Google Adwords Customer Service

Most of the complaints you see on blogs about companies relate to relatively minor matters or people simply not reading the instructions.
For example, I took delivery of a printer this morning. It didn’t come with a cable. Some people would use that as an excuse to whine about how the supplier had ruined their week, when really anyone who works in IT should know that printers do not ship with cables these days.
Whose fault is that? Mine of course!
However if you start to mess with people’s incomes then things are a lot more serious
Google Adsense works well for me and a lot of other people, but from reading some posts elsewhere this would not appear to be universally true.
A post on Darren Rowse’s blog took me to mobilejones.com, where there have been all sorts of fun and games involving Google’s customer service – or lack thereof (I’ve mentioned this more than once in the past)
The post and its followups are well worth reading.
In essence the guy had an Adsense account. He’d his payments on hold. He updates his address and requests payment. Google’s system screws up completely and sends the cheque to the wrong address. Google admits they screwed up but flatly refuses to do anything about it.
One bit of the latest post, which sums up the entire fiasco including the happy conclusion, is worth citing:

Google services accounts with millions of publishers. And like the Wizard of OZ, on our journey we hear about the goodness of the Wizard (Google) and that he can grant our wishes (for revenue) simply by the asking. So when we knock on the door of the Emerald City (Googleplex) only to find a gatekepper who chases us away, it’s not only frustrating but like Dorothy we question the goodness and wisdom of this so called Wizard.

(source)
Whether the blogger got their money in the end or not isn’t important. What is important is that Google’s customer service failed to deliver yet again.
If Google expect to be taken seriously in the long term they are going to have to address this.
Normal people like dealing with other people. They don’t like dealing with an anonymous team that doesn’t have a proper contact number.