3 ms·

As I posted about recently - big organisations need to have an ombudsman - a way to resolve problems when the company's ordinary support mechanisms fail to reso

As I posted about recently - big organisations need to have an ombudsman - a way to resolve problems when the company's ordinary support mechanisms fail to resolve issues. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19092039 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19092039 It's silly that the only way to get big companies to resolve crazy failings in their normal processes is to take the problem public on social media. Instead they should have a built in process that operates outside their normal systems - an ombudsman who has the power and authority to instruct other areas of the organisation to make different decisions.

rhizome 8y ago
I'm not sure how you square that against the reality that many companies specifically and obviously do not have humans backing up these things. Do you think Google has never heard of human support? When you have hundreds of millions of people clamoring for your products, ignoring several million -- regardless of what the issues might be -- is easy. These things literally do not show up on their radar, which is why stupid shit like posting to HN about it is required to get a basic level of service and fairness out of the system. Their organization and priorities absolutely do not leave room for support for everyday people. There is zero evidence that they have any intentions of changing this, just like every other one of the past 20 years.
jakejarvis 8y ago
Wasn’t this, in theory, one of the selling points for upgrading to a paid Google One account? https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/02/google-finally-adds-consumer-customer-support-with-google-one/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/02/google-finally-adds-consum... I’d be interested to hear if anyone’s tried to take advantage of this, I’m upgraded to One for more storage but haven’t had a reason to test out their humanoids (yet). [edit: I’m definitely not suggesting Google One would have helped with this particular Play Store publishing predicament, for the record!]
kevingadd 8y ago
Having access to a Google employee won't change anything because even Google employees can't fight erroneous takedowns of their own content, or get abusive/inappropriate ToS-violating content taken down off of YouTube or Google News Source: me
jaabe 8y ago
Big companies simply shouldn’t use Google services until they resolve these issues with their awful support. I know this is about Apps and you can’t really avoid google if you make apps, but the story is the same throughout their services. I’d Azure breaks I have a direct hotline to Seattle. Granted we’re enterprise and spend a lot of money on Microsoft products, but I can still call Seattle and they’ll work on it and give me hourly status reports until my issue is resolved. If our google cloud breaks I can talk to a chatbot. Maybe having fewer support staff saves google money on the budgets, but I’m not convinced it’s a very good long term strategy if you want enterprise to take your services seriously.

rhizome 8y ago

I'm not sure how you square that against the reality that many companies specifically and obviously do not have humans backing up these things. Do you think Google has never heard of human support? When you have hundreds of millions of people clamoring for your products, ignoring several million -- regardless of what the issues might be -- is easy. These things literally do not show up on their radar, which is why stupid shit like posting to HN about it is required to get a basic level of service and fairness out of the system. Their organization and priorities absolutely do not leave room for support for everyday people. There is zero evidence that they have any intentions of changing this, just like every other one of the past 20 years.

jakejarvis 8y ago

Wasn’t this, in theory, one of the selling points for upgrading to a paid Google One account? https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/02/google-finally-adds-consumer-customer-support-with-google-one/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/02/google-finally-adds-consum... I’d be interested to hear if anyone’s tried to take advantage of this, I’m upgraded to One for more storage but haven’t had a reason to test out their humanoids (yet). [edit: I’m definitely not suggesting Google One would have helped with this particular Play Store publishing predicament, for the record!]

kevingadd 8y ago

Having access to a Google employee won't change anything because even Google employees can't fight erroneous takedowns of their own content, or get abusive/inappropriate ToS-violating content taken down off of YouTube or Google News Source: me

jaabe 8y ago

Big companies simply shouldn’t use Google services until they resolve these issues with their awful support. I know this is about Apps and you can’t really avoid google if you make apps, but the story is the same throughout their services. I’d Azure breaks I have a direct hotline to Seattle. Granted we’re enterprise and spend a lot of money on Microsoft products, but I can still call Seattle and they’ll work on it and give me hourly status reports until my issue is resolved. If our google cloud breaks I can talk to a chatbot. Maybe having fewer support staff saves google money on the budgets, but I’m not convinced it’s a very good long term strategy if you want enterprise to take your services seriously.