(29)
Googler, DeWitt Clinton, shared his "thought of the day" on why Google can't technically do customer support.
He shared it on Google + saying:
If you have a billion users, and a mere 0.1% of them have an issue that requires support on a given day (an average of one support issue per person every three years), and each issue takes 10 minutes on average for a human to personally resolve, then you'd spend 19 person-years handling support issues every day.If each support person works an eight-hour shift each day then you'd need 20,833 support people on permanent staff just to keep up.
That, folks, is internet scale.
Now, of course, many people are thinking for a company that has more cash on hand than most governments in the world, what is the big deal with hiring a few more people.
But truth be told, Google has tons of Googlers who are out there just to help others. They can't do phone calls but they are in the support forums, they do spend time on blogs, they do go to social media sites and they do respond to emails when possible.
Here is a picture of some of those Googlers from 2008:
Anyway, if you want to rant about it, the Google + post is public for all to chime into.
Forum discussion at Google +.
Comments:
Stephane
08/24/2011 02:19 pm
Wow. I guessed it was complex, but not that complex! Anyway, I has to use the forums several times and the service is really quick because the community is very large. Why would they need staff when there are googlers who are willing to do it for free out there! :)
hagrin
08/24/2011 02:26 pm
I totally agree with Google's conclusion about customer service and internet scale. However, this means the company is always going to hit a ceiling when it comes to what it can offer as a company. There will be no brick and mortar stores, no distribution centers and I'm not exactly sure how they utilize their high speed fiber since I can't see how they can run it to the homes. I wouldn't be surprised if at some point Google breaks off certain businesses from the main company in the future.
Nick Stamoulis
08/24/2011 02:41 pm
When you break it out into numbers, Google really can't do "traditional" customer service. It can be really frustrating for site owners, but it seems like that's the way it's going to be. However, there is such a large community for support among other users, most questions can be answered.
MarketingXD
08/24/2011 02:44 pm
This is also why social marketing doesn't scale.
Koozai Mike
08/24/2011 03:01 pm
I think he's missed the point somewhat. The Google search tool doesn't really need customer support (it's fairly idiot proof really), however it's the subset services that businesses rely on day by day that need support - AdWords and Analytics being two examples. When Analytics lost data in April it took over a week to resolve, that wasn't good enough, and this is where customer support should have been positioned.
Guest
08/24/2011 03:04 pm
This is the fire they are lighting under their plaform - I totally disagree - they have serious google places wrong info listings (just got another client call this am from one) and forget going to their forms and getting it resolved - it will not happen - I've seen them pick up bad info and send hotel guests for months to an empty field in a residential area 3 miles away, I've seen them take 6 months and more to change out bad address and phone listings for local businesses (this was hurting their business bad) - with all the cash they have and all the money they make to not have a real support person for incidents like these should be cause for civil liability - google get real about your listings in places or get out of the business of showing addresses and phones where the client never gave you that info or get some real people online to quickly resolve your problem as you have no idea apparently at the hostility you are breeding on street level businesses that you are sending their clients and customers to the wrong locations and phone numbers.
Ian Williams
08/24/2011 03:45 pm
Google have a billion clients? 1 in 6 people on the planet are paying for services (either in direct cash, or business investments of time/revenue dependency) from Google? I don't think so.
Joe Amadon
08/24/2011 05:08 pm
I imagine they are considering people who use their free services as well in that billion user count.
Electronic Cigarette
08/24/2011 05:12 pm
how about billion clients call them at the same time?? will the whole US tel system be crashed?
Max Beggelman
08/24/2011 07:00 pm
Does Google have more than 20,000 servers? I bet they do! When you get down to it, this isn't actually a reason why they CAN'T do customer service, it's a reason why they don't WANT to. The numbers involved may be big, but everything about Google's operations is bigger. Most importantly, this lack of customer service isn't unique to Google. Many other web companies, none of which have a billion users, feature a similar lack of phone service. It's just cost-cutting: why pay for call centers on that scale when you can cover your user support needs with only a public forum and a few dozen community managers, knowing full well that such a system provides inadequate support but that very few people will actually dump your service over it?
Guest
08/24/2011 07:53 pm
Typical of Google: lying through their teeth. Did someone suggest to answer emails from people that are random searchers? These scumbags will ignore everything you post in G 'help' forums, unless the media gets involved. You can report a scrapper and no one does anything.
Joe Youngblood
08/24/2011 08:11 pm
it would only cost google ~54 million in their own estimate to do GOOD customer service each year. adequate would cost about 20 million in labor and fair around 5-10 million. their customer support now is sub-poor and likely to cost them as comps step up to the plate.
Jaan Kanellis
08/24/2011 08:16 pm
Their should always be complete support for AdWords no matter how small the account it.
Jon Wade
08/25/2011 12:05 am
"20,833 support people on permanent staff " - and what is wrong with that? A lot of business employ tens of thousands of people for this very reason - to keep the customer satisfied. Wal-Mart apparently employs 2.1 million people. 21 thousand suddenly seems like a small number!
