Posted by Jocelyn Ding, Vice President, Google Enterprise Operations

Since we launched Google Apps for Business in 2007, we’ve been working hard to build a global support offering that’s responsive to the needs of our business customers. In the early days, our customers reached us mainly through email, and our 24 x 7 phone support was limited to critical issues.

To improve the experience of our customers, we now provide 24 x 7 phone support to small, medium, and large Google Apps for Business customers for all issues affecting the core services. Our customers may also receive support through our web-based support portal, online help forms, and online help center. All support cases are handled directly by trained Google Apps experts.

A support metric that we’re especially passionate about is customer satisfaction. We measure customer satisfaction by asking for feedback on a seven point scale at the time we close a support case. As measured on this scale, 80% of our business customers and 90% of our large business customers indicate that they’re more than satisfied with their support experience. While we’re proud of these ratings, we want to do even better. Our goal is to achieve an overall satisfaction rating of 95%.

One of our core values is delivering products that just work for our customers, so in addition to serving customers directly, our support team provides our product and engineering teams with input regarding the usability and quality of our products. This effort has led to SLA and uptime improvements, as well as enhancements such as unthreaded email and read receipts in Gmail, and a scheduled release process.

Brad Feld, Managing Director of Foundry Group recently said, “My firm has gone Google, but I encountered a problem with the Contacts feature. I reached out to Google Enterprise support and am very impressed with how they responded. They explained to me that they were working to address the issue, and when they were getting ready to roll out the solution, they circled back to tell me about it. Are they perfect? No, but they’re very good, and I certainly got a positive impression when I interacted with the support team. I’m confident that they know what they’re doing and that they’ll keep getting better.”

To all our Google Apps for Business customers, thank you for your feedback. We take your input very seriously, so please continue to let us know how we’re doing. If you need help, please don’t hesitate to contact Google Apps for Business support.