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February 22, 2007
As discussed earlier in the day, the Internet Marketing Monitor signed up for Google's new Apps Premiere service. I've spent much of the day playing around with it (hence the slow posting today). I'm already quite familiar with the bundled services, so today I focused on the new things: the start page and customer service.
http://<some google domain>.com/<your domain>.com The problem is that, without the <your domain>.com part, the links are worthless. I don't know how many times I fiddled around with it trying to get it to work. When nothing seemed to work, I decided to try out our brand-spanking-new customer service number. The customer service information provided on the Apps Premiere website are a little misleading. You're almost led to believe that the 24/7 support is telephone based. It's not. Google's customer support operating hours are 1 a.m. - 6 p.m. PST (I'll let you figure out what that means for you). That leaves 7 hours out of the day that telephone support is not available. The hours are before/after normal business hours, though. So I don't think that will be a huge deal for most. If you call outside of those hours, you can leave a voicemail and let Google know if the situation is "urgent". I assume that means they have a skeleton crew working the night shift that only calls people back who are in an emergency setting. When you sign up for the service you're given 2 PIN numbers. One is just a "PIN". The other is a "customer PIN". The first thing the automated answering machine does is ask for your PIN. After it verifies the number you're given two options:
I was instantly connected to a live human. It was actually surprising. When you call most companies the size of Google, you have to wade through endless menus and spend countless minutes on hold waiting for an "available customer service representative". After verifying my information (including the customer PIN), I described my issue. The rep I talked to pulled up our custom start page and followed along with me. When he saw what the problem was he walked through the steps to fix it (I'll admit… it was user error… and it seriously made me question my ability to do even the most mundane of online functions). But he didn't stop there. He suggested that there was an easier and better way to do what I was trying to do. He walked me click-by-click to the information in Google's documentation and waited while I made sure it worked. And in the end, I decided to go with his recommendation after all. Overall, my customer service experience with Google was surprisingly pleasant. I'm not used to good customer service from big companies. And it was the first time I'd spoke to anyone from Google on the phone so I didn't know what to expect. I'll have to think of a reason to call them back in a few months - after more people have signed up - and see if they're any different. As Day One with Google Apps Premiere starts to wind down, I don't really have a lot to say. We spent some time this morning getting our Google newbies up to speed on how everything works. And I've spent quite a bit of time in the administration control panel looking around and trying things out. Luckily I haven't broken anything just yet. There was one little mishap this afternoon with a Docs file gone crazy. But the cause has yet to be determined. Personally… I think the file is haunted. It keeps saying that changes are incompatible with a collaborator's changes. But there are no collaborators. That we can see…
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Creating the start page was simple enough. But I did run into a problem with links. For some reason, Google's WYSIWYG editor was stripping the last part of the URLs out. The part that's funny is that I was trying to use links provided by Google to the individual applications that are part of the suite. They look like this: 
