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Google support and customer relationship is horrible. One day I enabled Youtube partnership out of curiosity (it was enabled for my country so I enabled it than

• smcl 10y ago
  Thing is, google has enough customers and makes enough money they probably don't need to do something about it. It frustrates the hell out of me, but that's sadly how it is. Related: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2016-12-08/google-makes-so-much-money-it-never-had-to-worry-about-financial-discipline https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2016-12-08/google-ma...
• pwg 10y ago
  > Why would I continue to pay for their other services if I can expect that they can ban me from them for no reason and without explanation or support?! Exactly. Which should be a huge hint to get yourself off of google services and thereby stop paying them. Like all big corps. their feedback loop consists of: customer continues to pay -> everything must be ok
  • vinay427 10y ago
    Google certainly doesn't represent all big corporations. I've had excellent experiences contacting Amazon as a consumer, and have almost always had my issue resolved with clear answers, store credits if needed, etc.
    • tw04 10y ago
      As a customer. And good on them for taking care of their customers. But then again they're also selling something to their primary customers. Try being a seller on Amazon and see what you think of the customer service. There was a post here just the other day about someone losing all access to their seller account because they changed a name on their personal kindle... that's ridiculous. Google doesn't interact directly with their primary customers. They provide free services that draw eyeballs to serve up ads. That's it. If they were selling you access to google search (their primary means of income), I would imagine you'd find a much better experience.
      • trome 10y ago
        We aren't their primary customers, advertisers are. If its free (Google Search, Gmail, Youtube, etc) you are the product.
        • dangerlibrary 10y ago
          Parent comment is talking about being a paying customer of AdSense and still not getting support. The problem transcends the 'you are the product' and goes to "no, their support is terrible even for their paying customers."
          • trome 10y ago
            Look at it from Google's perspective, unless you are pushing volume and have a dedicated account manager, they will not help you, it'd cost too much for them to do so.
• cylinder 10y ago
  I've had excellent experiences with Google on the hardware warranty side (Nexus) FWIW.
  • aewnjfksd 10y ago
    Cannot confirm that. Google denied warranty for my Nexus 7 because I was in Germany and not in the UK until I got EU customer protection authorities involved. Note: I bought the Nexus 7 while in Germany through the Google Play Store website.
    • kuschku 10y ago
      For me, they required me to send it in (and pay for shipping), then refused to fix it, required me to pay for them to send it back, and when it came back, it was entirely broken (motherboard was snapped in half, before the screen had only a few stuck pixels). I still bought a few Google devices later on, but I won't let their customer support handle anything ever again. Fuck Google.
      • cylinder 10y ago
        They sent me a replacement phone next day air before I returned the defective one, so I would not have to be without a phone.
        • kuschku 10y ago
          This was an original Nexus 7, in 2012, a week after launch. It was the worst return policy I'd ever seen.
  • IanCal 10y ago
    Same, I got a full refund for two nexus 4s after over 3 years.
  • crisnoble 10y ago
    As a counter example, I had a terrible issue with my Nexus 5x, upgraded to 7.0, phone bricked itself while I was traveling. Got home, contacted customer support at 7 A.M., they informed me that my warranty had expired the day before, literally 7 hours ago. They refused to budge, left a very sour taste in my mouth.
• dawnerd 10y ago
  Google is by far one of the worst companies when it comes to support. They really don't care if you pay for their services. In fact, it seems they treat you better if you don't. The whole Gsuite integration they have going on is completely broken. You can't use google assistant or home (completely, some things work), can't use music with family sharing or YouTube red. My gsuite account also have problems connecting with my Android TV. I've tried to ask support but they just say "you're paying for those services"... If they want to seriously compete with Apple and even Microsoft then they really have to step up their game.
  • saurik 10y ago
    The goal of Google Apps is to allow an employer to own and manage accounts for employees. They are fundamentally limited accounts owned by someone else. Sure: you might be your own "employer" and allocate yourself an account, but that account is still subservient to the organization you set up. With this in mind, what does it mean if an employee of a company pays for a month of YouTube Red by themself and then their employer immediately fires them and deletes their account? What happens to the data stored in such an account that the user will expect to still have if they are working with a social service like Google+ and signed up "as them"? Will they get locked out of the Android TV they own when their employer deletes their accounts? Will all the IoT stuff in their home, from their lights to their thermostat, all stop working when they get fired from their job and their account revoked? The concept just doesn't make sense to use these kinds of accounts for arbitrary Google services; accounts under Google Apps should not be thought of as personal accounts to be used for personal purposes: if there is some business reason for employees of your company to need access to YouTube Red the correct way to support that in Google Apps would be some kind of organization-level per-seat license, not to allow accounts to buy YouTube Red ostensibly for themselves. You should use a personal account for personal things and use Google Apps accounts only for use cases that fit the model of "this is a work account owned by an organization that could lock me out of that account at any second and would not want me using the account to store personal data or for any personal reason", whether or not you happen to have for some reason decided to set up a one-person organization where you own the organization and have granted yourself an account.
