7 ms·

Please email me (email in profile) and I will try to get you support internally.

folli 7y ago
As respectable as your involvement in the situation is, this is exactly how it's not supposed to work. It seems that the only way for a small business to get in contact with someone at Google is to raise hell on social media (or HN) and to wait for someone to take mercy on you.
- ijidak 7y ago
  I agree, I don't understand why such wildly profitable tech companies willfully ignore live support... I mean, even a paid option. As a business, I would gladly pay $99 for a phone call if I have a high-pri issue. I remember using that when Microsoft had something like that years ago. If they did that, high-priority support can be a profit center (or at least break even) if they're really that worried about costs.
  - zozbot234 7y ago
    To be fair, both GSuite (business oriented) and Google One (for end users) come with paid support. Not sure to what extent this includes recovering a locked-out account, but it's a thing.
    - user5994461 7y ago
      In a company using Google Apps for Business, administrators can reset any user account.
- thaumasiotes 7y ago
  > It seems that the only way for a small business to get in contact with someone at Google is to raise hell on social media (or HN) I'm intrigued by the implication that HN is not social media.
  - TimTheTinker 7y ago
    HN is the only very large, threaded comment forum I know of that is still (a) anonymous, and (b) actually has excellent content in the comments. In my own opinion, the signal/noise ratio is nearly 2 orders of magnitude greater than places like reddit (or perhaps the mathematically correct formulation is that the noise/signal ratio is nearly 2 orders of magnitude less at HN). I credit the excellent, thoughtful moderators at HN for that.
  - wolco 7y ago
    What part of hn remind you of social media?
    - thaumasiotes 7y ago
      Every part of it, with no exceptions. It's a website where you register an account and interact with the other accounts socially. Contrast Netflix, where you consume fixed content, or Amazon, where you buy things.
      - wolco 7y ago
        Social media also includes the social profile (with info about you)/friends (followers/watchers),sharing, personalized feeds. This is more like your local news site. Articles are presented with comments below. Comments can be from real people but anyone can use a fake name. And who gave the comment rarely matters.
- filmgirlcw 7y ago
  I’m not going to defend the lack of live customer support — especially in cases that are largely automated (like Google), but even when you do have live customer support — social media or other ways of escalating/raising a signal is often necessary. In a perfect world, it wouldn’t be — but if you are a very large company (or have millions or tens of millions of users), it’s often not possible to have live support staff who have the knowledge to handle every issue. It’s not just about paying for it either — if you have tens of millions of customers, support doesn’t scale that way, irrespective of cost (if you pay more you can generally get people more committed to gaining the knowledge to offer good support, but you still have a relative fixed number of “good enough” candidates). And that doesn’t even account for the fact that a vast majority of questions/calls are for issues that can either be automated or handled by less-skilled/lower-paid support. In the face of those realities, using external platforms to act as a signal boost/triage for the most critical issues isn’t necessarily the worst thing. Nine or ten years ago, I visited Delta’s headquarters to see how they were using Twitter to inform and re-define their customer service experiences. Airlines were some of the first industries to scour social media for issues to handle in real time and to go from being reactive (you have an issue and use Twitter to complain), to proactive (you’re invited to reach out over Twitter DMs or Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp) and I think they’ve