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The lesson I learned a long time ago is Google products are great until you need to contact someone. I'm sure a few people have some ability to directly contact

The lesson I learned a long time ago is Google products are great until you need to contact someone. I'm sure a few people have some ability to directly contact a real person at the company, but 99% of us are stuck with their product support forums that OP linked to, which frankly are terrible and rarely solve any real problems - I would highly doubt if any of their "representatives" can actually do anything but show you existing help documents.

e40 8y ago
Calling the product support forums terrible is being way too kind. They are worse than terrible because they give you hope. I've used them dozens of times over the years, and never once has a solution come from them.
- stoolpigeon 8y ago
  Yes. When they turn up in my search results for an issue it always makes me sad because the threads never have useful resolution.
  - ddtaylor 8y ago
    It's like a graveyard of problems.
- ValentineC 8y ago
  Sadly, Google seems to like it a lot as a substitute for hiring their own in-house support team. They even reward their "top contributors": https://topcontributor.withgoogle.com/ https://topcontributor.withgoogle.com/
whitepoplar 8y ago
Idea for startup: use data to make a better routing layer for customer service. Right now, everyone hits the same (more or less) frontline people. But some customers respond better to one or more of: empathy, hand-holding, highly technical, no-nonsense, etc. Based on feedback from customer surveys that currently go into a black hole, you can route to a better person next time. And once a profile is built of a customer, corporations could subscribe to this data in order to make customer service better for everyone, and reduce costs for them. Many companies care a lot about something like net promoter score, but can't seem to improve it. Wouldn't it be cool for them to have Heroku-like knobs? "Given budget X, route for best customer experience."

e40 8y ago

Calling the product support forums terrible is being way too kind. They are worse than terrible because they give you hope. I've used them dozens of times over the years, and never once has a solution come from them.

stoolpigeon 8y ago
Yes. When they turn up in my search results for an issue it always makes me sad because the threads never have useful resolution.
- ddtaylor 8y ago
  It's like a graveyard of problems.
ValentineC 8y ago
Sadly, Google seems to like it a lot as a substitute for hiring their own in-house support team. They even reward their "top contributors": https://topcontributor.withgoogle.com/ https://topcontributor.withgoogle.com/

whitepoplar 8y ago

Idea for startup: use data to make a better routing layer for customer service. Right now, everyone hits the same (more or less) frontline people. But some customers respond better to one or more of: empathy, hand-holding, highly technical, no-nonsense, etc. Based on feedback from customer surveys that currently go into a black hole, you can route to a better person next time. And once a profile is built of a customer, corporations could subscribe to this data in order to make customer service better for everyone, and reduce costs for them. Many companies care a lot about something like net promoter score, but can't seem to improve it. Wouldn't it be cool for them to have Heroku-like knobs? "Given budget X, route for best customer experience."