of companies like that have slipped up and let their arrogance get in the way of making sound business decisions.