As companies grow, so does their technical support load.

In the case of computer/Internet services and products, technical support load increases disproportionately, because early adopters are more tech-savvy than the mass market, and don't ask stupid questions (even with not-so-stupid questions, they'll often be able to figure out the answer themselves).

An easy way to reduce technical support load is to make it harder for customers to get technical support - this is one big reason why caling customer support hotlines these days always gives you ("For English, Press 1. For Chinese, Press 2..."), and to get to speak to a human.

The online equivalent is to make one run a gauntlet of help mechanisms. For example, while Google AdSense used to accept email enquiries, now their "Contact Us" doesn't actually let you contact them for most issues. Instead, you're forced to go through a Troubleshooter and even at the end of it, after 8 steps, the link to "contact our customer support team for further assistance" leads to... the start of the same Troubleshooter.

Another option is to be kicked to the AdSense Help Forum, where you either get ignored or replied to by people promoting their websites (though at least you get some sort of an answer this way).

What they want to do is to filter out questions that are inane/silly/already-answered in the FAQ, but the current approach just pisses customers off. In the short run, Customer Support is happy and they don't have to hire as many support staff, but in the long run it will reduce revenue, and it'll take longer to find genuine problems that occur within the system.

This attitude to customer service is surprising, especially considering that AdSense is their [only] cash cow (but then again, the biggest clients probably get their own Moscow-Washington hotline).

In contrast, eBay has a Live Help option which lets you chat to a customer representative live. I used it once and was very happy with it. Even Microsoft's Windows Live has a contact form you can access if you don't find what you need in the FAQ, and responses are reasonably quick (even if they don't always read your submission thoroughly and just paste a boilerplate reply even if it isn't relevant - eventually I've always gotten an at least somewhat-decent answer).

Maybe Google should change their motto from "Don't be evil" to "Don't be worse than Microsoft".


(Incidentally, my problem was that despite setting up AdSense for Feeds, they weren't showing in my feed items.

In the end I found out that burning a new feed seemed to solve the problem [at least the ad code appeared in feed items], BUT I can't do this because Feedburner* has an error ["Trouble at the mill!"] when I try to change the URL of my old feed to free up the URL for the new one

* - Which is now owned by Google and, surprise surprise, has the same sort of unhelpful help system, despite urging you to "contact us directly about the problem you are seeing")