ecommercematt

I have spoken with people who answer the phone at the toll-free #s that are now provided to anybody signing up (or thinking of signing up) for a Google AdWords account, and I have not been impressed. In fact, I've been distinctly unimpressed. The representatives are profoundly misinformed, somewhat rude, and generally unpleasant to deal with if you're hoping to discuss anything remotely nuanced.

These representatives are also setting up AdWords campaigns on behalf of small businesses, and as representatives of Google, they probably have some credibility in the eyes of people who lack enough knowledge to spot them for the ignorami & charlatans that they might be (in my 3 calls, each person made claims which were provably wrong). In my experience, the Google phone reps say "backslash" when they mean forward slash, and refer to domain names as URLs, and it goes down hill from there.

In defense of the mediocre phone reps assigned to new Google AdWords customers, it should be pointed out that their level of knowledge & service is comparable, and often better, than that offered by many big companies selling SEM with field sales forces to SMBs. So even though I'm disappointed with the quality of reps that Google has, it certainly can be worse. Talk to a business owner who purchased a managed SEM campaign from his phone book/yellow pages sales representative for greater details on "worse."

Anyway, I can do what I need to do with AdWords without phone support, so I'm not really negatively impacted by their incompetence, but it got me thinking: Is there any other way to have telephone support at that scale? Can it be anything but mediocre? Do you think these folks are remote workers, or reporting to a call center somewhere? Did Google give up on making their advertising platform simple enough to not require human "explainers" & "sellers?"

I'm in the process of researching a startup opportunity focusing on accounting with a CPA friend of mine. Specifically, the startup we're thinking of launching would produce monthly financial statements (P&L, Cashflow, Balance Sheet).

What we're offering here is to produce the above listed financial statements for a few startups/small businesses (USA only, sorry) from the Hacker News community for free for a month (or more if it seems worthwhile), to test the process we've developed. The basic premise of the startup is to save small businesses the trouble of using Quickbooks or similar applications, and to enable them to upload a (hopefully pretty simple) list of documents from which accurate, third-party, objective financial statements are produced. In a sense what we're considering is similar to tripit.com, except the information will be uploaded via the web instead of forwarded by email, and we'll produce financial reports, not trip itineraries.

We know that financial information is sensitive and confidential, and we will treat it accordingly. Fortunately, there is a CPA on board to ensure that all rules, regs, and best practices are followed. Nonetheless, since this is such a sensitive matter, we'd like to request some time to talk with whoever might take us up on this offer to discuss confidentiality and security issues before any information exchange takes place. If you have any questions, I'd be happy to answer them here, and you can look up my personal email address in my HN profile. Thanks!