Everybody loves Google.
Google can do no wrong.
I would disagree.
Google is grossly overvalued on the stockmarket at present. Its share prices are insanely high.
Yes they have some very cool tools, but cool tools do not always make money and certain areas of their business operations are really badly managed in terms of customer service and interaction.
Urchin, for example, used to have staff with names and personalities. You could ring them up and speak to someone about their products and services. If you are spending $200 / month for a software service, which works out at $2400 per annum, you would expect some level of service.
Wrong!
If you choose to deal with Urchin in the Google era you will not get any personal attention and will have no indication of who you are actually dealing with. For all I know all my emails could be answered by a computer – though I think a computer would be more efficient and timely in their responses.
I now get emails signed by “Urchin Sales Team” – wow! I feel so important!
Is this the future of customer service? I certainly hope not.
I ring my bank’s call center from time to time when I have queries about services etc., I am always told who I am speaking to and treated like a person – not a number.
Urchin’s website contains an email address and a physical address – no telephone number – which is actually less contact information than I, or a lot of banks, would expect an e-merchant to include on their website.
Why is it that a company such as Google thinks that it can get away with treating their clients like numbers?
I know that none of the companies we deal with on a regular basis would be able to do this. What do you think?
UPDATE Just got an auto-response from them after sending an email to the one provided on their site for a particular product. The auto-response conflicts with the information provided on the site, so you basically end up wondering what the hell you are meant to do with them if they can’t decide how they want to route the information. *sigh*
For a while now, I have thought that google are doing a great job at pulling the wool over our eyes. We look at them as great and they give us all these cool things like g-mail and excellent search capability.
But, when is he last time that I got a non-autoresponse/template-response from google? I can’t actually remember!
The level of information they are amassing on people is staggering. I’m concerned about what they do with this data behind closed doors.
We have gone from physical corporations to virtual corporations (offshoring manufacturing_ to faceless corporation (automated processes through software). Standard skills are codified in software so that specialized skills (in jumans) can be put to better use. That is utopia, perhaps…
Time will tell..