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> Instead of actually trying to create the best customer service I've worked in high volume customer services. It's not easy for the agents doing the work or t

by movedx 6y ago

> Instead of actually trying to create the best customer service I've worked in high volume customer services. It's not easy for the agents doing the work or the companies operating them. I've worked in multiple call centers dealing with calls and tickets. I've worked in companies in which I dealt with mobile phone bill queries and hardware issues right up to Cisco networking problems and then eventually enterprise grade Linux clusters at Rackspace (UK). I've spanned a pretty large spectrum of industries from a customer services perspective. I've even done customer services in the food industry. It's HARD. Not just for you as an operator, but as a company trying to offer the service to begin with. of all of the companies I worked for, O2 (a mobile phone provider and network operator) had tens of millions of customers. We had several call centers that spanned close to ten thousand agents doing everything from calls to tickets, emails to Tweets. The call queue for that company never dropped below a constant 200-300 on hold and emails took days to even get to. Google has approx' one BILLION customers. What is your suggestion here? > they are mostly trying to automate the whole process as much as possible which then causes errors like this Damn straight automation, to a larger degree, is the answer. People don't scale at all. They can do one job at a time, for a limited amount of time, and are subject to all kinds of problems. > Yeah I know it's terribly expensive to keep a horde of content reviewers It cost O2 about $5/6 to answer a single call. That's the cost of the agent's time and JUST answering the call, not the cost of listening, understanding, resolving and ending the call. Humans are expensive. I'm not saying don't use people. I'm saying automation at Google's scale is one of the few solutions available to them when it comes to dealing with the simply insane amounts of complaints they'll receive just via their YouTube platform alone. EDIT: Apologies for being so crude in my original wording. I'm updating the comment to reflect a more professional, civil tone.

