Originally posted on reddit (r/PPC).
Question
What’s up with the guys you speak to when you have to contact support? They are nearly all clueless idiots.
Sorry for being blunt but they seem to know nothing about anything I have asked them about.
Are these just untrained call centre staff who have some sort of online FAQ which they search buzzwords for when trying to answer queries?
Would be great if anyone on here who works for Google or has done in the past could shed some light on this incompetence.
Thanks.
Answer
Up to a certain level of account managers, they are just salespeople from outsourced companies, and their goal is to make themselves and their company more money.
They aren’t incentivised on the performance of your account, they have incentives on your spend and the activation rate of their recommendations. These ones deal with 60+ accounts/month.
Realistically speaking, that’s half a day spent per account if you work on 30 days a month. There’s no way you get to remember that many things as an account manager. They just follow a checklist mindlessly.
The more helpful ones are the internal account managers, even though they still don’t really care that much about your business, they can get you to speak with the Support team faster sometimes, and even then I find it’s not made much of a difference in the past 12 months, it’s easier to contact Support directly (and wait).
Finally, if you spend enough money not to get a quarterly change in account managers, you’ll start getting people who care a little bit more because they work with a much smaller portfolio of accounts.
Stay away as much as possible from Google Reps who reach out to you, especially if you’re spending less than USD$300k/year — you’ll mostly get third-party salespeople trying to get you to spend more.
Once their email and signature are legit @google.com (and not @xwf.google.com), it’s slightly more serious, but it’s not quite great yet.
Make use of them for their support capabilities as they can escalate support tickets for you, but don’t take their advice at face value: they work for their own interest first and foremost, not yours.