Not quite a Jane Austen title, but “Help Forums and Helplessness” involved far too many terminal sibilants. The recent launch of Google’s Nexus One, the Google branded Android phone, highlights Google’s fledgling incompetence with mass market customer service, already demonstrated in abundance in many of Google’s own help forums.
Harsh criticism, you might think, but I’ve been part of Google’s attempt to de-staff and automate customer service, by relying on the willing help of volunteers. I used to be a Top Contributor in the AdWords Help Forum. I contributed a lot of posts, over the years. In the early days, it was a good place to learn AdWords problems, and to spot problems and policy changes before they were announced. Over the last few years, Google has taken to sending users with problems to the Forum first, rather than to customer service.
Now, I don’t mind answering, in public, questions about AdWords, if I have the time to do so. What I don’t like is answering the same question, repeatedly, when it it caused by a failure to understand information architecture and search engine optimisation and I especially detest it when the question is entirely within the province of Google. An example of that? A user saying that their credit card has not been accepted by Google. There is no reason for anyone outside Google to know the causes for that. There is nothing that anyone outside Google can do about that. It’s a problem caused by Google deciding to decline payment – so what can you, or I, or any one else outside Google, say to the n’000th person to claim their card payment has not been accepted? There’s an entire subsection of the AdWords Help Forum that consists of would-be AdWords users complaining that their cards have not been accepted.
It’s not a nice place for a volunteer to hang out. And the rewards are minimal… because the interesting problems are now very few and far between. Anyone wanting to ask a serious question about *how* to use AdWords effectively, is lost in the noise of people whose adverts aren’t running yet (another Google internal problem, where Google has decided to defer approval of the adverts, or keywords, and no-one outside Google knows the precise reason) and other repetitive self inflicted customer service wounds. I wince when I look at the forum – so my response to this miserable treatment of Google’s customers is that I’ve resigned as a Top Contributor.
Agency and GAP Treatment
Agencies can have a Google Account Representative assigned to them. Sufficiently large accounts may have a “vertical” strategic team associated with them. So at any one time I’ve had between one and three account reps to handle problems. I’m actually pretty pleased with the way that works. I can have a new MCC set up inside a day. I can get billing questions resolved, and sort out linking, and raise account limits and have adverts pushed through expedited reviews.
But if you are a mass market, self-signed up customer, with a low budget? Tough. You’re on the self-help program. And that can be a maze of twisty links, all leading inexorably to the AdWords Help Forum, for volunteers to solve problems that Google has created for you, partially because they create a maze of ever shifting links to more or less incomprehensible answers and forms, and the forum.
Google Staffers
Google has a team of staffers who respond to Google-oriented questions. These are the AdWords Pros (AWPs). Empathetic. Pleasant. Courteous. Access to a lot of areas inside Google.
They answer thousands of posts. By eyeball estimate, the most prolific answerer, AWP.Bindu, from India, answers somewhere in the range of 5,000 to 10,000 individual threads a year, having checked the account to find out what the status is. She’s unfailingly nice, and really does try to help.
The AWPs are also sometimes ready and willing to help the Top Contributors tackle problems. Top Contributors, or TCs, have to answer frequently, and correctly, and courteously. Otherwise they won’t be TCs. It takes time. Months of answering several questions, correctly, every day. TCs have their own private area in the forum, invisible to normal users.
Why Am I Spitting Rivets This Time?
Google isn’t merely annoying an army of small businesses who’ve had their AdWords accounts terminated for unstated and apparently irreparable reasons, but it isn’t even able to obey it’s own guidelines for making websites. And if it did, the help services it offers, supported by volunteers, would be a lot easier to find, slightly more useful, and less painful for the volunteers that help Google deliver customer service.
Look at this ageing article by Google’s own Matt Cutts, on the use of the Nofollow link attribute. Old news for SEO. The summary of that article is that “page rank sculpting with nofollow is dead, and we may penalise organisations that overuse nofollow”. And what does *that* mean? It means that the nofollow attribute, originally intended to help reduce spam in discussion forums and blogs, has been so widely adopted that the use of the attribute is destroying the way that the web passes link weight.
What does Google do, in its volunteer supported web forums? It nofollows each and every link in every article, even when posted by a Google staffer, much less the “trusted” Top Contributors. The consequence of that is postings with links that refer users to better postings with good information, are not ranked any higher as a consequence of the additional links. That means that users are not served with the best content. That means that TCs and Google Staffers waste time repeatedly answering the same question, because the search engine has been rendered useless.
What does Matt actually say?
I wouldn’t recommend closing comments in an attempt to “hoard” your PageRank. In the same way that Google trusts sites less when they link to spammy sites or bad neighborhoods, parts of our system encourage links to good sites.
In other words, when Google staffers have nofollow links to pages inside Google, or to pages outside Google, they are not doing the right thing. By nofollowing links within the help forum, useful pages inside Google aren’t ranked more highly, and external authoritative resources are also not helped. Ultimately that should lead to Google penalising itself for attempted pagerank sculpting. Amusing, eh?
Why Are Customer Problems Exposed To The World?
Google has taken a philosophy of user contributed content and applied it to ludicrous lengths. As I said earlier, there is no way that someone outside Google can usefully comment on why a specific advertisers adverts are not running. There’s lots of reasons. They usually boil down to “you’re in an account review or an advert review”. But that’s not the specific help that advertisers are looking for – like why their card has been refused.
It is reasonable for users to ask other users about the impact of geotargeting, or what kind of advert copy works best, and the reasonable fees for an agency. But asking other users about decisions that Google has made, for reasons kept private inside Google? It makes no sense to me, or to anyone else that I’ve spoken to, outside Google.
The philosophy that users are frequently enough nice and helpful is fine. I am, even with a snitty posting like this, attempting to help other users on the internet. It is even, in a painful way, helpful to Google, by pointing out that the policies they have developed are one thing and reality is another.
I like the idea of the forums. I use the other Google forums myself. But to withdraw customer service for wounds that Google has inflicted, and only Google can comment upon, and to direct those damaged customers to volunteers for support, is just not sane. Or if it is sane, it is sane in ways that mean that Google can reduce staffing – it isn’t sane in terms of developing a reputation for good customer service.
And lo and bhold, what do we see when the Nexus One ships? The same philosophy that users will help. How can I, sitting outside Google, respond to a question about when someone’s phone will ship? Or issue an RMA for defective hardware? Or deal with provisioning questions? These all need levels of of authority that are really part of the social contract between user and service provider. A relationship in which random third parties should not be welcomed by either side.
Yes, I do run an AdWords Help Forum blog (with Kim doing most of the postings, these days, as I’m just so annoyed with Google). But I regard it as a supplement to Customer Service, not a replacement for it. That’s why I resigned as a Top Contributor. Preventing users from advertising for Google internal reasons, then telling them to consult ignorant third parties, is demeaning for all involved parties.
And then nofollowing every useful link, makes the value of posting much lower than it should be, forcing the volunteers to keep answering the same questions, again and again. Some proper information architecture and linking would help a lot.
Updates
2010-06-21 – typos corrected.
