My new friend and fellow Yahoo! Store Developer Rob Snell was invited by a director at Yahoo! Small Business to testify in front of Congress at a hearing of the US House of Representatives’ Committee on Small Business about Online Advertising. His preperation and written testimony was easy-to-read and Rob published it here at Search Engine Land. You should definitely read that first.

Now that’ he’s back and rested, with a fresh .gov link in his pocket, I thought I’d ask him a few short questions about how it went, what it was like as an experience, and what he thought it meant for search marketing’s future.

Scott: We had lunch at SMX Advanced and know you’ve been on the road pretty much since then. I want to thank you for carving out a few minutes with me.

Rob: Not a problem!

Scott: The public has had a difficult time understanding search marketing. Did you feel that the assembled panel truly understood the industry?

Rob: Yep. Rep. Charlie Gonzalez, especially. He understands the overall concepts from top to bottom. Was asking good questions about the specific applications. Lynn Westmoreland, too. I think the DUMMIES material helped, but these guys were sharp.

Scott: Did you stick to your written testimony? If not, what areas did you expand on?

Rob: Written testimony was 5 minutes. Q&A ran almost 2 hours. You can watch highlights on Youtube.

Scott: What other types of testimonies did you hear on the panel?

Rob: It was a good panel. I was able to talk about Gun Dog Supply, our family’s web store. There was a content guy who runs Adsense, Askthebuilder.com’s Tim Carter, who really has his act together. The Retailer of the group was SkyFacet.com, and their CEO and Founder Paul Sanar (23 years old) does 5x the volume we do, which speaks volumes. Randall Rothenberg was there as head of the Interactive Advertising Bureau and represents Web publishers and advertisers and was very, very knowledgeable. Lastly, Richard Lent, CEO of AgencyNet NYC brought extremely well-rounded knowledge, mostly from working with upper end clients. They were all well-prepared.

Questions Asked To Rob

• How do retailers deal with all these keywords?
• Would I sell my keyword lists?
• How can small firms get into buying paid search ads?
• How easy is it to get online? And launch paid search ads?
• Are you afraid of Google’s domination in the search engines?
• What are the differences in free search and paid search?
• What did we think Congress should do? What should Congress NOT do?
• For more… click on Rob’s wrapup

Scott: Coming out of it, how did the SEM industry fare in the minds of the audience?

Rob: Great! It was more SEM in general and paid search than SEO. The panel was ONLINE ADVERTISING and SEO was a small part of that. Personally, I was afraid that the “SEO is snake oil” problem would rear its head, and the only negative I heard was the “I paid an SEO $35,000 and I got banned from Google” horror story, but IMHO dude should have done his homework before paying that kind of cash to an SEO.

Scott: What do you think the SEM industry could learn from what you heard?

Rob: Google needs to be careful. Congress can step in at any moment and regulate our industry if they think they need to do so. Kinda scary!

Scott: Cool Rob, I’ll look forward to your wrap up later. Get some rest!

Rob: Thanks!

For more… click on Rob’s wrapup

My email to the client representative for a $10k portal software said:

“The edit RSS page for the portal is giving a page not found error for [I entered url] - what do you think would cause that? Thanks, Scott”

The reply from their customer service email:

“We don’t answer questions like that here, and don’t forward things to the support team as a policy. You need to fill in a support ticket for this. [link]”

The link was to a form that had 54 fields. I felt compelled to let them know who the customer was and went on with my day, pissed. It was all I could think of when we had a budget meeting about whether we should continue using the portal.  We didn’t renew.

Was this kind of behavior the reason we cancelled a $12k/year support arrangement? Not sure, but I certainly wasn’t in the best mood when it came time for me to voice my recommendation for the renewal.

I know support ticket systems pretty well in the small-enterprise variety. I have had a few when I was doing hosting and have interacted with probably 20 different ones. My company has since moved to basecamp to give things a more human touch, and basecamp has recently followed some of the advice in this post. I am guilty of the things in the past. But to you, beloved reader, I will say I see the errors of my ways.

Let me be the first to say that if you have 100s of clients, selling a commodity item such as hosting, I recognize the workflow issues you’re facing. We all need to move support issues through the system as fast as possible when margins are razor thin. But if the support systems creators were a little more aware of the non-tech and/or busy customer community, perhaps things could improve.

So here’s my take:

What they SHOULD have said, in a human voice in reply to my email.

“Oh wow, I’ll check in to that. You’ll get a note from the team soon.”

Cool. Now… I would have entered the “humans are working on it” and “I’m getting my money’s worth” state of mind. I would not have been upset that a solution didn’t arrive in 10 seconds.

The process on the customer service side should be refined to support the remarkableness, transparency and joy of the experience, not just its efficiency.

On their end, here’s a sketch of what could have happened:

My email address should identify me - and my account - to bring up lots of relevant information about my account without me entering it. Relevant, but missing information can be flagged by the person monitoring the support emails. If I send a support email to the wrong address, it should be forwarded for me, without scolding but perhaps automatically insert a friendly reminder so I know next time. My email body should become the ticket body, automatically. Any flagged missing and relevant information should generate an email to me like this

“Hi Scott,

We’ve got your support issue but there was two things we needed to know. Please answer these two questions and reply. We’ll get right on it!

Be sure and write the answers after the ‘>>’ below

Question 1: What is the browser type and version you’re using?

Question 1 Answer:>>

Question 2: Did you try clearing your cache to see if that works?

Question 2 Answer:>>

[do not write below this line - we won't see anything below it]

Take care!

Support

The other 48 friggin’ questions aren’t asked and I’m not a bit annoyed that they asked for this. I should have entered that before. Of course, the reply will feed the support ticket what it needs to proceed.

The old way of doing support tickets is to abuse customers by making them do menial form filling work with information they’d entered many times before. Scold them so your system will work better. After all, if it weren’t for their bloody complaints you wouldn’t have to go over these stupid emails.

The new way is to let computers do the grunt work, extracting that previous information and limiting the work required of customers to that which is truly needed. This should be done in a conversational pattern, not a computer tug-of-war. It is marketing, and it makes a big difference.

Photos Used Under Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic License

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Just follow “farktweet” to get them in Twitter.

Improvements later if there’s interest:

• Improved condensing of content.
• Totally SFW version.
• Category-by-category tweets.

Farktweet links may link to adult content depending on the story you click on.  This is a part of Fark, not the tweetbot.

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If you have an improvement, feel free to shoot ‘em over.

Remember, you have to put “Sphinn” in your post Tags before the button will display.