deleted 6y ago
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dagnabbit 6y ago
I can say with absolute certainty that you've never given a shit about a customer. Ever. I have. I've worked with many customers, and I've helped them solve problems. I've cared about them. I've worried about if I was doing harm to them. I've let them be more than just a KPI on my dashboard. It's HARD. There is a lot of pressure from sociopathic, no talent, MBA-holding sociopaths who will argue that the best thing to do is to fuck the customer. These people think they're smart, but they're dumb af. They view the world as zero sum. IN order for us to win, the customer must lose. To win over the long term, we must ignore all of these dumb, lazy, zero-sum thinking mouth-breathers, and embrace the customer, care about their problems, and solve them. Google had thirty billion of _profit_ last year. They can pick up the phone even if it costs $5 a call. They need to ignore the people like you, the cowards who have never had the courage to care about a customer more than the immediate bottom line. They need to borrow some fucking balls and grow some fucking leadership. I'm not saying don't use ML. I'm saying that ML at Google's scale is not a full and complete solution, and it's simply insane to argue otherwise. They need to deal with the exceptions and make their ML better. To do otherwise is to embrace permanent failure and eventual irrelevance.
droopyEyelids 6y ago
I don't think your point passes a back of the envelope math test. Right now Google makes the second most profit per employee of any large enterprise on earth: $269,000 in profit, annually, per employee. I know of other- successful!- companies that make less money per employee, because they hire people to do customer support. To start your argument, I think you have to explain why Google can not hire more CSRs, even though they are the #2 most profitable enterprise on Earth.
- stopping 6y ago
  IMO, Google's profit per employee isn't an indicator of Google's obligation to increase its customer service headcount. Taken to it's logical conclusion, we should let poorly-performing companies off the hook for having awful customer service. The rest of this comment is going to be somewhat critical of Google criticism and seemingly apologistic. Please assume positive intent. I agree that Google certainly could do more to help people on its platform. But this will always be the case until every single customer service issue is solved to the user's satisfaction. The important question that I never see anybody asking or answering is "How much is reasonably enough, and how do we know (subject X) has done enough?" It all boils down to what we believe the moral obligation of people (and companies, by extension) ought to be. Any extra service that Google provides beyond those required for profit maximization (e.g. customer retention, maintaining reputation, being only slightly better than the second-best option) is purely charity. Then, how do we evaluate when a certain amount of charity is sufficient, let alone necessary? Public sentiment is fickle, and therefore not a great measure. I bet even if Google increased its CSR by 10x, we'd still see communities eagerly latch onto any criticism of the tech giant and shout "you have to do more!" without quantifying what the final demand actually is! I take the moral position that we as a society certainly can and should do much more to take care of each other. Telling each other to be better is absolutely valuable and I will never argue against that. But I believe we ought to do a much better job of suggesting desirable and realistic end states, instead of perpetuating insubstantial discourse amounting to one of either "They need to do better!" or "Come on, they're doing the best they can." Admittedly this places me in a non-committal position. I don't have any great suggestions for what the end states of YouTube, Twitter, et al should look like from a content moderation perspective. But I would love to hear input from actual experts in who can offer some reasonable ideas about the most cost-beneficial solutions for society as a whole.
donmcronald 6y ago
There has to be something between the best customer service and things like letting shitty "AI" ban accounts without any human intervention. How hard can it be to augment crowd sourcing and "AI" with some actual humans? If the "AI" is so crappy that it can't figure out an established, popular account is worthy of human support, what problems can it actually solve? I also wonder why we can't just pay $X to get a human, but I know the answer. Tech companies would just take the money as extra profit and still provide the shittiest quality support possible.
- NoPicklez 6y ago
  It's easy to say "there has to be something between the best customer service and things like letting shitting "AI" ban accounts" as an armchair hackernews user. But maybe, there isn't, currently. Maybe there simply isn't a solution at the scale of companies like Google.
  - Dylan16807 6y ago
    'scale' is often used as a cop-out. If you double your customer count, and double your revenue, then you can double your customer support resources. O(n) does not become impractical just because the number gets really big. If they can't deal with something, the fundamental design is wrong, and would fail even if they downsized a thousandfold.
    - yuliyp 6y ago
      These things are not linear. As your scale grows, the amount of attention from bad actors you receive goes up (from what could basically be 0 for something small). Coordination also becomes more difficult, as does managing the fleet of customer services resources. If you have 1 person doing support, they can deal with the weird cases themselves. If you have 2 people, they need to share information between themselves. If you have 10 people, they might need to set up some sort of escalation system. If you have 100 people, you'll probably set up some sort of routing system (multiple languages/specialization). If you have 500 people, you probably need some sort of internal abuse / anti-bribery effort to catch bad apples. If you have 1000 people you've now got a separate team working on setting up policies. If you have 5000 people you've got a training and evaluation system set up for your customer service staff. If you have 10000, you've got customer support staff in multiple countries around the globe and need to deal with conflicting and ever-changing laws in the countries you do business in. All of this while marginal revenue per customer declines as your scale goes up. So yes, in addition to it being costlier per customer to provide the same level of support as your customer base grows, you have a smaller budget per customer to do it in.
majormajor 6y ago
We should question the assumption that we need services to be at Google's scale. Especially when it comes to pushing user-generated content to all those costumers.
- bryan_w 6y ago
  I like having services that Google provides so the answer is yes. That was easy, thanks for asking the question so that I can answer it. Any more questions you think "we" should answer? I'll be glad to resolve them since you only seem to ask them.
novok 6y ago
They might have 1 billion free users, but they definitely don't have 1 billion partners or 1 billion paying customers. Google's customer service is horrible even for organizations that pay them +$10k/month or make them +$10k/month for ad sales, and that is a far smaller number. You would think they could at least scale customer support properly for that much smaller number, but they don't because culturally they do not want to. Even people who have used google cloud services say the support is bad compared to AWS. Google stands out as a corp that is really bad at customer service. While apple, amazon, AWS & many other companies provide customer support that mostly works for customers who provide maybe $40/month max in revenue. They don't even let you self pay for your own support at google in most cases. I bet youtubers who live on their work on youtube would gladly pay $100 to deal with one off incidents like these that might happen once a year if it meant they had proper thought applied to their issues for example.
