Last Thursday I went on somewhat of a rant about an issue I was having with AdWords Customer Support (or the apparent lack thereof.) At the time my client’s ads had been down for less than a week and at least I had a “Specialist Team” on the case. At that point I was unhappy. When I didn’t get an update at all last week on their progress I was pissed off. Now I’m just dumbfounded.
Does Google Want Our Money?
Toward the end of last week I sent a follow-up email and got no response. The ads started running on Friday and I thought everything was good. However, on Monday the account was off again and a quick look at the Billing Summary revealed that the ads were running only briefly on Friday and Saturday because of a couple click quality adjustments that had been posted to the account. Therefore I tried to call the general AdWords phone number at 1-866-2-GOOGLE. However, after navigating the calling tree and entering the 10-digit AdWords ID the system just hung up on me. Very classy.
Next step I went to the live chat feature and got a representative on chat. They of course saw I had a ticket in the system and offered to follow up on the progress. Of course all this meant was that my current rep was pushing me off on the last rep (who hadn’t done anything during the last 5 days) with the promise that I would be contacted by the end of the day. Alas, it’s Tuesday and I didn’t hear from them yesterday. I even waded through my junk mail folder to make sure it didn’t get snagged. Nope.
Conclusion?
Google derives the vast majority of its revenues from AdWords. It’s the cash cow that gives Google the cash to burn on all their free offerings and acquisitions. So why don’t they have better customer service? My advice to Google would be to create an advanced customer service team that deals with agencies and large accounts. Limit it to GAP-certified individuals and agencies or something because this type of customer service is unacceptable. My clients will continue to use Google AdWords, but if a Bing/Yahoo conglomerate can put together a viable alternative with better support, I’ll push clients that direction because I’m sick of apologizing for Google’s shortcomings.
About Robert
