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SEM - Google Adwords, Yahoo Panama, MSN AdCenter Customer Service Rundown.

by Cathy Wang ()

I have recently started doing intense corporate Search Engine Marketing at Laplink. I manage the PPC accounts and make sure they are making lots of money. After dealing with all the different platforms, I have observed more than just interface/usability problems throughout the process.

I have always believe in direct marketing. A face, a person, represent a brand. The customer service department is where the brand/company reaches out and presents itself. It's extremely important in terms of achieving customer satisfaction. I dealt with Google Adwords through email support and live chat support, Yahoo Panama through email and phone support, and MSN AdCenter through email support. I am going to share my experience.

Google Adwords

After couple clicks into "Contact us", a live help chat option shows up. It's not always there but if it's available it's a much faster way to get response instead of waiting for emails. The live help is very timely and it usually helps. (One interesting about live chat, I think all the live chat reps are female, or at least they all give out female names. I have used the live chat many times and I've never seen a male rep. I wonder if it's intentional.) The good thing about live chat is that they allow you to send transcript to yourself after the chat. All the chats are saved by Google for future reference. The feedback form appears after the chat ends, with couple very brief simple questions.

Google's email support is pretty fast and timely. When the Live Chat rep says that she will contact you via email for update on your status, you can usually expect the email in the same working day.

I am very happy with Google so far. They are fast and very helpful. They listen to what the customers have to say and find the best solution. Sometimes I even get solutions to problems I didn't even know of.

Yahoo Panama Sponsored Search

As an American company, we recently got to be upgraded to the new Panama platform. (It is not available to Canadian customer yet. The other international market places are still in the process of upgrading to this platform.) There were some frustration during the transition because of some technical issues. I figured out that it is always faster to just pick up the phone and ask for help. Yahoo actually gives different levels of user account a different kind of phone support. I was upgraded to a premium account; however, I did not experience enough to tell the difference. I personally find that the email replies are always very "canned" and not really answering the question.The Yahoo email support is decent. However, there is no place where a customer can rate the service. (Both Google and MSN do it) If you are not entirely satisfied with the customer service you got, there's no where for you to tell Yahoo. In the end, you will probably have to call customer service and be directed to the executive team.

I think the new platform release is probably the main reason why a lot of things are still not in place. After all, it is beta. It's getting better day by day.

MSN

The first confusing thing about MSN AdCenter is that I couldn't find a number to call. I found out about the number of customer service after asking it in an email. MSN AdCenter's respond time is very fast. I can usually expect a reply in 24 hours. The replies are always very detailed and very helpful. A rep is assigned to the account for the case. I was so satisfied with the email support I never needed to call them. During business hour, I can expect an email reply in 2 - 3 hours, which is definitely fast enough even for emergency issues. The only thing that was confusing was after the support. For every case number you get, you will receive an evaluation email asking you to fill out a survey. Here's the trick, the survey email is really not sent out on the day of the case, it is usually after. However, sometimes a case can expand into different stages of problems, which then have different case numbers. I received around 10 survey emails in 2 days from Microsoft AdCenter, all regarding a different case. I am not sure how you are, but to me, the case number looks something like SRX1024420000ID. I really wanted to give feedback to AdCenter because I had a wonderful experience dealing with one of my reps; however, it was almost too complicated to do so.

The phone support is very good as well. I only had to call AdCenter once because the MSN Sympatico toll free number really doesn't work on this page. I called AdCenter wondering if they can find out a right number for me to call. It is almost abusing the customer service, but hey, they found me a number and a sales rep.

After all, I am just sharing my experience with customer service and how the business treats its customer service. As a sponsored search platform, I am very satisfied with all 3 of them. (If I like Google better, it's only because it's my preferred search engine.)

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