- rezonant 6y ago
  Yes, Google has never been good at customer service. They believe that providing feedback tooling is the better approach. I think Google has succeeded _despite_ this not because of it
  - SXX 6y ago
    Google was always great at _customer_ service, but their only customers are in advertisement, paid subscription SaaS and cloud departments. When you use any other services you are not customer, but a product and no one owe you anything.
- greggman3 6y ago
  > Google's customer service is horrible even for organizations that pay them +$10k/month or make them +$10k/month for ad sales, and that is a far smaller number. Is this true? As a paying customer for gsuite, the 4 times I've contacted customer service I got someone immediately and they solved my problem immediately. I'm not a big customer either I have one account. I pay them $72 a year.
  - 6y ago
RHSeeger 6y ago
> The call queue for that company never dropped below a constant 200-300 on hold and emails took days to even get to. If those are the stats and you're still not actually solving many customers' problems; if tons of people are being hung out to dry with no recourse, then you're doing a bad job. If you don't have enough people to do the job, then hire more people. If you can't afford to hire more people, then don't do the job, or limit the number of customers you deal with.
- NoPicklez 6y ago
  The problem with customer service is that quite often the problem is larger than a single person can fix. It requires other people both within the company and outside of the company to fix an issue. There is also the scenario in which there is no solution and you need to balance the cost of investigating to the point where you're 100% certain there isn't a solution and efficiently deciding there isn't one. One thing I have learnt working at these companies is that some customers think the world revolves around then and that technology should work flawlessly all the time, when it doesn't.
  - lowdose 6y ago
    A bad company devides available work in so many different departments and job titles the actually people with authority that is able to execute is by design very thin spread. This company could also pay higher salaries, give better training and enable more call agent autonomy because that is what is takes to deliver a frictionless delightful customer service. That's why every mom and pop store outranks every Fortune 500 on customer service expect Amazon. Most still haven't learned to put customers central to their business but treat it as an after thought.
    - NoPicklez 6y ago
      Putting the customer at the center of their business is a very flamboyant term that many companies say they do but appear to perhaps not do. I like to use Telecommunication companies as an example because I worked in one heavily and dealt with these exact scenarios. If a customer calls the service desk because their internet is broken due to vandalism at their exchange. I as a customer service agent cannot drive to the exchange and simply fix the problem myself. It requires appropriate prioritisation of all of the other problems within the network that need fixing that may also be affecting other customers, as well as requiring outside resources to rebuild that location. To add that the customer might also have a mobile SIM as a backup within the modem but is not able to achieve the speeds nor latency needs commensurate with their fixed service. And that's if you're lucky to be the wholesaler if you aren't, then your organisation literally cannot fix the problem legally because you don't have the authority to repair infrastructure that you don't own outright. I appreciate that this a specific example, but one I have dealt with mutltiple times. Once a business grows to a greater size, it is inherently more difficult to fix problems like a mom and pop store whether or not you care the same about your customers or not. It may appear as though they don't care, but there are simply different realities at different scales. My point being that if you assume as the beginning that they purposely distribute available work and responsibilities in such a way that to execute is difficult by design then that's not what we're talking about here. What we're talking about is where you are operating at such a scale that it is very difficult to provide great customer service even if you do care.
underwater 6y ago
> People don't scale at all. Which is fine, because Google's customer base is made up of people, so Google should be able to scale their support in a linear way.
- bryanrasmussen 6y ago
  but we are all in agreement for years now that Google's customer base is advertisers, they can scale their support for their user base but it is unlikely to have any relation to their revenue. on edit: I don't mean that not supporting their user base is the right thing to do, although an MBA might say it were.
int_19h 6y ago
My suggestion would be to avoid growing to 1 billion customers, until you have support that is capable of handling that many.
- varjag 6y ago
  So I guess YouTube should just shut down?
  - chongli 6y ago
    They should. Their existence sucks all the oxygen out of the room, preventing lots of smaller competitors from gaining traction.
    - movedx 6y ago
      > They should. That's an insane statement. YouTube should shutdown because they're successful? What, do you think a monopoly is a bad thing? The market place decided YouTube was the better platform and continued to pile on (sure, they had market timing too.) If you can suggest something better than YouTube do let me know.
      - int_19h 6y ago
        The market could suggest something better than YouTube, if it were actually competitive. Monopolies may briefly be efficient, but they're always evolutionary dead ends, and getting out of one is more costly than any short-term benefits.
ta17711771 6y ago
If you can't figure out how to scale proper customer service, there's a simple solution: don't grow too large too fast. I know, blasphemy to the VC crowd.
- crazygringo 6y ago
  It's not blasphemy, just elementary economics. Customer service at scale, for many products, turns the product from profitable into a severe loss. It will go out of business no ifs ands or buts. YouTube clearly cannot survive if its customer service costs exceed its advertising revenue. It has absolutely nothing to do with speed of growth, and I don't know why you think it does. Are you saying free user-generated video hosting sites shouldn't exist period? That YouTube simply shouldn't exist? Because that seems to be what you're saying.
  - chongli 6y ago
    Customer service at scale, for many products, turns the product from profitable into a severe loss. If that is the case then Google is helpless to stop these attacks from growing out of control. How long before the long tail of YouTube is clipped off?
    - crazygringo 6y ago
      Well that's another false extreme. That's what algorithmic detection (together with user flagging) and removal at scale is for. That prevents them from growing out of control. The combo of algorithmic detection at scale, combined with small amounts of manual intervention and customer service where most needed, is how YouTube is able to operate.
      - chongli 6y ago
        The combo of algorithmic detection at scale, combined with small amounts of manual intervention and customer service where most needed, is how YouTube is able to operate. This article is evidence that the process is breaking down. It's an old maxim in computer security that attacks become more sophisticated over time as knowledge of the system grows and spreads among attackers. That is what we are seeing here. YouTube has built a system which is ultimately unsustainable at this scale. Over time these attacks will continue to escalate until only the very large channels (those they have the resources to support in person) and the very small channels (those beneath the notice of attackers) are left.
LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
Well. I have some experience with O2 too, from a customers point of view. Let me tell you a story: Once upon a time i've been a happy customer of a regional ISP called Hansenet, started by the local public electric utility. It was (at least for me) lightyears ahead of the crappy experience (speed/latency/price/(competence of)service(if needed)) the former state monopolist had. Everything was golden, also excellent peering. They grew slowly, cooperated with some other regional upstarts, stayed golden, speed even got faster without raising of monthly fees, furthermore no long contracts necessary, could be canceled within a month. Then Telecom Italia came and bought them, now it was Alice, as advertised by some mouthbreathing twen all over the public space, larger than life. Quality of service went down, very unsexy of you, Alice! But still was better than the former state monopolist, and still got faster without raising prices or contract conditions. They even retained a local service center where you could walk into and talk to people who knew their stuff and could change settings in realtime! Imagine that! Not some outsourced call-center agent mouthpiecing some useless uml-diagram. Anyways, too good to be true? Right! Telefonica came to rescue (of BlackRock), to milk the cash cow as long as possible, and it was noticable. Fortunately another neighboring public utility, pioniering fiber roll out since the nineties expanded and became a choice for me then. All is golden again! Yay! Why am i ranting? Because everybody i know is mostly unhappy with O2 in any form, except for the price. O2 can't do! I wish i could add some internal, even worse insights from another ISP growing larger at the time, but am not allowed to. Also they managed, got better, and meanwhile can do again. Lesson? There is no lesson here, with the exception of economies of scale are bad for humans above certain amounts of 'scale'.
- allendoerfer 6y ago
  Also had a very bad experience with O2. I switched back to T-Mobile it's expensive but at least someone will answer the phone.
raducu 6y ago
Oh please, I've worked on the anti-fraud/abuse system of a large hosting/internet provider in Europe. It was a flexible "if then scoring escalation/ticketing rules". I'm not saying my knowledge applies to all customer support cases, but what happened here would never have happened with our system. Just very simple tricks go a loooong way dealing with malicious people: how old is the account of the "reporter" ? is the "reporters" id verified? how long has the account we're taking action against been our customer? whitelists/blacklists -- temporary or permanent are all complaints against a customer of the same type grouped to the same ticket type/ticket? Just based on those simple facts, we would mmediately lock functionality/content for unverified, new customers we received complaints about, while delaying, notifying and giving verified, aged customers the chance to respond/fix issues. I'm not saying this is easy, for the system I worked, our agents designing the rules had about 80 individual ticket types(in a hierarchy, with rule re-use for ticket category), but they used their brains and did not take any "lock X functionality of the customer" lightly.
- o-__-o 6y ago
  I too use osTicket for my support escalation needs...
  - raducu 6y ago
    I'm not familiar with osTicket, is your point that osTicket could have been used instead of custom-made software in 2006 or that I'm overglorifying the system I worked on?
- movedx 6y ago
  I doubt you came close to 10% of the complaints YouTube gets via its reporting systems. It's the largest video hosting platform in the world.
  - raducu 6y ago
    You could be right, in 2008 we handled about 10^5 complaints per day, and the volume seemed to double every year(most of those were automated complaints from external systems complaining about our customers spamming/phishing/etc), I don't know what the figures are now. My point was we had automated rules in place that worked really well and there was nothing really clever about those rules. It was a game of cat and mouse between our rule designers and adversaries who always tried to probe our thresholds and evade us while we tried to find new useful facts about customers, new probes, new actions, react proactively, but not screwing our legitimate customers was always our number 1 concern.
virvar 6y ago
I work in the public sector of Europe. One of the primary reasons that we prefer Azure and AWS to google cloud is support. When things go really wrong on our office365 platform or any part of Azure, Seattle will call us on the the hour with updates until it’s fixed. We have programs within Microsoft support where our developers and sysops can suggest changes, and if the suggestions gather enough popularity and fit within whatever criteria Microsoft have internally they’ll happen. AWS didn’t always have the great support they do now, but as far as cloud operations (the nerdy bits) go, I think they’re actually better at it than even Microsoft. It build up gradually along with GDPR, but they were the first of the major three to offer things like support for AWS services that’s actually located within the European Union. I’m not updated on Microsoft, but AWS may still be the only company to do that. Compare that to Google, where we get to talk with an automated system, the same as though we weren’t a 3,3 billion a year budget organisation. I’ve had better personal support for my free google account than I have for our company google cloud account. Don’t get me wrong, we would probably have a lot of GDPR related reasons to prefer Azure or AWS even if google had better support, but the lack of support means we’ve never gotten beyond that step in our risk assessments.
- movedx 6y ago
  I've had the same experience with GCP too. I work pretty exclusively with AWS these days as a CloudOp. I remember building an environment in GCP and getting answers from support was terrible. I eventually left that job after 11 months. The next job was pure AWS and sweet Jesus was the contrast strong. AWS not only had people who would phone you within 10-15 minutes, more often quicker than that, but they had a frickin' account manager who visited us every month and we only spent a thousands per month with them. Absolutely worlds apart.
allendoerfer 6y ago
So just give me priority support when I need it. Let me choose to use the free robot support or pay for a human to answer my call. Be upfront, that the human might not resolve the issue, but at least look at it and give me a non-automated answer to my problem.
- movedx 6y ago
  That's not a bad idea: premium YouTube creators. If you pay a premium then you can get issues resolved more directly.
slightwinder 6y ago
> Google has approx' one BILLION customers. > What is your suggestion here? Which means they also have one billion potential workers. They could tap into the power of crowd-intelligence. It's probably somewhat easy to forge some processes to oursource certain support-problems which need low human interaction. Something they do with Recaptcha already and IIRC at Google Maps. They could sell Youtube Premium to some thoudsand people and let them instead check a handful videos per day for some cases of copyright infringment and such. Just let them be the final fonrtier of sanity in cases where the machine is weak.
- bemmu 6y ago
  Would be amusing if they integrated it into Recaptcha. "To proceed logging in, please select all the inappropriate images"
- movedx 6y ago
  > ... let them instead check a handful videos per day for some cases of copyright infringment and such. They'd all have to be copyright lawyers, then?
z3t4 6y ago
You can use the community for support. Then make people pay a premium for paid human support.

