How will Google manage growing demand for support for its free products, as people rely more and more on its services?
(Credit: Screenshot by Tom Krazit/CNET)If you rely on a compelling service that happens to be free, what level of customer support are you entitled to receive?
Google is trying to figure that out. Known for using brilliant engineers, complex algorithms and speedy servers to organize online information in a simple and accessible fashion, Google is learning how to add the human touch to its repertoire as customers look for answers that can't be found on an FAQ.
Not surprisingly, not everyone is happy with the results. Some advertisers have been complaining about Google's Web-page-first approach to customer service issues for years, with the most common gripe that they find it exceedingly difficult to reach a real live human being when they have a problem that isn't answered on a product Web page. More recently, Katie Braband, who reported problems with Google Checkout's handling of transactions at her company, Datto, was just as frustrated by Google's response to her issues as she was the issues themselves. "The only e-mails we've received response to are pre-generated, it's very clear there's no person writing the e-mail," she said in September.
Google is aware that customer service will play a large role in its growth as it offers more paid services, and seems committed to improving services for those kinds of customers over time. "The first thing a CIO is going to say is, 'where is that person and how do I wring their neck?'" said Google CEO Eric Schmidt in an interview earlier this year. Schmidt knows a thing or two about traditional enterprise customer service: he ran corporate software maker Novell before joining Google. And before Novell, he was an executive at Sun Microsystems.
For many users of Google's free services, support is limited to a series of Web pages, FAQs, and user forums. That's not that surprising, since Google can't realistically offer phone support to every Gmail user who can't figure out the conversation-based design.
But as Google continues to push forward with free advertising-supported services that people and small businesses increasingly rely on in their personal and professional lives, the company appears to be banking on its ability to train those users to expect a healthy dose of relatively low-cost support. Web pages with hints, troubleshooting tips, and discussion forums are the first level of support across virtually all of Google's products and are pretty much the end of the line for those who do not pay to use products or services. That's not unusual in technology; even businesses that charge customers for their products have moved in that direction in a bid to cut support costs.
When it comes to Google's main profit engine--the AdWords search keyword ads--there are two basic kinds of customer service, said Deanna Yick, a Google representative. High-roller customers enjoy access to a personal sales team they can reach out and call, but almost everyone else relies on Web-based resources like the AdWords Help Center.
For a while, Google also offered phone support to a proportion of those advertisers without sales team connections. However, it recently reduced the amount of phone support it provides for those not supported by the sales team, leaving e-mail as the sole contact method for a larger segment (Google won't say exactly how many) of its most important customers.
"AdWords is an effective, self-service online advertising platform for advertisers of all sizes worldwide," Google said in a statement regarding the reduction in phone support. "Some clients work with our sales teams, while others prefer to manage their accounts independently. We also provide email and phone support to some advertisers, and have worked hard to build out a robust set of online resources (such as the AdWords Help Center, AdWords Learning Center and user forums) to help advertisers find the answers to their questions around the clock wherever they might be located."
Is this an issue? Google argues that in many cases e-mail and Web support can be faster than sitting on hold waiting for the next customer service representative to answer your call in the order in which it was received. The company can track the most common queries and therefore answer the most commonly asked questions on the Web much more quickly than a telephone-based system would allow, while also developing fixes for commonly reported problems as to cut down on the need for support in the first place.
But on the Google Apps side of the world, the company knows it doesn't have the luxury of pulling back on phone support with its most important customers, said Matthew Glotzbach, director of product management for Google Enterprise.
Here, as well, Google tries to encourage its users to solve their issues through forums and troubleshooting pages. It turns to the solution Google employs for just about everything--an algorithm--to get the most relevant information regarding support issues on those pages and before the people who need detailed answers, and fast.
But Google Apps Premium users--who pay $50 a year per user--can also talk to live Google support personnel anytime day or night when they encounter issues. Years of phone-based IT support has trained system administrators and IT executives to expect the human touch when it comes to advanced support, Glotzbach said, echoing Schmidt's comments last month.
Glotzbach--like any true Googler--believes there are efficiencies just waiting to be discovered that could be greatly improve the customer support experience for both Google and its customers.
"I think this is a fascinating technology and innovation challenge that's properly underappreciated as such," Glotzbach said. "When people think of support, they think of large call centers. But underneath that there is a massive opportunity to innovate." Left unmentioned were the cost savings that accompany automated support.
