I'm Feeling Lucky_ The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 - Douglas Edwards [111]
Meanwhile, after five months of rejecting applicants, I hired Denise Griffin in October 2000 to fill the role of full-time CSR. Surprisingly few candidates had the temperament and writing skills necessary to represent Google with the grace and grammar the job required. Denise had the requisite ability, a Berkeley degree, and community service experience that Sergey found appealing.
The day Denise started we were three thousand emails behind. Issues kept popping up like the methane fires dotting the grass-covered landfill down the street. A porn star desperately needed us to remove her home phone number from our index. History buffs claiming Israel had sunk a U.S. warship in 1967 objected to being classified as a hate group in our directory. Turks were outraged by an ad about genocide targeted to the keyword "Turkey." And those were the minor complaints. We were reaching the limits of what our Outlook software could handle, and user questions were becoming more complex and time-consuming to answer.
Our email output slowed from Sergey's remembered (and perhaps unconsciously optimized) personal response rate of one per minute to a more languid pace of one every three minutes. Of course, Denise and Rob couldn't pull answers out of their heads as Sergey had, but in his eyes that didn't excuse lower productivity. Then Cindy found some week-old unanswered emails that could have resulted in negative press.
"The situation is getting out of control," she warned me. "You need to get it in hand."
You know that dream where you're trying to run away from some menacing figure and your legs turn into melted marshmallows? I felt my feet mired in the sticky mess of text that was our user base asking for help.
I went back to the only solution that ever worked. I argued the numbers with Salar and convinced him to support a push for another CSR for our group. Omid put in a separate request for a service person for advertising clients. With two additional staffers, we would be able to make progress for at least a couple of months, until the volume of mail doubled again. Prompted by Salar, Sergey agreed to let us hire another CSR. One CSR, that is, to handle both the user support and advertising jobs. It wouldn't be enough, but it was better than nothing.
Since so much incoming mail was not in English, I sent out a note asking Googlers to list their language abilities in hopes of tapping in-house translation skills.
The languages spoken by staff included Arabic, Chinese, Hindi, Indonesian, Japanese, Hebrew, Romanian, and Swedish, but that didn't help me. Engineers didn't have the time or inclination to sift through foreign-language spam all day looking for urgent messages. We needed better technology to sort the mail, store common responses, and send bulk replies, but choosing the right customer-relationship-management (CRM) software required engineering skill to evaluate the efficiency and security of the code we'd be installing. Engineering project manager Mieke Bloomfield agreed to help me separate the good bits from the bad.
Mieke and I quickly learned that Google's trivial needs didn't impress big CRM firms. They focused on companies managing extensive sales operations and providing product support for thousands of paying customers. We didn't need to identify potential big spenders, and we had no desire to create buyer profiles. We just wanted a tool that could track basic metrics around volume and response rates. And we didn't want to spend a ton of money. Unfortunately, it was a seller's market.
Kana, which Wall Street dubbed the leader in the CRM space, had just split its stock at an adjusted high of about fifteen hundred dollars a share. Wall Street believed CRM tools were as essential