December 01, 2006 (1): It's the People, Stupid!

Elise Ackerman has a great article in today's San Jose Mercury News, now available through E-Commerce Times. It is basically a "report from the trenches" on how Google Checkout is being received as a potential threat to PayPal. One of the major punch lines has to do with what happens when things go wrong. Dallas comedian Amelia Klaymann hit one of those speed bumps and ended up getting charged five times for a computer monitor. Needless to say, she responded with a sense of urgency, only to discover that there was no help desk she could call: all communication was conducted through electronic mail.

Now, in all fairness, if Google Checkout is providing electronic mail communication with customer support, then at least they are ahead of Amazon.com in this game, who only provides you with a rather limited form to fill out. If you have a problem with Amazon.com and you have screen shots to support your claims, there is no way you can pass that information to them. So, if Google Checkout lets you send "real" electronic mail, complete with whatever attachments may be useful, such as screen shots or scans of paper receipts, they are at least better than some of the other players.

However, the other punch line has to do with how Ms. Klaymann finally managed to communicate with Google. She wrote up her experiences in her blog. More specifically, she wrote, "It turns out Google does not have anyone you can talk to in real life -- only via e-mail;" and, as fate would have it, a Google manager happened to read her blog (which happened to be hosted by Google's Blogger service). So Ms. Klaymann ended up getting the $20 incentive credit for using Google Checkout in the first place and had all five charges voided, meaning that she got her monitor for free.

Before we write this off as a happily-ever-after story, though, we should ask a couple of questions:

• If Ms. Klaymann had not used Google Blogger for her blog, would any Google manager has seen it? (Hint: I have given the URL for this blog to Google Blog Search and have yet to find anything on it with their search tool. So much for me keeping my blog in "enemy territory!")
• Has Ms. Klaymann's experience had any impact on Google Checkout operations; or, for that matter, has Ms. Ackerman's report of those experiences had any impact?
• When will the purveyor's of e-commerce recognize that there are all sorts of things that the "e" can facilitate; but, as soon as things go wrong, people want to talk to people willing to take the time to listen, understand, and act?