CNN || Google tries its own take on customer service

If you rely on a compelling service that happens to be free, what level of customer support are you entitled to receive?

Google is trying to figure that out. Known for using brilliant engineers, complex algorithms and speedy servers to organize online information in a simple and accessible fashion, Google is learning how to add the human touch to its repertoire as customers look for answers that can't be found on an FAQ.

Not surprisingly, not everyone is happy with the results. Some advertisers have been complaining about Google's Web-page-first approach to customer service issues for years, with the most common gripe that they find it exceedingly difficult to reach a real live human being when they have a problem that isn't answered on a product Web page.

More recently, Katie Braband, who reported problems with Google Checkout's handling of transactions at her company, Datto, was just as frustrated by Google's response to her issues as she was the issues themselves.

"The only e-mails we've received response to are pre-generated, it's very clear there's no person writing the e-mail," she said in September.

Google is aware that customer service will play a large role in its growth as it offers more paid services, and seems committed to improving services for those kinds of customers over time.

"The first thing a CIO is going to say is, 'where is that person and how do I wring their neck?'" said Google CEO Eric Schmidt in an interview earlier this year.

Schmidt knows a thing or two about traditional enterprise customer service: he ran corporate software maker Novell before joining Google. And before Novell, he was an executive at Sun Microsystems.