Stephen
08/25/2011 04:01 am
Google seems to be again quite unique. Over the last 5.5 years conducting large scale ppc activities, the more we spend on adwords the less service we get- as I said quite unique.. They do have plently of support if you want to opena new account- but effectively zero -once you are an adwords client.mmmmmm summit wrong IMHO.
Megan
08/25/2011 05:45 am
True!
Ian Williams
08/25/2011 08:20 am
Exactly. Which is why its somewhat disingenuous at best for them to claim a figure of a billion as requiring support. IMO they could provide customer support if they wanted but, as discussed below, they simply don't want to because it will eat into profits. 20,000 is NOT that big a staff number, even less so when placed in the context of Google's reach, market position, and profit. A tiny example is the impact bad listings in Google Places can have on a small business. I think Google has to shoulder some responsibility for that, especially as they are mindlessly automating the data collection in the first place, with or without request of the business owner. The cost to the business of a bad address/merger/phone number can be tremendous; the cost to Google would be minuscule. There is an element of responsibility on behalf of Google there, IMO. That said, when you're so big that people have no choice but to depend on you, you can pretty much cut all the corners you want in pursuit of $.
Jone
08/25/2011 11:51 am
Google is right. Why customer service if their revenues keeps growing in light speed?
Jonathon Hewitt
08/25/2011 01:29 pm
So it looks like Google has 20 instead of 20,000. If they actually had a support staff on hand they would be getting a lot of the leads that us marketers get everyday.
Sean
08/25/2011 01:31 pm
Proves that Google is evil still
Barry Schwartz
08/25/2011 01:31 pm
that is just one small group from the dublin office back in 2008 or so.
Jonathon Hewitt
08/25/2011 02:07 pm
Interesting, seems like a unique crowd.
Jonathon Hewitt
08/25/2011 02:11 pm
I bet Google's payroll monthly is already close to the same as Wal-Mart's as it is now, they are some highly paid individuals and Wal-Mart starts at minimum wage with very little benefits.
Afi
08/30/2011 11:20 am
Google does not have 1 billion clients. It has 1 billion ingredients to their product (as they make their money from selling their users' attention to advertisers). They have millions of clients (AdWords + AdSense), like any utility company, mobile phone company etc. in even a small country. And guess what? All those companies manage to maintain 24-hour phone support and physical client service offices. What's more: they don't hide behind "support forums", multiple-steps-till-you-find-it contact forms etc. Even a relatively small AdSense-client generates more revenue for Google (through the one-third/two-thirds revenue sharing) than he does for his phone, water, gas, electricity etc. companies combined. Do all those companies have better customer support than Google? Yes, they do; you can only do better than Google. The pathetically distorted, puerile and self-justifying thinking of this guy DeWitt Clinton just proves why mega-companies are the scum of capitalism. If you are a small company, you have responsibilities. If you are a medium-size company, you have responsibilities. Even if you are a large company, you have responsibilities. But if you are a mega-company, you suddenly do not have responsibilities simply because they would be too burdensome. It's like the mining company mindset: they cause tens of billions of dollars of environmental damage, which they can't afford to compensate for, so their thinking goes, no-one should expect them to compensate for it in the first place. Big numbers are good for Google as long as those numbers generate them 8 billion dollars per year in profits. Just not good when it comes to responsibilities. That notion is not something this lovely company cares much for.
Gmail
10/28/2011 03:09 pm
So how do you get help? More specifically, help with something that someone at google will be required to interact with?
Bobby stan
12/12/2011 08:19 pm
Google is an arrogant monopoly. Get the F off the fooz ball tables and provide industry standard customer service u bunch of geeks. No wonder why you couldn't figure solar power out you cant figure customer service out
Butcer666
01/11/2012 04:18 am
thats shorseshit, google are arrogangt assholes and if they contiunte such awful coustume service there stocks will soon plummet
AvalonNYC
02/16/2012 10:01 pm
If google can't afford to hire 20,833 to answer the same questions over and over, they could at least hire people to review the answers their googlers are submitting and delete the ones that are patently wrong. Those Googlers are quite busy, posting "solutions" that are sometimes correct, and sometimes not. There are about "About 28,400,000 results" for the search "gmail internet explorer compatibility view", but after two hours I still haven't figured out why gmail is telling me to turn off Compatibility View when it is already off. Many of the wrong answers are at google.com, contributed by googlers, and most of them say "This discussion is closed to new replies.". This just noise, getting in the way of finding answers. Finding an answer to a google software issue takes us at least twice as long as finding an answer to most other software issues, because of all the noise. And not even the possibility of putting up with an hour hold to get someone who actually knows the product.
johnmark Gardner
02/24/2012 03:45 am
I could not have said it better myself. I just got through leaving feedback on Googles disappointing support. The company makes billions but makes excuses as to why it does not want to hire employees to handle its products that are SO great and have NO problems? Yes there are forums that DON'T answer questions after a lot of reading and who wants to sit around and read a dang forum? We work eight hours a day really? I don't want to do that in my spare time, I want an answer.