Google Has BAD BBB Rating Due to Poor Customer Service

[Linda Buquet]

For anyone that has suffered due to Google's poor customer service, this blog post should come as no surprise. However this post REALLY puts it in perspective for me.

I own another company that helps small businesses get ranked on Google maps - ie Google Places and the lack of support for that product is especially sad! I volunteer a lot of time in the Google support forum trying to help these poor business owners who have hijacked listings, duplicate listings, bogus scraped info added, missing reviews and all kinds of other problems that Google seldom provides support for.

Mike really nails it when he says:

"Google has made a science out of making it
difficult to get a problem looked at let alone solved.
They have saved millions of dollars by not providing support."​

(Bold, underline by me.)​

You need to see the BB ratings of these top tech companies for a good comparison.

Google Gets a Barely Passing Grade with the BBB – For the Want of a Nail… | Understanding Google Maps & Local Search

So when a reader sent me the link to Google’s BBB rating I approached it with my typical objectivity towards Google ( ) and the aforementioned caveats. I decided to compare Google to a range of tech companies (Apple, Hewlett Packard & Microsoft) and several companies in mobile (Verizon, ATT) to see how they faired and so you can put Google’s customer service level in perspective.

Drum roll please… Here are the results in order of the BBB grade:

 

[Laura61]

Interesting. I'm having trouble with my Feedburner account, and do you think I can even find a way to contact these people? It's so frustrating that you can't even communicate your problem to them, even though they probably wouldn't respond anyway. It's crazy.

 

[Linda Buquet]

Only a company that big could get away with so much!

 

[djbaxter]

Only a company that big could get away with so much!

Precisely. They have become complacent and arrogant. And that's why Bing is my default search engine now.

As for feedburner, Laura, it creates more problems than it's worth. I recommend you revert to the standard WordPress feed which is more SEO friendly anyway. The only people who need Feedburner, IMO, are those using Blogger who can't or don't know how to generate an RSS feed rather than the standard Atom feed.

 

[djbaxter]

Google's C- BBB Rating Is An Improvement
Search Engine Roundtable
October 8, 2010

Mike noticed yesterday that Google had a BBB rating (Better Business Bureau) of a C-.

They do, but what most people don't know is that over a year ago, Google had a D score from the BBB. So Google is actually improving.

That doesn't seem to me like something Google should be celebrating...

 

[djbaxter]

Google Improves From Unsatisfactory To C- Rating At BBB
by Matt McGee, SearchEngineLand.com
October 10, 2010

Google’s BBB profile shows fewer complaints over the past three years than Yahoo’s profile, but Yahoo rates an “A+” grade. Why is that? It appears the problem is that Google has not responded at all to more than four dozen of the 647 complaints on its record. Yahoo, on the other hand, has responded to all of the 806 complaints listed on its profile.

Google has a history of providing poor support for several of its products. The 2009 article on Search Engine Roundtable makes reference to complaints from AdWords users. Complaints about Google’s lack of support are also common in the Google Maps Help Forum. Last summer, on its Google Maps blog, the company even admitted that it “can’t respond to every problem individually,” and hasn’t “found the perfect way to address each problem and question that comes up.”

Until Google puts more energy into responding to complaints, that BBB grade isn’t likely to get any better

 

[Seleyna]

I've been contacting Google Support via Webmaster Tool but so far only received generic responses. It's about one of our sites who suffered from spam injection, and was kicked out of search results.

its been 3 months

 

[Laura61]

Precisely. They have become complacent and arrogant. And that's why Bing is my default search engine now.

As for feedburner, Laura, it creates more problems than it's worth. I recommend you revert to the standard WordPress feed which is more SEO friendly anyway. The only people who need Feedburner, IMO, are those using Blogger who can't or don't know how to generate an RSS feed rather than the standard Atom feed.

I've been meaning to get back here and ask you how to do that - would I just use:

http://mysite.com/feed/
or
http://mysite.com/feed/rss/
?
Is there anything else I have to do? How do you track your subscribers this way? Can you offer e-mail subs without Feedburner too? Sorry for all the questions.

 

[djbaxter]

For WordPress, the default feed is http://mysite.com/feed/.

To track subscribers and offer email subscriptions, all you need do is add a plug-in or two. If memory serves, one of them is Subscribe Me but I'd have to llopk it up. Just search for new plug-ins from your WordPress Dashboard using a phrase like "subscribe" or "subscription options" or something.

There are also numerous stats packages as plug-ins.

 

[Laura61]

Thanks - I will check into it! Have a good night!

 

[jzhao1688]

I know google maybe arrogant, but google actually holds 80% of the market share in the search engine industry. This means me as a business owner I'll get 80% of the traffic from google and only 15% from yahoo, bing being the least of only 5%. So far only google has bring me more new clients than any other search engines?

 

[djbaxter]

Again, you seem to have missed the part where Bing is now providing search results to Yahoo.