by movedx 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

dagnabbit 6y ago

I can say with absolute certainty that you've never given a shit about a customer. Ever. I have. I've worked with many customers, and I've helped them solve problems. I've cared about them. I've worried about if I was doing harm to them. I've let them be more than just a KPI on my dashboard. It's HARD. There is a lot of pressure from sociopathic, no talent, MBA-holding sociopaths who will argue that the best thing to do is to fuck the customer. These people think they're smart, but they're dumb af. They view the world as zero sum. IN order for us to win, the customer must lose. To win over the long term, we must ignore all of these dumb, lazy, zero-sum thinking mouth-breathers, and embrace the customer, care about their problems, and solve them. Google had thirty billion of _profit_ last year. They can pick up the phone even if it costs $5 a call. They need to ignore the people like you, the cowards who have never had the courage to care about a customer more than the immediate bottom line. They need to borrow some fucking balls and grow some fucking leadership. I'm not saying don't use ML. I'm saying that ML at Google's scale is not a full and complete solution, and it's simply insane to argue otherwise. They need to deal with the exceptions and make their ML better. To do otherwise is to embrace permanent failure and eventual irrelevance.

droopyEyelids 6y ago

I don't think your point passes a back of the envelope math test. Right now Google makes the second most profit per employee of any large enterprise on earth: $269,000 in profit, annually, per employee. I know of other- successful!- companies that make less money per employee, because they hire people to do customer support. To start your argument, I think you have to explain why Google can not hire more CSRs, even though they are the #2 most profitable enterprise on Earth.

stopping 6y ago
IMO, Google's profit per employee isn't an indicator of Google's obligation to increase its customer service headcount. Taken to it's logical conclusion, we should let poorly-performing companies off the hook for having awful customer service. The rest of this comment is going to be somewhat critical of Google criticism and seemingly apologistic. Please assume positive intent. I agree that Google certainly could do more to help people on its platform. But this will always be the case until every single customer service issue is solved to the user's satisfaction. The important question that I never see anybody asking or answering is "How much is reasonably enough, and how do we know (subject X) has done enough?" It all boils down to what we believe the moral obligation of people (and companies, by extension) ought to be. Any extra service that Google provides beyond those required for profit maximization (e.g. customer retention, maintaining reputation, being only slightly better than the second-best option) is purely charity. Then, how do we evaluate when a certain amount of charity is sufficient, let alone necessary? Public sentiment is fickle, and therefore not a great measure. I bet even if Google increased its CSR by 10x, we'd still see communities eagerly latch onto any criticism of the tech giant and shout "you have to do more!" without quantifying what the final demand actually is! I take the moral position that we as a society certainly can and should do much more to take care of each other. Telling each other to be better is absolutely valuable and I will never argue against that. But I believe we ought to do a much better job of suggesting desirable and realistic end states, instead of perpetuating insubstantial discourse amounting to one of either "They need to do better!" or "Come on, they're doing the best they can." Admittedly this places me in a non-committal position. I don't have any great suggestions for what the end states of YouTube, Twitter, et al should look like from a content moderation perspective. But I would love to hear input from actual experts in who can offer some reasonable ideas about the most cost-beneficial solutions for society as a whole.

donmcronald 6y ago

There has to be something between the best customer service and things like letting shitty "AI" ban accounts without any human intervention. How hard can it be to augment crowd sourcing and "AI" with some actual humans? If the "AI" is so crappy that it can't figure out an established, popular account is worthy of human support, what problems can it actually solve? I also wonder why we can't just pay $X to get a human, but I know the answer. Tech companies would just take the money as extra profit and still provide the shittiest quality support possible.

