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Worked there.. I cared. I responded on forums, dealt with customers large and small, bot direct and as a point of engineering contact. Here is the problem with

Worked there.. I cared. I responded on forums, dealt with customers large and small, bot direct and as a point of engineering contact. Here is the problem with a company like Google: SPAM. Want to support the regular user? You are going to get people bitching that they can't find the "save" button and they are afraid of losing documents. You will get people asking you where their Nigerian prince went. You will have people who don't own a computer but need access to gmail. etc. Controlling the ways that support enters the system controls the amount of pure bullshit support requests you have to filter. My favorites from the people that made far enough to find a way to contact us directly: * A 30 minute long voicemail from a person talking about how he invented a system to produce energy from.. something.. we never did figure out what the model was. * A person asking YouTube to send over camera to record some event they were having. * A scammer who was annoyed that their scam emails were being filtered, who spent a lot of effort trying to convince US that they really were an estate lawyer in a country that didn't exist. * Somebody telling us that they lost access to an email that didn't exist (and had never existed) and kept slipping up what their name really was. * Piles, and piles of people trying to sell us stuff we didn't need or want.

lancewiggs 9y ago
Just make all calls to support paid per minute - it shortens the calls and removes the nutters. Adjust the price dynamically to meet demand.
- liquidgecka 9y ago
  Spammers would sign up for enterprise accounts, drop a couple hundred or more to get priority access, then spam the ever living hell out of the internet because they knew that we couldn't just disable the accounts outright. In the time it took to get the account shut down they more than made their money back. Eventually it would turn out that the card was stolen so the money would get reversed. Dealing with credit cards is a nightmare, especially in support situations. What happens if the problem is totally on the users end? (Hi, I can't log into my gmail account, its bob@yahoo.com) Do you refund them since you can't fix the issue? If not they are going to be pissed. What if the problem is quite a lot complicated and requires several hours to fix? In the enterprise space we _constantly_ had to explain to mail carriers that the Cisco PIX device was mangling their SMTP EHLO line in a way that would break the SMTP protocol which is why mail was not going through. If an end user calls it can take hours to debug something like that. Will the user demand a refund when $200 later its ruled to be their shitty ISP's fault?

lancewiggs 9y ago

Just make all calls to support paid per minute - it shortens the calls and removes the nutters. Adjust the price dynamically to meet demand.

liquidgecka 9y ago
Spammers would sign up for enterprise accounts, drop a couple hundred or more to get priority access, then spam the ever living hell out of the internet because they knew that we couldn't just disable the accounts outright. In the time it took to get the account shut down they more than made their money back. Eventually it would turn out that the card was stolen so the money would get reversed. Dealing with credit cards is a nightmare, especially in support situations. What happens if the problem is totally on the users end? (Hi, I can't log into my gmail account, its bob@yahoo.com) Do you refund them since you can't fix the issue? If not they are going to be pissed. What if the problem is quite a lot complicated and requires several hours to fix? In the enterprise space we _constantly_ had to explain to mail carriers that the Cisco PIX device was mangling their SMTP EHLO line in a way that would break the SMTP protocol which is why mail was not going through. If an end user calls it can take hours to debug something like that. Will the user demand a refund when $200 later its ruled to be their shitty ISP's fault?