With innovation comes friction, however, as new ways of thinking about old problems grate on the status quo.
Google is pushing into a whole host of businesses in which it is a newcomer, such as Google Apps, Google Voice, and now Google Maps Navigation. In many cases, those products are free, which reduces expectations for premium support (usually). But those products compete against paid products and services that do provide some level of support.
As more and more people rely on these free services--and Google crowds out competitors who can't compete with free--support issues will grow. Even products that "just work" fail from time to time, and those failures present opportunities for companies to build loyalty if they handle the support encounter the right way, and resentment if they don't.
Can Google train those customers to expect a passive Web-based support experience? Or will Google's free strategy evolve into two groups, those willing to tolerate passive support for free, and those willing to pay a little extra for more service?
Either way, managing the customer experience has been a relatively easy task for Google up until now; basic search requires little customer support. It's about to get a lot more difficult.
To commemorate last week's third anniversary of the launch of Google's Custom Search tool, the search giant has announced a slate of updates to its customizable search service.
Design options
To kick things off, Google announced the release of six new themes for Google Custom Search. All six themes can be customized by changing "fonts, colors, backgrounds, promotion settings, as well as interactive features such as tabbing and mouseovers," the company said. Users can also decide where the search box and results should be placed (in a contiguous layout or in two columns). All the themes will work with Google's Mobile Custom Search, which the company launched last week. That service allows users to access a site's Custom Search from Android phones, the iPhone, and Palm Pre.
Google Custom now features 6 themes.
(Credit: Google)Google's Custom Search will be displayed inline on a Web page. A Google spokesman told me Monday that when users search a site equipped with Custom Search, the results will be displayed above the page they're on. If they scroll down, they can view the page's contents. Those site owners who prefer a separate page to display results can still use that option, the company said.
Structured Search
Google has also launched a new Custom Search feature called Structured Search. The new option will allow users to search for information by specific attributes, rather than use general terms, the company said.
If a Web publisher has provided "author's name" as an attribute in the app's metadata, for example, users can search specifically for a particular author and view only the results matching that query, the company said. Google's intention is to make finding specific content easier, but only those "specific attributes that the page content has specified via metadata markup" can be used to tailor results, the company said.
The company also announced that Web publishers can now place thumbnail images or publisher-provided links into the search results. For example, if a story from CNET.com includes an image, the new feature gives users the option to add that attribute to results. When Google displays that particular story, it will include a thumbnail of that image next to it (see the image below).
Google's Structured Search in action.
(Credit: Google)Wikipedia, anyone?
Finally, Google announced that it has built a Custom Search skin for Wikipedia. Instead of relying upon Wikipedia's search, Wikipedia users can now log in to their accounts and edit their skin to include Google's Custom Search feature. From then on, Wikipedia's search field will be replaced with Custom Search.
Google's Custom Search is on display in Wikipedia.
(Credit: Google)Instead of just delivering Wikipedia pages matching queries, Custom Search will display three tabs when a user searches the site from a Wikipedia page. The first tab will display relevant Wikipedia results. The second page will display relevant wikis that are linked to the Wikipedia page the user is already on. The final tab displays related third-party sites that are linked to in a particular Wikipedia page. All results will be displayed inline on the same page the user is on.
Google's new Custom Search features are available now. If you want to learn more about the changes made to Custom Search, check out the site's blog here.
As of 2:15 p.m. Tuesday e-mail delivery had started to return to normal for some Postini customers, although problems remained.
(Credit: Screenshot by Tom Krazit/CNET)Some customers of Google's Postini e-mail security product experienced significant problems Tuesday, with reports of hours-long delays in e-mail delivery that are still affecting some customers.
Threads throughout Google's Postini forums spread involving the issue, which seemed to begin overnight on System 7--one of several systems used by the service--and was still affecting some customers as of Tuesday afternoon, although e-mail delivery had resumed for others. Users also reported problems accessing the management consoles used to log into the Postini service, preventing them from understanding exactly what was happening.
Postini, acquired by Google in 2007, offers e-mail security services to businesses. Postini scans all e-mails directed to the networks of its customers for viruses, malware, and spam, passing along the genuine messages to the network once they have been cleared. However, Tuesday it appeared that for a significant portion of the morning, all messages for customers using System 7 were blocked before they reached their destination, and customers could not log into their accounts to see what was going wrong.
