Google’s weakness is a strength
There’s yet another post on HN today lamenting Google, in part, for non-existent personal customer service. But how can you give personal customer service for a free tool used by hundreds of millions? Even if everyone calls in once a year for 5 minutes, GMail’s 176 million users would need 176m/365/8/12 ~ 5,000 phone reps working full time to talk to these people, increasing linearly with the number of users. Number like that just don’t scale.
And anyway, personal customer service is a band-aid for when you’ve pissed off customers enough that they want to be coddled and told you care. I’d rather have a service which just works, gets out of my way, and doesn’t ever make me even think about calling customer support. For me, personally, GMail has been precisely that experience (and my inbox is at 57%, as well). Obviously, YMMV.