actually done a good job. (I’d be curious to see what it has been like for airlines the last month as there have been unprecedented cancellations and support volumes are flooded across contact points). I have to give Delta immense credit, even a decade ago, they were doing phenomenal work in the space. I’m a Diamond Medallion, which means I theoretically get highest-priority phone support — and the agents on the phone are fantastic for helping me with complicated itineraries or rebookings), but for many things (like applying a regional upgrade certificate), I just DM the Twitter account because it is faster and it is a way the agent can work with multiple customers at once. It would be great if all small businesses had a direct line to their vendors, but in the absence of that (which isn’t realistic), at least there is a way to boost the signal and get attention.
- SkyBelow 7y ago
  Isn't that how our society works in general? Say you are the victim of a crime. You can't really do anything about it except appeal to the authorities. They will generally take pity on you and try to enforce the law, but often enough they don't and they have discretion not to. You have no other recourse for justice if they take the route of not enforcing the law other than appealing to the public or to a higher authority. Many victims of crimes have had the existing system fail them in this fashion.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
jtwaleson 7y ago
HN is the only place you can get Google support. Thanks for the effort, but you guys should seriously fix that, and not by shifting into your "let's automate this and do it smarter" mindset. It does not work.
- sct202 7y ago
  I don't know why they can't just hire a bunch of people to take care of stuff like this, like this is so ridiculous that I'm pretty sure someone could make a successful start-up to pay Googlers to enter internal tickets on behalf of people having issues with Google accounts/services.
  - glitchc 7y ago
    It’s obvious that Google doesn’t want to incur the cost of client support staff.
    - luckylion 7y ago
      I'm sure that lots of people would be happy to pay good money for plenty of support issues if that meant not having to use the terrible Google help pages and issue forms, and not having to wait a week or ten for a response.
      - glitchc 7y ago
        Agreed. It's the main reason why I've refrained from using Google for business activities, otherwise it would be a no-brainer. If something breaks, I need to be able to call or email someone and receive a response within 24 hours. Anything else is just not tenable from a reliability perspective.
        v7p1Qbt1im 7y ago
        If you use Google services for business activities you‘d presumably pay for a support tier. For the consumer side I suspect, with over 2 billion users, it‘s pretty much impossible to offer human support at scale. That‘s not even taking into account malicious actors that would use the support as an attack vector. I might be mistaken. Is there an example of a company with that big a user base which offers human support for everyone?
zerr 7y ago
Why you are not hiring proper support staff?
- amelius 7y ago
  Because they can get away with it.
  - speedgoose 7y ago
    Well, many people say Google will never catch back Amazon and Microsoft in the cloud market due to their terrible reputation.
  - TimTheTinker 7y ago
    Don't trust the machine if you don't trust the person who made it.
dang 7y ago
All: it's understandable that commenters react with generic indignation about how things shouldn't work that way, but please let's not pile on a user who's trying to help another user. It stacks up into the wrong incentive. After doing this once or twice and running into a buzzsaw of protest, who would want to it again? Also, these comments appear mechanically and interchangeably every time the topic comes up, which means they're not the greatest for intellectual curiosity (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).
marketgod 7y ago
You are an awesome person.

