For the most part I think that finding fault with the products emanating out of the Googleplex. I still use Blogger for this blog, use GMail, have Google News as a tab in my Firefox home page, go to their search engine first for news, web, blog and image finding, have enjoyed using a number of the free APIs you offer plus Google Code and Groups, and feel that Google Maps is one of the best features on my iPhone. Heck, I even have a few pals working there.
Still… I’d like to put a bee in their bonnet while time remains for the troika at the top of that massive value pile to make resolutions for 2008:
Gents, the share price is over $700 and as of the last quarterly filing the company had $15.7 billion in cash equivalents in the piggy bank, with that amount increasing at nearly $1 billion per quarter. Admittedly, Google has filed to participate in the current spectrum auctions and that might require about half the cash if you plan to fund it internally.
Fair enough. You’ve been so far over the success horizon I need a, er, Google-sized telescope just to keep in view, meaning my thoughts on running your business barely fit in the room.
But, reading back on my first paragraph, I am a loyal customer of longstanding across quite a few products and from many media reports you clearly value hard data points when making decisions, of which this post can be one more.
Please add more people in customer service. If there’s one part of the company that across the board seems not to have enough staff this is it (okay, I know the Blogger team could use some extra developer and QA hands, so mark that as request 1A). While you could never, as a practical matter, hire enough CSRs to give human attention to every trouble ticket you could certainly do better than now.
The help pages of most Google products include a link to a discussion group for the product; GMail, for example, has a box on the right with GMail Help Discussion in bold and a hyperlink labeled “Visit this group – get answers fast” below it.
For all the zeros in your personal wealth charts, I certainly hope you don’t believe these words are accurate or true.
Clicking through to the Group page, one finds this further promise: “A Google employee will be popping in from time to time to post announcements, share tips, and answer questions.” True, neither statements says those fast answers will come in all or even many instances from a Google employee but from my experience a very large percentage of reasonable questions never do get a useful answer, let alone fast.
For instance, I get a good deal of non-English spam to my GMail account and they are almost always marked as spam and put in the spam folder. But messages written in Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese, Russian and almost any other non-English character set are literally useless to me, the only possible exception being Hebrew and, let’s be honest, I might piece out the letters but have no chance of comprehending the meaning.
So why isn’t there an option to just send that traffic straight to the trash? Okay, no option, that would require engineering effort. But over the time that Google’s been offering email and hosting support in the group the question’s been asked more than a dozen times and not once has a Google employee given any type of response.
Let’s estimate that a customer service rep with a useful level of writing skill in English or another relevant language but who does not work in the high cost Silicon Valley offices costs the company a nice round $100,000 per year, inclusive of salary, benefits, taxes, perks and other overhead like managerial and support services.
You could add, say, 2500 new staff, reps plus an appropriate number of managers, at an annual cost of $250 million, a drop in the proverbial bucket. True, that’s $250M per year and the cash account is not bottomless but I have to think that this force would more than justify the bill in improved customer satisfaction.
Further, these people will be a rich source of talent for other parts of the company; certainly that’s been my experience. Over half my support team at NetDynamics went on to be successful members of the development, QA, marketing, sales and consulting groups in Sun Microsystems and elsewhere. Who knows what so many bright folks–you only hire the best, as we well know–will come up with on their 20% free time projects?
Make a long time customer happy. Make bulking up support a priority for 2008.
BillSaysThis 