A Google representative acknowledged the e-mail delivery delays in a statement. "We're aware of an issue that's causing a delay in mail delivery for some Postini customers in the US, and are working to fix it as quickly as possible. We know how important mail is to our users, so we take issues like this very seriously, and apologize for the inconvenience. We encourage anyone having technical difficulty to visit the Postini support portal at https://www.postini.com/support/support_login.php."
It has not been a good week for the cloud. Hosted applications and services such as Postini were sure to get a second look following the debacle at Microsoft involving the Sidekick and possible data loss.
It's also another example of Google's growing pains with customer support. Google Checkout customers reported significant issues for over a month without any resolution, and angry e-mail administrators on Postini's message boards complained that Google support personnel were very difficult to reach during Tuesday's issues.
Google support technicians promised some Postini customers--who pay between $12 per user per year and $25 per user per year--that their e-mails were not lost, which is at least some good news for customers affected by the problems. But running a business without e-mail in the 21st century is a very difficult thing to do.
Thousands of Facebook users who have been unable to access their accounts for nearly a week and a half now are now seeing their profiles restored--but some data related to recent profile updates may have been lost.
What happened? According to Facebook, the replacement of profiles and login screens with a "down for maintenance" notice--which appears to have started on October 3--stemmed from "a technical issue with a single database." The company has stressed that there is no chance that it was due to hackers or other malicious activity.
Profiles should be restored over the course of the next day, the company estimates.
"Our engineering team has worked around the clock, and as of today, all of these users should begin to regain access to their Facebook accounts," Facebook spokeswoman Brandee Barker said reading from a statement. "We apologize for the inconvenience this may have caused and we are taking additional measures to uphold the reliability users come to expect from Facebook."
Less than 0.05 percent of Facebook's users have been affected by the outage, the company estimated. The social network's last head count, about a month ago, was 300 million active users, so that comes out to be a total of about 150,000 affected users. Not very many but enough to put some of them in a panic over not being able to access a primary mode of communication and (in some cases) business.
Profiles have not been lost or deleted, Facebook has continually said--even though the company has been otherwise tight-lipped about the maintenance issue until this point. When affected users' access is restored, however, some things may be different and very recent updates may be missing. According to a notice that Facebook is displaying to members who may have been affected:
You may not have been able to access your account over the last several days. We're sorry for this inconvenience; an extended technical issue affected a small number of Facebook accounts, including yours. We have done our best to restore your account to its most recent state, but some data and settings may not be current. In order to be cautious, we defaulted some of your privacy settings to their most restrictive settings. You may wish to review your privacy settings and reset them.
Facebook added that "some of (affected members') content may not be up to date: in other words, some minor data loss regarding recent updates to profiles. This, according to Facebook, may include photos that were recently added or deleted, recent updates to friends lists (additions and deletions), and "other content you've added, sent, received, or posted."
As for the company's relative silence about the matter until now, Barker explained in a phone call that the company wanted to nail down the specifics of the outage and figure out the situation, rather than provide details to users that could turn out to be inaccurate.
Many of the complaints pertaining to the outage alleged poor customer service on Facebook's part, and as a sort of olive branch, the company is encouraging feedback pertaining to the specific outage. The alert displayed to affected members whose accounts have been newly restored directs them to a form to report any further details or additional problems.
Whether Facebook will step it up a notch for future unexpected technical problems remains to be seen.
Something is really odd here.
As a reporter covering Facebook, I do get the occasional cranky complaints from members who, for one reason or another, are experiencing errors when they try to access their accounts. But it's never been anything like the past week, with a steady stream of e-mails continuing to come in from Facebook members who say they remain shut out of their accounts--despite assurance from Facebook that profiles have not been deleted and that the company is working on the problem.
"This is now seven days and counting," an e-mail sent on Saturday morning read. "It's beyond ridiculous and extremely frustrating."
"The experience completely reversed the Facebook opinion and experience for me," one reader complained. "I see many people bitch and complain, many more beg and a few threaten. To me, the route to take is fairly obvious. Mark Zuckerberg on his own page invites democratic input from Facebook users in one of his most recent videos. Given that statement especially, I find the way their user base is being treated with respect to their disabled account policy hypocritical at best."
"My account has now been held hostage for a week," another reader wrote. "Some of my friends think that I have deleted (my profile) or even blocked them...None of my friends or family can see my profile or even find it in search. It's as if I simply deleted my account or blocked all of them from seeing it without even a word."
