What do topless women have to do with Customer Experience?
August 20th, 2007 Posted in Grade FA new Google widget results in a surprising experience
Event: Adding a Widget to my Google Home Page
Location: Online
Company: Google - Blogger
Customer Experience Grade: F
Diving head first into blogging about customer service and customer experience has been accompanied by a simultaneous rush of research into the topic. I feel confident that I have insightful commentary, however there are many other voices out there that bring value to the table. Using tools such as Technorati and Google Blog Search to track down relevant blogs and posts has provided a bounty of useful information. The difficult part though is sifting through the chaff. This can be difficult even for those who spend considerable time online. For instance, the best customer service/ customer experience post that I have found to date was Joel Spolsky’s post on the Seven steps to remarkable customer service. His points were perceptive and insightful. The source was a somewhat unexpected for me, though, and it took some searching.
Seeking to make my search more efficient and to increase the automation involved, I installed a Google widget (I think they actually called it a gadget) on my Google home page that was to provide a snapshot of customer experience-related posts. Admittedly, I am a big fan of Google and its products and I thought that this tool would be no different. I could not have been more wrong.
On my very click of a new “customer experience” post on the widget, I was taken to a blog that had a huge banner advertisement of four topless women. Granted the post was related to customer experience but I could not fathom how this ad appeared there. I checked my Google preferences and they were set to moderate - which, according to my expectations, should have blocked this ad. I shrugged it off and went back to the widget and clicked on the second post. Again, A similar advertisement appeared on a different Blogger blog. The women were not topless this time but they were scantily clad and in, let us say, somewhat provocative poses. This was a Google widget on a Google page going to a Google-hosted blog and I was shocked. Fortunately, I was at home on my own computer and my own network when this happened.
I didn’t even try to view the third post and immediately uninstalled the widget.
Suggestions to Improve the Customer Experience:
- Don’t let this happen again!
