Strategies of niceness.

In the Sunday Times style section last Sunday there was an article on Innocent - the company that make those fruit juices and smoothies. At the end of the article was the following anecdote:

"We met some people from Unilever the other day," says Reed. "They were interested in how we do business. We said, 'Be natural, be nice.' They went, all earnestly, 'That sounds great. Now how do you implement that strategy of being nice?' We were like, 'Oh dude, oh man.'"

Funnily enough I had been thinking about this recently because of an email conversation I had with Google Adsense.


This particular instance pertains to Google AdSense, but it is just one of many similar conversations I have had of late with tech support for a wide range of businesses.

It started like this:

Adsense URL filter... help!

I want to get rid of an ad from BifSniff.com, the url when checked as outlined in FAQ is:


http://store.yahoo.com/url-edited-was-a-very-long-one-though.html

This is too long a url to put into the filter. I don't wish to filter
yahoo.com, but my other attempts to block this ad have failed... can you advise?

Many thanks,
Frank

So I got this response:

Hello Frank,

Thank you for your email. I understand you'd like to exclude an ad from being displayed on your site, www.bifsniff.com , and that you've made several attempts to do so.
Unfortunately, the only method of ensuring the exclusion of the ad you mention is to add one of the following to your filter list:

store.yahoo.com

or

yahoo.com

We apologize for any inconveniences this may cause. As AdSense is still a new program, new features are under consideration, and your feedback is very helpful. We welcome any suggestions you may have on improving Google AdSense for you.

Please feel free to reply to this email should this problem persist or if you have additional questions regarding this program.

Sincerely,

name removed
The Google Team

Fair enough, so given the invitation to send on further questions and the assurance that "new features are under consideration, and your feedback is very helpful" I responded as below:

Thanks Name Removed,
I am sure you can see the issue with this particular url, I don't really wish to exclude other people who have stores on yahoo. I don't understand the issue exactly however as under the url filter in AdSense includes the
instructions :
example: www.competitors-site.com or www.competitors-site.com/folder
Which is why I don't understand why store.yahoo.com/url-edited won't work.
If people are to be allowed use urls like yahoo.com or cafepress.com it would seem quite important to me to have a way of filtering these ads, other than by the root domain.
If you could let me know if/when this issue is likely to be taken into consideration I'd really appreciate it.
Thanks for all your help,
Best,
Frank

I got this response:

Hello Frank,

Thank you for your email.

We appreciate your taking the time to offer us this feedback on our filtering mechanism and encourage you to continue to let us know how we can improve Google AdSense. As AdSense is still a young program, new features are under consideration and your feedback is very helpful.

We apologize again for any inconvenience the suggested solution may cause.

Sincerely,

name removed
The Google Team

Which I can only translate as this:

Hello Frank,

Thanks you for your email.

While I may have seemed to care about your observations and value you as a customer, actually let's be honest I am just following the corporate guidelines sellotaped to my monitor and including key phrases in my emails to you so I don't get fired. If I was to explain to you that it is unlikely that anyone actually involved with the product will read your mail, that wouldn't really keep you happy would it? While you may suspect all of this from my nice but meaningless mails you'll never prove it and will be reduced to ranting on your blog about corporate strategies of niceness as opposed to genuinely caring corporations. Ha ha ha.

Sincerely,

name removed.
The Google Team.

Now I'm not saying that just because I observe an issue with certain urls that the MD should call me and thank me for my feedback, but instead of a stock answer it would be nice to hear "that feature is being considered" or "I am forwarding your mail to the suggestions box" or even "I am deleting your mail now because I have no contact with the rest of the company". Basically, anything that rang true would do.

End rant.