NoPicklez 6y ago
It's easy to say "there has to be something between the best customer service and things like letting shitting "AI" ban accounts" as an armchair hackernews user. But maybe, there isn't, currently. Maybe there simply isn't a solution at the scale of companies like Google.
- Dylan16807 6y ago
  'scale' is often used as a cop-out. If you double your customer count, and double your revenue, then you can double your customer support resources. O(n) does not become impractical just because the number gets really big. If they can't deal with something, the fundamental design is wrong, and would fail even if they downsized a thousandfold.
  - yuliyp 6y ago
    These things are not linear. As your scale grows, the amount of attention from bad actors you receive goes up (from what could basically be 0 for something small). Coordination also becomes more difficult, as does managing the fleet of customer services resources. If you have 1 person doing support, they can deal with the weird cases themselves. If you have 2 people, they need to share information between themselves. If you have 10 people, they might need to set up some sort of escalation system. If you have 100 people, you'll probably set up some sort of routing system (multiple languages/specialization). If you have 500 people, you probably need some sort of internal abuse / anti-bribery effort to catch bad apples. If you have 1000 people you've now got a separate team working on setting up policies. If you have 5000 people you've got a training and evaluation system set up for your customer service staff. If you have 10000, you've got customer support staff in multiple countries around the globe and need to deal with conflicting and ever-changing laws in the countries you do business in. All of this while marginal revenue per customer declines as your scale goes up. So yes, in addition to it being costlier per customer to provide the same level of support as your customer base grows, you have a smaller budget per customer to do it in.

majormajor 6y ago

We should question the assumption that we need services to be at Google's scale. Especially when it comes to pushing user-generated content to all those costumers.

bryan_w 6y ago
I like having services that Google provides so the answer is yes. That was easy, thanks for asking the question so that I can answer it. Any more questions you think "we" should answer? I'll be glad to resolve them since you only seem to ask them.

novok 6y ago

They might have 1 billion free users, but they definitely don't have 1 billion partners or 1 billion paying customers. Google's customer service is horrible even for organizations that pay them +$10k/month or make them +$10k/month for ad sales, and that is a far smaller number. You would think they could at least scale customer support properly for that much smaller number, but they don't because culturally they do not want to. Even people who have used google cloud services say the support is bad compared to AWS. Google stands out as a corp that is really bad at customer service. While apple, amazon, AWS & many other companies provide customer support that mostly works for customers who provide maybe $40/month max in revenue. They don't even let you self pay for your own support at google in most cases. I bet youtubers who live on their work on youtube would gladly pay $100 to deal with one off incidents like these that might happen once a year if it meant they had proper thought applied to their issues for example.

rezonant 6y ago
Yes, Google has never been good at customer service. They believe that providing feedback tooling is the better approach. I think Google has succeeded _despite_ this not because of it
- SXX 6y ago
  Google was always great at _customer_ service, but their only customers are in advertisement, paid subscription SaaS and cloud departments. When you use any other services you are not customer, but a product and no one owe you anything.
greggman3 6y ago
> Google's customer service is horrible even for organizations that pay them +$10k/month or make them +$10k/month for ad sales, and that is a far smaller number. Is this true? As a paying customer for gsuite, the 4 times I've contacted customer service I got someone immediately and they solved my problem immediately. I'm not a big customer either I have one account. I pay them $72 a year.
- 6y ago

RHSeeger 6y ago

> The call queue for that company never dropped below a constant 200-300 on hold and emails took days to even get to. If those are the stats and you're still not actually solving many customers' problems; if tons of people are being hung out to dry with no recourse, then you're doing a bad job. If you don't have enough people to do the job, then hire more people. If you can't afford to hire more people, then don't do the job, or limit the number of customers you deal with.

NoPicklez 6y ago
The problem with customer service is that quite often the problem is larger than a single person can fix. It requires other people both within the company and outside of the company to fix an issue. There is also the scenario in which there is no solution and you need to balance the cost of investigating to the point where you're 100% certain there isn't a solution and efficiently deciding there isn't one. One thing I have learnt working at these companies is that some customers think the world revolves around then and that technology should work flawlessly all the time, when it doesn't.
- lowdose 6y ago
  A bad company devides available work in so many different departments and job titles the actually people with authority that is able to execute is by design very thin spread. This company could also pay higher salaries, give better training and enable more call agent autonomy because that is what is takes to deliver a frictionless delightful customer service. That's why every mom and pop store outranks every Fortune 500 on customer service expect Amazon. Most still haven't learned to put customers central to their business but treat it as an after thought.
  - NoPicklez 6y ago
    Putting the customer at the center of their business is a very flamboyant term that many companies say they do but appear to perhaps not do. I like to use Telecommunication companies as an example because I worked in one heavily and dealt with these exact scenarios. If a customer calls the service desk because their internet is broken due to vandalism at their exchange. I as a customer service agent cannot drive to the exchange and simply fix the problem myself. It requires appropriate prioritisation of all of the other problems within the network that need fixing that may also be affecting other customers, as well as requiring outside resources to rebuild that location. To add that the customer might also have a mobile SIM as a backup within the modem but is not able to achieve the speeds nor latency needs commensurate with their fixed service. And that's if you're lucky to be the wholesaler if you aren't, then your organisation literally cannot fix the problem legally because you don't have the authority to repair infrastructure that you don't own outright. I appreciate that this a specific example, but one I have dealt with mutltiple times. Once a business grows to a greater size, it is inherently more difficult to fix problems like a mom and pop store whether or not you care the same about your customers or not. It may appear as though they don't care, but there are simply different realities at different scales. My point being that if you assume as the beginning that they purposely distribute available work and responsibilities in such a way that to execute is difficult by design then that's not what we're talking about here. What we're talking about is where you are operating at such a scale that it is very difficult to provide great customer service even if you do care.

