The Customer Service Survey
VocaLabs' weblog providing news and commentary on the challenges of providing good customer service.
Awesome app, but what about service?
Wednesday - August 06, 2008 02:12 PM in
by Peter Leppik
I love Google's online applications. I use Google Calendar all the time, I use Google Spreadsheets to track our home energy usage, I have a Gmail account. Google can make my web browser sing in ways I never thought possible.
But apparently Google hasn't yet figured out that producing a great application and providing great support are two different things--or so Nick Saber learned recently when Google mistakenly disabled his account.
For Nick this was not a small thing, since he couldn't get into his office's instant messaging system, he couldn't access his e-mail, and he couldn't get to his family photos.
This kind of problem should be treated as critical, especially for a premium (paying) customer like Nick. Google apparently has a little work to do in this direction, since the only response Nick got to his repeated e-mails (the only kind of support he could find) was:
Thank you for your report. We've completed our investigation. Because our investigation was inconclusive, we are unable to return your account at this time. At Google we take the privacy and security of our users very seriously. For this reason, we're unable to reveal any further information about this account.
As it turns out, Google does offer phone support for premium customers, but will only give you the special phone number if you're logged in--not much help if the entire problem is that your account has been blocked for no apparent reason.
This story does have a happy ending, in that Nick did eventually get back into his account. It took many different e-mails to many different support addresses until someone pointed him to a web page where he could submit a form asking for access to his account. There are two lessons here: one is that it's not enough to have a great application, there will always be problems in the "real world" and support is important. The second is that you shouldn't use a great application for important stuff (stuff you care about if you lose) unless you can get great support--because sooner or later something will go wrong, and you want some place to turn for help.
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