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?"