"I doubt that anyone who is using Google for search purposes will need to contact customer support."
You'd be surprised. There's still some people who think that when they type in a query, people at Google manually decide which results to show. For every result on the page. For every query. Hundreds of millions of times a day.
A lot of those searchers do a search for "John Smith" and then want to talk about why their school friend John Smith wasn't #1 instead of that other John Smith.
That's doesn't negate your point; I'm just saying that orders of magnitude more people want to contact Google than there are Google employees, and many of those people want to have prolonged discussions with Google. So the challenge is to find scalable ways to communicate with those people.
I have heard answers of that nature coming from Google before. I think they are avoiding the question. Searchers? Fine. They are using a free, take it or leave it service. Almost anyone would understand that they will be shuffled in to some sort of 'scalable communication method.' Webmasters in your index? You have no commercial relationship with them. They may rely on Google. But there is still no real commercial relationship.
Adwords/Adsense customers/vendors? That is a different story. As I have mentioned several times on this topic, I have encountered shocking responses from Google regarding large ($100k+) accounts.
Google does not have that many customers & vendors.
Why not just charge $80/hour for support, and refund it for when people call in to fix false positives in the fraud detector? Seems like a win/win - make money off scammers trying to cheat you, and give people an easy way to re-enable their account.
I cannot stress how important this is! Matt, if you can give one thing to the AdSense team, let this be it. $100 a call, $80 an hour, whatever it may be. If I'm out $1000, I'll pay $100 to try and get it back (especially if I stand to lose $100 within a week of waiting). Snail customer support when it concerns accounts that hold money is not good.
You'd be surprised. There's still some people who think that when they type in a query, people at Google manually decide which results to show. For every result on the page. For every query. Hundreds of millions of times a day.
A lot of those searchers do a search for "John Smith" and then want to talk about why their school friend John Smith wasn't #1 instead of that other John Smith.
That's doesn't negate your point; I'm just saying that orders of magnitude more people want to contact Google than there are Google employees, and many of those people want to have prolonged discussions with Google. So the challenge is to find scalable ways to communicate with those people.