Some users have started threads on Get Satisfaction and Yahoo Answers. A few others have pointed me to blogs and YouTube channels devoted to the subject.
The inaccessible accounts appear to be limited to a very small subset of Facebook's over 300 million active users, which means that it's not a large-scale issue for the health of the site. And Facebook is supported by neither subscription money or taxpayer dollars (though it wouldn't have advertising revenue without its users) so there's an argument to be made that users shouldn't be complaining about something they don't pay for. But that's an argument that many of the people who have come to rely on Facebook as a channel of communication simply don't buy.
Whether the string of complaints is warranted or not, Facebook hasn't disclosed exactly what's caused the "extended maintenance issue," and that's what I find puzzling.
There are some things that are nice to wake up to. The smell of bacon, for example. On Thursday morning, however, I woke up to something a little less pleasant: an in-box full of e-mails from Facebook members whose accounts are still inaccessible. Some were more or less on the verge of, well, panic.
Earlier this week, we wrote about Facebook's acknowledgment that some members could not access their accounts for several days, instead receiving a "down for maintenance" error. At the time, a Facebook representative explained that it was a "technical issue with one of our databases" and estimated that it would be resolved within 24 hours. It's unclear how many accounts have been affected.
But a resolution of the problem doesn't seem to have occurred, judging by the e-mails that were still showing up in my in-box well into Thursday morning. I sent another request to Facebook to find out more.
"We are continuing to work on the extended maintenance issue that is restricting some users from accessing their accounts," a statement e-mailed by a Facebook representative explained. "No accounts have been compromised during this process, and access will be restored as soon as possible. We apologize for any inconvenience."
Reader e-mails indicated quite a bit of frustration.
"I lost my job back in March and have been using this site as a networking tool," one reader's e-mail said. "It's frustrating that it's been down for so long."
Some were paranoid that their accounts had been deleted and all their contacts lost. And many of the e-mails cited unresponsiveness on Facebook's part despite multiple customer service complaints. Third-party customer service forum Get Satisfaction was filled with chatter about Facebook login and access problems, including at least one threat of a class-action lawsuit.
"Accounts are still down as of this Thursday morning," another e-mail read. "Facebook has been completely non responsive to its users. My account has been down with site maintenance issues since Saturday. I have sent over 20 requests to FB and joined help user groups looking for answers."
From yet another e-mail: "So far Facebook has been largely unresponsive to my emails, saying that this issue can't be reported as a security issue. It seems absurd to me that Facebook customers have no way to directly contact Facebook regarding problems."
With over 300 million active users around the world, we shouldn't expect Facebook to be able to respond to every inquiry it receives. And Facebook is a free product, so it arguably doesn't have a customer service obligation on par with your cable company or the Web site where you bought your last pair of shoes. But this is still a real problem for the social network, which has become so ingrained in culture and communication that for some people it's replaced the address book, the e-mail client, and the personal Web site. Many of the e-mails I received came from people who say that Facebook is their primary method of communication with far-flung family and friends. Others said it's crucial to how they do business.
Here's something else: Facebook doesn't offer a way for members to export their contact information into an address-book format, something that took center stage when blogger Robert Scoble had his Facebook account temporarily banned after testing a script that would export his contacts' information to Plaxo. Even now that Facebook has launched its Facebook Connect login product, there still is no easy way to access your contacts offline. The current account-access snafu indicates that this is a big void.
At the very least, Facebook could make some kind of mass message available explaining what exactly the problem is and reassuring people that inaccessible accounts have not been permanently deleted (assuming that's the case)--something easier to find and more detailed than the brief statement now posted to its company "fan page." On a more long-term level, this seems like a big red flag that Facebook needs to streamline its customer service operations somehow so that this sort of hysteria can be prevented.
A way to export basic contact information for offline access--phone numbers, e-mail addresses, instant-message screen names--wouldn't be bad either.
This post was updated at 10:41 a.m. PT with comment from Facebook.
Salesforce.com promotes software as an online service.
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)For companies that want to turn all that customer carping on Twitter and Facebook into something more constructive, Salesforce.com is bringing some new services to its cloud-computing infrastructure.
Salesforce.com, which sells Internet-based services as an alternative to business software companies install on their own computers, has added new Twitter and crowdsourced tech support options to its foundation for customer service work.
