That's comical. I feel like I have an understanding of what's going on because I've been in this scenario on a contract - not with Google. I was told - "there

That's comical. I feel like I have an understanding of what's going on because I've been in this scenario on a contract - not with Google. I was told - "there's a backlog of support requests. They are old requests that nobody has been working on and our offshore team can't handle. Being an expert in this particular product (and always in need of some extra cash), I said "OK, but let me be very clear that this is secondary to all other work that I'm doing." Then they proceeded to hand over tickets. I wasn't allowed to communicate directly to customers, and communicating with their offshore staff was a challenge. "I need a log to even begin to troubleshoot this." followed by a frustrated customer reporting "I don't know why you're asking for this log, it won't help." OK, I have to be more clear with support, who I assumed would know. "I need this log. You create it by taking these steps." Another follow up from the customer with the same log again, reporting more frustration. Repeat this process 5 or 6 times, on 20 different tickets. I finally follow up along a different path. "Well, you see they see a request for logs and they only have one template to ask for logs. I'll get it straightened out." A month goes by. I'm getting requests for updates. I follow up on every path I have available. One customer was smart enough to get me the right logs, but they did not forward that log on. After much back and forth I ended up getting that one log. It pointed to a source code problem that I had no access to view, let alone edit. And of course, I have no contact to send this to. What I ended up doing is submitting a bug report, the proper logs, and a summary of the logic problem in the source through one of my clients support account. Then I updated the tickets that looked to be related with "pending outcome of support ticket 1234. Months later, that particular problem was patched. Hopefully the customers with their tickets stuck in "level 3 support" were eventually notified. I backed out of that project at some point because it just wasn't a good use of my time. I understand the need to find a way to scale support. But if you are going to scale, monitor for effectiveness, plan for procedural changes, and do something to make sure the communications channels are working.