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There a lot of cases where people would gladly pay for service to get an issue resolved. I'd use that as a hedge against the people who just want to complain fo

There a lot of cases where people would gladly pay for service to get an issue resolved. I'd use that as a hedge against the people who just want to complain for free. Allow people to purchase a "certificate of service" at a nominal cost when the account is set up, and then charge them a fee when they need service for the product, verifying the request against the original certificate. That should cover the tech support problem.

ant6n 10y ago
How about just a paid phone number. Charge 10c/min.
- londons_explore 10y ago
  The issue here is that even with a paid phone number, what could the support rep do? Sure, they could provide advice, but would you want some stranger who happens to work on Google Support India the ability to look into your account? To reset your password? It's best they provide buttons for you to fix your own problems than choose privileged people who can invade your privacy to fix problems for you.
ethbro 10y ago
Agreed. I'm sorry, but the "these are free services, you shouldn't have any expectation of support" excuse seems to be trotted out far too often by Google to whitewash the utter lack of a support org in critical parts of their empire. The issue, regardless of the financial model of the services, is that (a) these are now critical services for some people & (b) there is utterly no support path in the event something goes wrong. Charge $100 or $200 or $2500 per suppprt case, refunding part of the difference if it turns out to be a Google system problem, and people would still be much happier. The issue is that there's currently no amount of money you can throw at Google to fix things, and no one besides Google has access to implement a fix. And every system has glitches and corner cases when you're running at the scale Google is.
rdtsc 10y ago
Would paying for Google for Business account help: https://gsuite.google.com/pricing.html https://gsuite.google.com/pricing.html Lowest tier is $5/month. I know my old company used Google for email. Is there a guaranteed access to support. I saw access to "Forums". Anyone have experience with that. But then Fastmail is $3/month and you get personal support it seems.

ant6n 10y ago

How about just a paid phone number. Charge 10c/min.

londons_explore 10y ago
The issue here is that even with a paid phone number, what could the support rep do? Sure, they could provide advice, but would you want some stranger who happens to work on Google Support India the ability to look into your account? To reset your password? It's best they provide buttons for you to fix your own problems than choose privileged people who can invade your privacy to fix problems for you.

ethbro 10y ago

Agreed. I'm sorry, but the "these are free services, you shouldn't have any expectation of support" excuse seems to be trotted out far too often by Google to whitewash the utter lack of a support org in critical parts of their empire. The issue, regardless of the financial model of the services, is that (a) these are now critical services for some people & (b) there is utterly no support path in the event something goes wrong. Charge $100 or $200 or $2500 per suppprt case, refunding part of the difference if it turns out to be a Google system problem, and people would still be much happier. The issue is that there's currently no amount of money you can throw at Google to fix things, and no one besides Google has access to implement a fix. And every system has glitches and corner cases when you're running at the scale Google is.

rdtsc 10y ago

Would paying for Google for Business account help: https://gsuite.google.com/pricing.html https://gsuite.google.com/pricing.html Lowest tier is $5/month. I know my old company used Google for email. Is there a guaranteed access to support. I saw access to "Forums". Anyone have experience with that. But then Fastmail is $3/month and you get personal support it seems.