As respectable as your involvement in the situation is, this is exactly how it's not supposed to work. It seems that the only way for a small business to get in contact with someone at Google is to raise hell on social media (or HN) and to wait for someone to take mercy on you.

ijidak 7y ago
I agree, I don't understand why such wildly profitable tech companies willfully ignore live support... I mean, even a paid option. As a business, I would gladly pay $99 for a phone call if I have a high-pri issue. I remember using that when Microsoft had something like that years ago. If they did that, high-priority support can be a profit center (or at least break even) if they're really that worried about costs.
- zozbot234 7y ago
  To be fair, both GSuite (business oriented) and Google One (for end users) come with paid support. Not sure to what extent this includes recovering a locked-out account, but it's a thing.
  - user5994461 7y ago
    In a company using Google Apps for Business, administrators can reset any user account.
thaumasiotes 7y ago
> It seems that the only way for a small business to get in contact with someone at Google is to raise hell on social media (or HN) I'm intrigued by the implication that HN is not social media.
- TimTheTinker 7y ago
  HN is the only very large, threaded comment forum I know of that is still (a) anonymous, and (b) actually has excellent content in the comments. In my own opinion, the signal/noise ratio is nearly 2 orders of magnitude greater than places like reddit (or perhaps the mathematically correct formulation is that the noise/signal ratio is nearly 2 orders of magnitude less at HN). I credit the excellent, thoughtful moderators at HN for that.
- wolco 7y ago
  What part of hn remind you of social media?
  - thaumasiotes 7y ago
    Every part of it, with no exceptions. It's a website where you register an account and interact with the other accounts socially. Contrast Netflix, where you consume fixed content, or Amazon, where you buy things.
    - wolco 7y ago
      Social media also includes the social profile (with info about you)/friends (followers/watchers),sharing, personalized feeds. This is more like your local news site. Articles are presented with comments below. Comments can be from real people but anyone can use a fake name. And who gave the comment rarely matters.
filmgirlcw 7y ago
I’m not going to defend the lack of live customer support — especially in cases that are largely automated (like Google), but even when you do have live customer support — social media or other ways of escalating/raising a signal is often necessary. In a perfect world, it wouldn’t be — but if you are a very large company (or have millions or tens of millions of users), it’s often not possible to have live support staff who have the knowledge to handle every issue. It’s not just about paying for it either — if you have tens of millions of customers, support doesn’t scale that way, irrespective of cost (if you pay more you can generally get people more committed to gaining the knowledge to offer good support, but you still have a relative fixed number of “good enough” candidates). And that doesn’t even account for the fact that a vast majority of questions/calls are for issues that can either be automated or handled by less-skilled/lower-paid support. In the face of those realities, using external platforms to act as a signal boost/triage for the most critical issues isn’t necessarily the worst thing. Nine or ten years ago, I visited Delta’s headquarters to see how they were using Twitter to inform and re-define their customer service experiences. Airlines were some of the first industries to scour social media for issues to handle in real time and to go from being reactive (you have an issue and use Twitter to complain), to proactive (you’re invited to reach out over Twitter DMs or Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp) and I think they’ve actually done a good job. (I’d be curious to see what it has been like for airlines the last month as there have been unprecedented cancellations and support volumes are flooded across contact points). I have to give Delta immense credit, even a decade ago, they were doing phenomenal work in the space. I’m a Diamond Medallion, which means I theoretically get highest-priority phone support — and the agents on the phone are fantastic for helping me with complicated itineraries or rebookings), but for many things (like applying a regional upgrade certificate), I just DM the Twitter account because it is faster and it is a way the agent can work with multiple customers at once. It would be great if all small businesses had a direct line to their vendors, but in the absence of that (which isn’t realistic), at least there is a way to boost the signal and get attention.
SkyBelow 7y ago
Isn't that how our society works in general? Say you are the victim of a crime. You can't really do anything about it except appeal to the authorities. They will generally take pity on you and try to enforce the law, but often enough they don't and they have discretion not to. You have no other recourse for justice if they take the route of not enforcing the law other than appealing to the public or to a higher authority. Many victims of crimes have had the existing system fail them in this fashion.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

jtwaleson 7y ago

HN is the only place you can get Google support. Thanks for the effort, but you guys should seriously fix that, and not by shifting into your "let's automate this and do it smarter" mindset. It does not work.

sct202 7y ago
I don't know why they can't just hire a bunch of people to take care of stuff like this, like this is so ridiculous that I'm pretty sure someone could make a successful start-up to pay Googlers to enter internal tickets on behalf of people having issues with Google accounts/services.
- glitchc 7y ago
  It’s obvious that Google doesn’t want to incur the cost of client support staff.
  - luckylion 7y ago
    I'm sure that lots of people would be happy to pay good money for plenty of support issues if that meant not having to use the terrible Google help pages and issue forms, and not having to wait a week or ten for a response.
    - glitchc 7y ago
      Agreed. It's the main reason why I've refrained from using Google for business activities, otherwise it would be a no-brainer. If something breaks, I need to be able to call or email someone and receive a response within 24 hours. Anything else is just not tenable from a reliability perspective.
      - v7p1Qbt1im 7y ago
        If you use Google services for business activities you‘d presumably pay for a support tier. For the consumer side I suspect, with over 2 billion users, it‘s pretty much impossible to offer human support at scale. That‘s not even taking into account malicious actors that would use the support as an attack vector. I might be mistaken. Is there an example of a company with that big a user base which offers human support for everyone?

zerr 7y ago

Why you are not hiring proper support staff?

amelius 7y ago
Because they can get away with it.
- speedgoose 7y ago
  Well, many people say Google will never catch back Amazon and Microsoft in the cloud market due to their terrible reputation.
- TimTheTinker 7y ago
  Don't trust the machine if you don't trust the person who made it.

dang 7y ago

All: it's understandable that commenters react with generic indignation about how things shouldn't work that way, but please let's not pile on a user who's trying to help another user. It stacks up into the wrong incentive. After doing this once or twice and running into a buzzsaw of protest, who would want to it again? Also, these comments appear mechanically and interchangeably every time the topic comes up, which means they're not the greatest for intellectual curiosity (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).

marketgod 7y ago

You are an awesome person.