Can Google AdWords Customer Service Be Saved?

I recently had an AdWords client get blacklisted by Google for policy reasons. Anyone who has worked on AdWords accounts for more than a couple of years has no doubt had this happen to them as well.

In this case, I had just launched the client’s account and had bought a total of maybe 20 innocuous terms. To be clear, there was *absolutely* no reason for this client to be banned (the client offers free online classes, is VC-funded, and 100% legit in every way).

Here’s the initial email we got from Google notifying us that we had been blacklisted:

From: <[email protected]>
Date: Tue, Oct 23, 2012 at 4:42 AM
Subject: Your AdWords Account: Account Suspended
To: [redacted]

This message was sent from a notification-only email address that does not accept incoming email. Please do not reply to this message. If you have any questions, please feel free to email us through the AdWords Help Center at  https://adwords.google.com/support/bin/request.py.

Dear AdWords Advertiser,

We periodically review accounts for security purposes and to verify billing information. As a result of this review, your account and any related accounts have been suspended, and your ads are no longer running on Google. If you believe your account was suspended in error, please contact us through the AdWords Help Center.

Sincerely,
The Google AdWords Team

So I wrote my AdWords rep and asked her to fix the issue. She quickly forwarded my email to someone on the AdWords policy team in India for resolution. After about a week of radio silence, I received the following response from said policy team:

Hi David,

Thank you for reaching out to us about your account [redacted].

While reviewing your account, we found violations of our AdWords policies in this or a related account. As a result, your account has unfortunately been suspended, and your ads will no longer run on Google.

For information on the terms associated with AdWords account use, please review our Terms and Conditions at:https://adwords.google.com/select/tsandcsfinder

I quickly replied back:

Dear Adwords support, thank you for wasting our time with this meaningless email. 

[Account Manager], can you please get someone to actually help us?

About a day later, my account manager got the account back online (for which I am grateful), so I did end up with the correct resolution, but only because I actually know humans at Google who could intervene on my behalf. Had I been a normal small business, this might have been the end of the road for me. And for many small businesses, getting kicked off of AdWords could also be the end of their business.

What’s surprising about this story is not that I fell into a frustrating and endless feedback loop with an overseas customer service team, but that it was Google at the other end of the email acting with such incompetence.

Sure, we expect to get horrible customer service from the phone company, the cable company, and most US airlines, but Google is arguably the smartest company in the world. Dumb people simply don’t get hired at Google, and Google is famous for coming up with smart solutions to even the most inane problems.

So, one would think that something as critical as the decision to kick a paying customer off of the Google AdWords system would have a much smarter solution that a continuous cycle of anonymous, vague, and unhelpful emails.

The Two Likely Reasons AdWords Policy Responses Suck

The sheer volume of policy emails (and general customer service requests) Google must get is certainly one reason that Google’s policy emails are so vacuous. Indeed, one Google employee estimated that spending just ten minutes on every customer service request would require Google “to hire 20,833 people to work 8 hours a day, just to keep up.”

Granted, this estimate was applied to all customer service requests, of which AdWords policy issues is just a sliver; but, given the millions of AdWords advertisers around the world, the number of policy-related customer service emails Google gets is likely to be quite massive.

Another reason Google’s policy emails are so banal and useless is likely due to potential legal liability. I’m not a lawyer (nor do I play one on TV), but I can imagine several scenarios in which Google could be threatened by lawsuits as a result of their AdWords policies.

For example, if an AdWords policy rep admitted to an AdWords client that his account had been mistakenly suspended, the customer might try to sue Google for lost revenue while the account was offline. Or perhaps, if an AdWords rep told a customer to do certain things to get an account reinstated (e.g., change your website), and the customer followed this advice and then was still rejected by the policy team, the customer might sue Google for the cost of the changes made to the site.

Basically, because AdWords blacklisting has such a direct financial impact on the business getting banned, the chances of litigation are probably higher in this situation that most.

Why Google Should Get Better At Customer Service

I’d argue, however, that these serious issues are nonetheless worth overcoming. First, simply because Google is losing millions of dollars a year by erroneously banning legitimate advertisers. My limited experience with the policy team alone tells me that many upstanding Google advertisers are unfairly caught in the policy dragnet every year.

Second, because bad customer service directly drives down profit! An interview with Harley Manning from Forrester recently illuminated this point:

A study conducted by Watermark Consulting using the data in Forrester’s Customer Experience Index showed that a portfolio of customer-experience leaders returned 22.5%. During that same time period, the S&P 500 returned -1.3%, and a portfolio of customer-experience laggards returned -46.3%.

This relationship between customer experience quality and market returns holds true except in industries that have “trapped” customers due to lack of competition. For example, a cable company that operates entirely or mostly in areas where they own the only cable franchise, or health insurance providers, who sell to benefits managers at companies and are therefore insulated from the wrath of their end customers (consumers).

For those of you who think AdWords customers are “trapped” customers, trust me, they are not! Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, MSN, and eBay are all building alternatives to AdWords that are allowing advertisers to diversify their online marketing portfolio (I refer to this as the “wide tail” of marketing). Bad customer service (and the fear of being banned without cause) will only accelerate the flight to AdWords alternatives.

Last but not least, it’s just the right thing to do. The American criminal law system is built on Blackstone’s formulation, better known as “it’s better for nine guilty men to go free than to have one innocent man go to jail.”

The Google system appears to be just the opposite – it’s better for nine innocent men to get to jail than to have one guilty man go free. That’s just ethically wrong (and, no, I am not going to invoke the “Do No Evil” argument, so just forget that you ever read the last part of this sentence).

How Google Can Get Better

I love solving problems with “conditional logic,” and this seems to be a perfect use of that methodology. Conditional logic is basically “choose your own adventure” decision-making, where the answer to one question begets different questions down the road until the answer is reached.

Google’s current policy team conditional logic appears to look something like this:

• Was advertiser flagged by policy team for T&C violation?
  • If yes: send email telling advertiser they are banned
    • Is this a first-time violation?
      • If yes, send email telling advertiser they are banned
        • Is this a correctable violation?
          • If yes, send email telling advertiser they are banned

Real conditional logic creates a decision tree that would hopefully get real results for advertisers. With that in mind, here’s a suggested conditional logic path that the AdWords policy team is free to use (you can thank me later):

As I’ve noted before, there are tons of very smart people at Google, so I’m sure that there are a lot of people over there that could come up with a better conditional logic chart than the one above! But, let’s face it, the current system wastes everyone’s time, is unfair to innocent advertisers, and hurts Google’s revenue and brand – there simply has to be a better solution out there.