underwater 6y ago

> People don't scale at all. Which is fine, because Google's customer base is made up of people, so Google should be able to scale their support in a linear way.

bryanrasmussen 6y ago
but we are all in agreement for years now that Google's customer base is advertisers, they can scale their support for their user base but it is unlikely to have any relation to their revenue. on edit: I don't mean that not supporting their user base is the right thing to do, although an MBA might say it were.

int_19h 6y ago

My suggestion would be to avoid growing to 1 billion customers, until you have support that is capable of handling that many.

varjag 6y ago
So I guess YouTube should just shut down?
- chongli 6y ago
  They should. Their existence sucks all the oxygen out of the room, preventing lots of smaller competitors from gaining traction.
  - movedx 6y ago
    > They should. That's an insane statement. YouTube should shutdown because they're successful? What, do you think a monopoly is a bad thing? The market place decided YouTube was the better platform and continued to pile on (sure, they had market timing too.) If you can suggest something better than YouTube do let me know.
    - int_19h 6y ago
      The market could suggest something better than YouTube, if it were actually competitive. Monopolies may briefly be efficient, but they're always evolutionary dead ends, and getting out of one is more costly than any short-term benefits.

ta17711771 6y ago

If you can't figure out how to scale proper customer service, there's a simple solution: don't grow too large too fast. I know, blasphemy to the VC crowd.

crazygringo 6y ago
It's not blasphemy, just elementary economics. Customer service at scale, for many products, turns the product from profitable into a severe loss. It will go out of business no ifs ands or buts. YouTube clearly cannot survive if its customer service costs exceed its advertising revenue. It has absolutely nothing to do with speed of growth, and I don't know why you think it does. Are you saying free user-generated video hosting sites shouldn't exist period? That YouTube simply shouldn't exist? Because that seems to be what you're saying.
- chongli 6y ago
  Customer service at scale, for many products, turns the product from profitable into a severe loss. If that is the case then Google is helpless to stop these attacks from growing out of control. How long before the long tail of YouTube is clipped off?
  - crazygringo 6y ago
    Well that's another false extreme. That's what algorithmic detection (together with user flagging) and removal at scale is for. That prevents them from growing out of control. The combo of algorithmic detection at scale, combined with small amounts of manual intervention and customer service where most needed, is how YouTube is able to operate.
    - chongli 6y ago
      The combo of algorithmic detection at scale, combined with small amounts of manual intervention and customer service where most needed, is how YouTube is able to operate. This article is evidence that the process is breaking down. It's an old maxim in computer security that attacks become more sophisticated over time as knowledge of the system grows and spreads among attackers. That is what we are seeing here. YouTube has built a system which is ultimately unsustainable at this scale. Over time these attacks will continue to escalate until only the very large channels (those they have the resources to support in person) and the very small channels (those beneath the notice of attackers) are left.

LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago

Well. I have some experience with O2 too, from a customers point of view. Let me tell you a story: Once upon a time i've been a happy customer of a regional ISP called Hansenet, started by the local public electric utility. It was (at least for me) lightyears ahead of the crappy experience (speed/latency/price/(competence of)service(if needed)) the former state monopolist had. Everything was golden, also excellent peering. They grew slowly, cooperated with some other regional upstarts, stayed golden, speed even got faster without raising of monthly fees, furthermore no long contracts necessary, could be canceled within a month. Then Telecom Italia came and bought them, now it was Alice, as advertised by some mouthbreathing twen all over the public space, larger than life. Quality of service went down, very unsexy of you, Alice! But still was better than the former state monopolist, and still got faster without raising prices or contract conditions. They even retained a local service center where you could walk into and talk to people who knew their stuff and could change settings in realtime! Imagine that! Not some outsourced call-center agent mouthpiecing some useless uml-diagram. Anyways, too good to be true? Right! Telefonica came to rescue (of BlackRock), to milk the cash cow as long as possible, and it was noticable. Fortunately another neighboring public utility, pioniering fiber roll out since the nineties expanded and became a choice for me then. All is golden again! Yay! Why am i ranting? Because everybody i know is mostly unhappy with O2 in any form, except for the price. O2 can't do! I wish i could add some internal, even worse insights from another ISP growing larger at the time, but am not allowed to. Also they managed, got better, and meanwhile can do again. Lesson? There is no lesson here, with the exception of economies of scale are bad for humans above certain amounts of 'scale'.

