Clickfraud and Customer Service
Interesting post from Robert Cringely on issues relating to clickfraud and customer service. There seems to be increasing volume of posts related to this issue, with Mark Cuban staking his point of view. I'm less concerned about clickfraud. Ultimately if its a real issue, advertisers will decrease their focus on Adwords and similar tools. Once (and if) things start going south, I expect the adword-centric platforms will respond accordingly. I do think, however, that Robert's note on customer service is dead-on.
In the absence of timely customer service, customers simply don't give you the benefit of the doubt. Looking back at my own start-up experience, customer support was ridiculously expensive (more from a headroom than a cash perspective). Almost always it required resources across the organization to address an issue, and more than half the times, the issue was customer-centric (i.e. not a site-wide or application-wide issue, but more a problem with a specific customer's environment). Regardless, our customers didn't really care if their hardware met our product requirements, or if the servers we shipped them were self-installed in closets that were reaching the core temperature of the sun. If we didn't respond to these issues, we lost that customer forever. As the COO at Cima Systems, I would spend half of my work week out at customer sites, tooling around with set-ups or underneath desks, rebooting and reformatting things (this was before the renaissance of web services) and generally giving customers greater confidence in our company. So long as we invested time here, even if there were breakdowns (environment, hardware, software issues) customers stayed on...
At eBay, we've built a significant resource with our Customer Support teams. They're given enough degrees of freedom and discretion to actually bring meaningful solutions to the table. This is an area eBay continues to build actively because we recognize that if we're not talking to our customers, they'll be talking about eBay without our point of view or guidance or they'll be talking with our competitors.
Clickfraud, while easily dismissed by the adword platform providers because customers can't quantify it, is still a very real issue to the customers who sense it's there. As the din regarding clickfraud goes beyond a few customers and bloggers, timely customer service and response will be the key to maintaining or losing advertisers in the long-run. And for some, this unfortunately is something that requires direct contact and can't be addressed algorithmically.
In the absence of timely customer service, customers simply don't give you the benefit of the doubt. Looking back at my own start-up experience, customer support was ridiculously expensive (more from a headroom than a cash perspective). Almost always it required resources across the organization to address an issue, and more than half the times, the issue was customer-centric (i.e. not a site-wide or application-wide issue, but more a problem with a specific customer's environment). Regardless, our customers didn't really care if their hardware met our product requirements, or if the servers we shipped them were self-installed in closets that were reaching the core temperature of the sun. If we didn't respond to these issues, we lost that customer forever. As the COO at Cima Systems, I would spend half of my work week out at customer sites, tooling around with set-ups or underneath desks, rebooting and reformatting things (this was before the renaissance of web services) and generally giving customers greater confidence in our company. So long as we invested time here, even if there were breakdowns (environment, hardware, software issues) customers stayed on...
At eBay, we've built a significant resource with our Customer Support teams. They're given enough degrees of freedom and discretion to actually bring meaningful solutions to the table. This is an area eBay continues to build actively because we recognize that if we're not talking to our customers, they'll be talking about eBay without our point of view or guidance or they'll be talking with our competitors.
Clickfraud, while easily dismissed by the adword platform providers because customers can't quantify it, is still a very real issue to the customers who sense it's there. As the din regarding clickfraud goes beyond a few customers and bloggers, timely customer service and response will be the key to maintaining or losing advertisers in the long-run. And for some, this unfortunately is something that requires direct contact and can't be addressed algorithmically.
posted by Ro at 6/05/2006
1 Comments:
/snip
At eBay, we've built a significant resource with our Customer Support teams. They're given enough degrees of freedom and discretion to actually bring meaningful solutions to the table. This is an area eBay continues to build actively because we recognize that if we're not talking to our customers, they'll be talking about eBay without our point of view or guidance or they'll be talking with our competitors. /snip
You cannot be serious. eBay CS is the worst in the industry and as long as management at eBay views the company as the 800 pound gorilla, they will never truly empower their CS Reps.
Why?
Because they don't train their CS Reps to respond to customers issues, they train CS Reps to respond to customer complaints.
And eBay doesn't understand that there is a difference. Your need to make the above comment in your blog demostrates exactly that and is proof positive.
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