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Why Must I Know Someone Who Knows Someone To Get Any Support?
Over the past few weeks I’ve had customer service/support issues with Twitter, Google and Amazon. Each handled my issue in a different manner to a different conclusion and I thought it might be interesting to share the results. I also want to note that it’s disappointing that it seems to get support you have to know someone who knows someone. In two of the three cases below I was able to get a direct contact on the inside who was able to at least get me on the right path for help. Sadly I only was able to get a resolution on one of the three issues.
I posted some issues I had (am having) with my Twitter account for my startup. I still have not received any sort of reply from Twitter staff to my post or my trouble ticket in their system. I asked Twitter investor Fred Wilson for an update and he told me to go to Get Satisfaction as "some users seem to like it".
Amazon
I had an issue with Amazon Web Services and after clicking help, I posted a message to their customer service form. About 24 hours later I received a very generic reply that the person was going to have to investigate my issue further but he did note that I can’t reply to that email. So that left me with nowhere to turn as the days clicked by without a resolution.
After multiple days I turned to my friends and asked for help. I was able to chat with an Amazon executive (who actually helped me on the weekend while he was on a business trip!) and he got the case moving. I can say that the issue has been resolved to my satisfaction. I would suggest that Amazon look at how they handle support emails on the web services side – it’s a bit odd to me to have such poor email customer service on the web services side when the product side (normal amazon.com) has always worked so well.
Update: one note, the email from the support person who resolved the issue also comes from a no-reply mailbox. I have a follow up question regarding how to handle part of the problem and now I am back to square 1.
I realized about two weeks ago that I never received a required form from Google AdSense. I headed over to the support section for Google AdSense and was promptly told that there is only "limited" email support for Google AdSense. I honestly have no idea what limited means but I learned that I will never know. No matter what I tried, I was never able to reach an email form to even ask for help – all I got was the run-around inside Google’s supposed help section.
After a friend provided me with an email address for a person in the AdSense team, I sent off an email and received a reply pretty quickly stating that I would get a followup from someone who could help me. It has now been 10 days without a response.
Summary
I do wonder (especially on Twitter) if the so-called celebrities receive actual support when needed. Does Shaq or Britney have a hotline for support when or if there’s a request?
If you read CN you know that I put customer service at the top of the list when it comes to a product or service. One of the first posts on CN was a web apps customer service face-off (Dogster received the only A grade). It’s certainly disappointing that it seems like to get any sort of help from the companies I’ve listed you need to know someone.
I completely agree! Right now I have an issue with google email and my blogger account and it’s something that I need to be able to explain and get assistance from a REAL person, not from their FAQ pages, which is basically the ONLY support you can find.
For such a huge company, raking in billions of dollars, how is it possible they have such limited support (by email) and for ONLY VERY SPECIFIC issues??? So, of course, I had to select an issue that was not related to my query, JUST to be able to send SOMEONE an email.
This is BEYOND horrible customer service – it’s NO CUSTOMER SERVICE and that’s enough completely stop using anything related to Google.
About two weeks ago, I had my personal email account (rvstuder@gmail.com). Because of a new business I was involved in, I had to get an alternate email account. I applied for and was awarded
a new account. (bobvstuder@gmail.com). The two emails worked OK for about 10 days and then they became unworkable. First it became impossible to forward an email received in either email to the other email address. Now the people who were sending email to rvstuder@gmail but it was coming to bobvstuder@gmail.com. These people had not been advised to use the new email address. If I don’t get these problems straigtened out in the next week, I will have to cancel the emails and go to another company Robert Studer
I can add to this for you:
* Google AdManager – crap support through some horrible forum system
* OpenX – took over 5 weeks for a sales rep to reply – by which time I’d gone to AdManager
* Facebook – have you ever tried to ask them something?
Companies need to enhance their online customer services. Part of my daily roll is to work with our customer services team to look at ways we can make that customer service more personal, more real, more honest. It works in our favour
Twitter has enough money now to hire some off-shore customer support at least. No excuse from Amazon and Google. Google hates its customers – this is a long, well-established fact. Even if you spend $100k per month on adwords – good luck getting them to respond/give a crap about you. I have thought for a long while now that if they keep up this arrogance, as soon as something equally good comes along people will leave Google with a sign of RELIEF
Shame about Amazon though. Twitter’s customer support letter posted on techcrunch today sums up what you’re saying – young, arrogant and goign to shoot themselves in the foot.
Fred, though generally right, was wrong.
Twitter switched to ZenDesk (and announced it a lot), months ago.
http://help.twitter.com/portal
Best,
@Ed
I put in a ticket using the ZenDesk – the first ticket I never recevied anything but an initial "we think you asked this" reply… then I submitted another ticket with more information and still nearly a month later no reply.
Twitter has $55 million – It is still amazing to me that they don’t bring in a team for 2-3 weeks to clear up the entire queue. Sadly when they keep getting the media attention and tv interviews, maybe they just don’t care about me (or you).
They hide from their customers. I use jigsaw to get the top people’s phone numbers.