allendoerfer 6y ago
Also had a very bad experience with O2. I switched back to T-Mobile it's expensive but at least someone will answer the phone.

raducu 6y ago

Oh please, I've worked on the anti-fraud/abuse system of a large hosting/internet provider in Europe. It was a flexible "if then scoring escalation/ticketing rules". I'm not saying my knowledge applies to all customer support cases, but what happened here would never have happened with our system. Just very simple tricks go a loooong way dealing with malicious people: how old is the account of the "reporter" ? is the "reporters" id verified? how long has the account we're taking action against been our customer? whitelists/blacklists -- temporary or permanent are all complaints against a customer of the same type grouped to the same ticket type/ticket? Just based on those simple facts, we would mmediately lock functionality/content for unverified, new customers we received complaints about, while delaying, notifying and giving verified, aged customers the chance to respond/fix issues. I'm not saying this is easy, for the system I worked, our agents designing the rules had about 80 individual ticket types(in a hierarchy, with rule re-use for ticket category), but they used their brains and did not take any "lock X functionality of the customer" lightly.

o-__-o 6y ago
I too use osTicket for my support escalation needs...
- raducu 6y ago
  I'm not familiar with osTicket, is your point that osTicket could have been used instead of custom-made software in 2006 or that I'm overglorifying the system I worked on?
movedx 6y ago
I doubt you came close to 10% of the complaints YouTube gets via its reporting systems. It's the largest video hosting platform in the world.
- raducu 6y ago
  You could be right, in 2008 we handled about 10^5 complaints per day, and the volume seemed to double every year(most of those were automated complaints from external systems complaining about our customers spamming/phishing/etc), I don't know what the figures are now. My point was we had automated rules in place that worked really well and there was nothing really clever about those rules. It was a game of cat and mouse between our rule designers and adversaries who always tried to probe our thresholds and evade us while we tried to find new useful facts about customers, new probes, new actions, react proactively, but not screwing our legitimate customers was always our number 1 concern.

virvar 6y ago

I work in the public sector of Europe. One of the primary reasons that we prefer Azure and AWS to google cloud is support. When things go really wrong on our office365 platform or any part of Azure, Seattle will call us on the the hour with updates until it’s fixed. We have programs within Microsoft support where our developers and sysops can suggest changes, and if the suggestions gather enough popularity and fit within whatever criteria Microsoft have internally they’ll happen. AWS didn’t always have the great support they do now, but as far as cloud operations (the nerdy bits) go, I think they’re actually better at it than even Microsoft. It build up gradually along with GDPR, but they were the first of the major three to offer things like support for AWS services that’s actually located within the European Union. I’m not updated on Microsoft, but AWS may still be the only company to do that. Compare that to Google, where we get to talk with an automated system, the same as though we weren’t a 3,3 billion a year budget organisation. I’ve had better personal support for my free google account than I have for our company google cloud account. Don’t get me wrong, we would probably have a lot of GDPR related reasons to prefer Azure or AWS even if google had better support, but the lack of support means we’ve never gotten beyond that step in our risk assessments.

movedx 6y ago
I've had the same experience with GCP too. I work pretty exclusively with AWS these days as a CloudOp. I remember building an environment in GCP and getting answers from support was terrible. I eventually left that job after 11 months. The next job was pure AWS and sweet Jesus was the contrast strong. AWS not only had people who would phone you within 10-15 minutes, more often quicker than that, but they had a frickin' account manager who visited us every month and we only spent a thousands per month with them. Absolutely worlds apart.

allendoerfer 6y ago

So just give me priority support when I need it. Let me choose to use the free robot support or pay for a human to answer my call. Be upfront, that the human might not resolve the issue, but at least look at it and give me a non-automated answer to my problem.

movedx 6y ago
That's not a bad idea: premium YouTube creators. If you pay a premium then you can get issues resolved more directly.

slightwinder 6y ago

> Google has approx' one BILLION customers. > What is your suggestion here? Which means they also have one billion potential workers. They could tap into the power of crowd-intelligence. It's probably somewhat easy to forge some processes to oursource certain support-problems which need low human interaction. Something they do with Recaptcha already and IIRC at Google Maps. They could sell Youtube Premium to some thoudsand people and let them instead check a handful videos per day for some cases of copyright infringment and such. Just let them be the final fonrtier of sanity in cases where the machine is weak.

bemmu 6y ago
Would be amusing if they integrated it into Recaptcha. "To proceed logging in, please select all the inappropriate images"
movedx 6y ago
> ... let them instead check a handful videos per day for some cases of copyright infringment and such. They'd all have to be copyright lawyers, then?

z3t4 6y ago

You can use the community for support. Then make people pay a premium for paid human support.