• rebootthesystem 10y ago
  That, exactly that, is why I have made it a policy to not use any Google service beyond search and ads, no matter how enticing they might look. They can't kick you out of search and it's pretty hard to hit issues with ads. But the other stuff. Whew! You could end-up with your wonderful Google-powered world disconnected overnight and no recourse to deal with it sensibly. Read stories about people losing their email accounts and more due to issues with other Google services. One of our clients had an issue about five years ago and that was all I needed to understand that relying on Google can be deadly to a business. He had over 200 domains parked at GoDaddy. And GoDaddy would place a page with ads on every single domain. These ads were powered by Google (said so on the page). They'd give you some insignificant percentage of the virtually nonexistent revenue. Google launched a service called "Google for Domains". Park the domains with Google instead and get paid 100% of the virtually nonexistent revenue. So this guy decided "Why have a middleman?" and moved all of his domains to the "Google for Domains" service. This entailed listing them with Google and changing to the provided DNS. As you listed the domains Google went through some sort of a check and approved every single one of them. Presumably they didn't want obscene sounding domains or something like that (even though they -presumably- supported anything GoDaddy would thrown at them). Three days later all of his Google accounts are suspended. The claim was "unexpected click activity" on the ads they placed on these domains. In other words, click fraud. So, here's Google accusing a guy --who is doing 7 figures a year with his real business-- of clicking some ads to earn, what, twenty-three cents? The whole thing was surreal beyond all description. Why did he do this if he didn't need to? Because he wanted to get the hell out of GoDaddy and when this announcement for "Google for Domains" came across his email he told his web person to just move all the domains away from GoDaddy parking. It was that simple. There was no way to get through the Google customer-no-service wall. No way at all. The situation was final and without any sensible way to seek resolution. That one event, years ago, is what instantly made me decide reliance on Google was the worst business decision one could make. They would have to walk on water for me to recommend that anyone utilize their services outside of search and ads. What a horrible company. This behavior isn't unique to Google. All the large web companies have such contempt for their users that they behave in totalitarian fashion and offer no sensible mechanisms for customer service or conflict resolution. For example, if you advertise with Facebook, have no experience and run afoul of some of their nebulous rules your FB ads account could be permanently suspended or closed down. Again, just as the Google case, there is no real path to resolution. You can send in a form that probably ends-up in the hands of a petulant 24 year old child with no manners and devoid of the ability to deal with real human beings and get back a totalitarian "your account is permanently suspended" reply that helps nobody. Yeah, I've seen that one happen too. Once again, what a horrible company.
• govind201 10y ago
  Been here. I'm currently going on 2 months without a phone, since Google is still processing my warranty replacement (they promised 3-5 business days at the outset). As a friend of mine says "it's a monopoly issue. Usually if you're not well served you stop buying a service, not the case with Google." https://twitter.com/govind201/status/804559006551244800 https://twitter.com/govind201/status/804559006551244800
• SomeStupidPoint 10y ago
  Your experience is basically why I use both Azure and AWS, but have never even tried GCE despite their many promising features. I've had great support experience with both Azure and AWS, but simply don't want to risk needing support on a Google product. Not worth the headache.
  • devsquid 10y ago
    Huh strange, I've had excellent customer experience with GCE and Google in general. AWS also has excellent customer support.
    • ssijak 10y ago
      Problem is when they find out your in violation of something on some totally unrelated google service and ban you from using GCE also. Not saying that it happens often but it do. On some old unused google account when google music was just enabled for US (they checked credit card address, I am not from US) I payed for the service to try it with friends US credit card. Some months later they disabled google wallet entirely for that account permanently, thereby rendering all their paying services unusable for that account because you could pay for them just over google wallet not with paypal or something.
    • SomeStupidPoint 10y ago
      And they likely do have good support. I'll just never know, because it's not worth the time to find out (and potentially be wrong) when I can use services from providers with a reputation for good support (and who gave me good support for years prior on their other product lines -- something Google definitely hasnt done).
• pasbesoin 10y ago
  Aside from often uncommunicated and difficult or impossible to know implications, of enabling a Google service or feature. Aside from those, often in multiple dimensions (function, privacy, etc.), I am afraid to enable any new Google services or features, because doing so seems so often to be a one-way function with no means of reversal. Once you do -- even just to check something out -- you can never go back. And then, the whole account-disabling thing. Did they not learn their lesson in that respect with regard to the early Google Plus rollout and all the problems, not to mention bad press, then? Google doesn't just make mistakes, in such regards, they inhabit them, and they demonstrate a very persistent attitude that there is no problem in all this, in the first place. I have the Google features I use. As I've mentioned before, I draw the line basically at Google Docs (ok, "Drive", or whatever, now). I don't use much of anything of theirs that is newer. And, I tend to stick to functionality that they themselves are known for dogfooding and continuing to use, officially, internally. Hell, even my Nexus 5x was a hassle, with the in my opinion poorly conceived as well as communicated Google Fi "we will take over and eliminate your free-standing Google Voice account/number, with no choice about the matter" behavior. It's like they have no conception nor care that their users might actually come to rely upon their products and features. That's a great model for building trust and the value-added customer relationship that goes with it. /sarcasm