We’ve been testing Gmail for Your Domain with Sproutit for the last month. So far I’ve been pretty happy with it. (Gmail handles all of our personal accounts; we use Mailroom for sales and support email.) A few weeks ago, Google’s Calendar even shown up in our account and we started to play with that also. It had been great experience until this last week.

I first noticed it when my email volume seemed lower than normal. At first I thought it was just a quiet week until people started complaining that I was not responding to emails I had never received. (If that’s you, please forgive me. Email me at charles at okito.net instead.)

After some experimenting, I determined that Gmail, in fact, was not delivering about half the emails sent to any of our sproutit.com accounts. No problem, I thought. That’s pretty serious, but I’m sure Google can fix it. Outages happen from time to time. I’ll just report it.

And that’s when I found out just how far Google will go to avoid hearing from me. They don’t provide any simple Contact Us or Report a Bug Link. Here is what I had to go through instead:

1. First, I clicked on “Manage this domain” to get to the GfyD admin pages.
2. Then I clicked help.
3. No contact link yet. I searched for my problem and clicked on an answer that came up.
4. At the bottom of the answer was a Contact Us link. Finally! I clicked on it.
5. This is sometimes different depending on where you are. The first time I clicked on this link, I didn’t up on a contact page. Instead I was taken back to an index of the help topics, where I had to search through the topics again to make sure my question has not already been answered.
6. It hadn’t of course; I’m having an outage. Once I confirmed that, I clicked on a topic again and found another Contact Us link. I clicked once more.
7. This time I was taken to a form where I could report my issue.
8. Satisfied, I waited for a response, which I did receive a little bit later. Actually, the email I received was an automated email from Google suggesting help topics I should read through for a third time to make sure I really couldn’t just help myself.
9. I really can’t. Google is not delivering email. I need them to fix it. Once I confirmed this yet again, I had to reply to the email to tell them that yes, I really do need your help.

At this point, Google promises someone will contact me…someday. Even with all of that, I’m still only about 60% sure I got my email into the right place to be looked at. There were a lot of things I had to figure out by guesswork and I could be wrong.

Now, cmpare this to what you experience if you have a problem with our sales and support email service Mailroom:

1. You have a problem.
2. Click on the Contact Us link at the bottom of your Mailroom page and email us.
3. We write you back, usually within a few hours if we can. If we don’t hear from you again, we often will write again in a few days later just to make sure your problem was solved.

If you had a choice between a service that made it impossible for you to contact them and one that not only let you email them directly, but cared enough to follow up after a few days, which service would you trust with your critical business data?

A free consumer service can probably get away with Gmail’s avoidance approach to support. But, if Google wants us to trust our business data to them, they are going to need to try something else. My email is important to my ability to eat and pay the bills. I need to know who I can call when something goes wrong.

I am sure Google will eventually fix my email problem and maybe even the feedback thing. In the mean time, I think my experience highlights an important issue with the Web Office:

Anyone can build a set of hosted web office tools. What will really separate the winners from the losers will be who can convince businesses to trust them with their critical business data. The way to earn that trust is to connect with your customers on a personal level. Make it easy for people to contact you; answer their questions; have a personality.

Google, I have a problem with your service. Who do I contact? I hope you can tell me, because I have to contact someone and if I can’t contact you, I will soon be contacting someone else.