The Service Cloud 2 options, announced Wednesday, will give new Web-based options to those who pay Salesforce.com to run their customer-support infrastructures. About 8,000 clients use the earlier Service Cloud option, Salesforce.com said, and Chief Executive Marc Benioff used the announcement to tout his company's cloud-computing philosophy:
"With two-thirds of customer service interactions moving to the cloud and the popularity of social networks, it is high time for a change," Benioff said in a statement. "The customer service market is being held back by traditional technology."
Twitter integration automates manual processes for monitoring the microblogging site for finding tweets related to customer-service issues, engaging in support conversations using Twitter, and tracking that conversation. The service is a free add-on, available now, for Professional, Enterprise, and Unlimited Edition customers for the Force.com AppExchange service.
The company also announced Salesforce Knowledge, a service to bring company knowledge bases--think high-end frequently-asked-questions pages--onto the Web. It'll cost $50 per month per customer support representative starting in the fourth quarter of 2010. It's based on technology from Salesforce.com's 2008 acquisition of InStranet.
Also coming is Salesforce Answers, which lets companies set up forums where people can pose questions, answer them, and rate the answers. The service also integrates with a Facebook fan page. It'll arrive in the first quarter of 2011, the company said.
Americans are apparently quite happy with their Internet search options.
That's the conclusion reached by a survey of U.S. consumers conducted earlier this year by the American Customer Satisfaction Index and scheduled to be released Tuesday. The Internet portals and search engines category--made up of Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft--scored an 83 on the index, far ahead of the score of 75 amassed by the PC industry.
Google leads the industry in both market share and customer satisfaction, posting a score of 86. That's one of the highest satisfaction scores recorded by any one company, said Larry Freed, president and CEO of ForeSee Results, which interpreted the survey results. "What's interesting is that Google has really set an expectation with consumers and they've done a good job living up to it," he said.
Yahoo's search was second among listed companies, with a score of 77, while Microsoft's former MSN search ranked 75. The survey was conducted before both the launch of Bing as well as the search deal that will see Microsoft taking over search on Yahoo's pages, so next year's results should be particularly interesting, Freed said.
Overall, however, customer satisfaction with search is relatively high despite the fact that most search companies believe the experience could be greatly improved. "The simple definition of satisfaction is it's a combination of what you get and what you expect. Consumers are used to not finding what they expect" the first time they go to a search engine, Freed said.
That opens up opportunities for newcomers like Bing to win customers with a better product, Freed said. But they'll have a tough time going up against Google because the company's brand image is so strong and because the public continues to think highly of Google's product, he said.
The browser wars are heating up again. Microsoft's touting the improved performance and security of Internet Explorer 8, dozens of new Firefox extensions are released every day, and, according to Apple, Safari 4 will be even faster than its speedy predecessor. Meanwhile, Opera just keeps chugging along at version 9.64, with version 10 beta 3 now available.
Just a few weeks ago, Google announced its plans to create an operating system based on Chrome. Considering that the browser itself is barely a year old, such plans may be premature. Then again, maybe not. But for right now, I'll keep looking for ways to make the Chrome browser more useful.
Last June, I described ways to change Chrome's default settings. Here's a look at ways to revamp the browser's interface and access some of its useful hidden features.
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Custom shirts with Shirts My Way
(Credit: Shirts My Way)After reading Rick Broida's post on how to save a small fortune on custom eyeglasses, I decided to do some research into what other custom clothing items you can purchase online. I found a Web site called Shirts My Way that lets you design your own dress shirt using a variety of different fits, fabrics, and cuts.
The project started with co-founders Michael Yang and Peter Crawfurd, who married their knowledge of custom tailoring with Web programming to start the site. The interface of the online design studio is simple, but comprehensive: the ordering process begins and ends with the shirt designers page.
From here, you choose everything from fabric (stripes, checks, denim) to design (collars, cuffs, yokes, pockets) and even minute details like the number of button holes and custom monograms. All in all, there are more than 7 trillion possible dress shirts combination possibilities.
The cost of the shirt depends solely on the type of fabric swatch you choose--all the aforementioned add-ons are included in the price. The company just launched the site last year, so introductory prices currently range from $59 to $69 with free international shipping, but prices will soon start at $65 and work their way up from there. Finally, the site is also running a 2-for-1 Easter promotion until April 19.
For more information on pricing, design, and how to order, take a trip over to ShirtsMyWay.com.
