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To me, the issue with Google's products and services is that they're not willing to provide any human customer service to resolve the real issues. Now, of cour

To me, the issue with Google's products and services is that they're not willing to provide any human customer service to resolve the real issues. Now, of course, I understand that even Google can't reasonably be expected to provide free 24/7 customer support for the entire Internet. If they had a normal phone number available where anybody could reach a human at any time, every confused person would call them with issues that are completely unrelated to Google's actual products and even Google would be overwhelmed. The solution is to figure out some payment level for support that dissuades casual abuse of customer service, but is still reasonable for people to use in an emergency to save their business or communication accounts. I'm convinced that at least some people have lost jobs and companies, had their lives ruined, or even committed suicide over being completely unable to salvage everything they've worked for all of their lives. This should be horrifying to every Google employee.

hedora 4y ago
> Now, of course, I understand that even Google can't reasonably be expected to provide free 24/7 customer support for the entire Internet. Microsoft did this back in the 1990's. It provided a strong financial incentive to reduce the number of support calls generated per Windows installation, which is what they ended up doing.
- dhimes 4y ago
  And often Microsoft would not put the charge through, at least if you were working to try to solve the problem without them. I don't know what their criteria were, but I don't think I ever paid despite calling a few times.
  - snotrockets 4y ago
    The terms I remember (note that there are so many different Microsoft licensing agreements, so yours could’ve been totally different) were that you weren’t charged if the problem you called for was indeed a problem with Microsoft software. And that definition was quite liberal: not just obvious software bugs, but also confusing documentation, etc. In other words, as long as you RTFM before you called, it was free.
    - DaiPlusPlus 4y ago
      That’s still the case today, even though the base charge is now $500/incident. I always get a refund.
glitchc 4y ago
> Now, of course, I understand that even Google can't reasonably be expected to provide free 24/7 customer support for the entire Internet. If they had a normal phone number available where anybody could reach a human at any time, every confused person would call them with issues that are completely unrelated to Google's actual products and even Google would be overwhelmed. No it is entirely reasonable. Even with a decline this quarter, Alphabet is sitting on ~$116 Billion cash on hand. Spending $1B on customer service would be trivial. They won't though, because end-users are not the customers of Google, advertisers are. You can betcha advertisers get excellent customer service.
- glogla 4y ago
  > They won't though, because end-users are not the customers of Google, advertisers are. You can betcha advertisers get excellent customer service. You would think so, but no. Even advertisers get bad support from Google. Even companies using Google as replacement for Microsoft stack (Gmail and Calendar instead of Outlook, etc) get bad support from Google. Even Google Cloud customers spending millions a year get bad support from Google. The terrible support might have started for the reasons you mention, but it turn into whole organization dysfunction.
  - TechBro8615 4y ago
    This is just not true from my experience. Google Cloud has proactive and responsive support staff.
    - kenjackson 4y ago
      It might be a relative perspective they had. I've heard that AWS and Azure provide much better support. I can't say firsthand, but I've heard that fairly consistently.
      - toddreedy 4y ago
        The joke we had was AWS has better support, Google had better products, and MS had better sales.
McDyver 4y ago
> Now, of course, I understand that even Google can't reasonably be expected to provide free 24/7 customer support for the entire Internet. If they had a normal phone number available where anybody could reach a human at any time, every confused person would call them with issues that are completely unrelated to Google's actual products and even Google would be overwhelmed. That would be the fair consequence of wanting to dominate the whole internet, no? If any company providing a product would refuse to have a human that is reachable, they would never get to a dominating position. And IMHO, google should be forced to provide that human service given its dimension, or scale down until it does.
- logicalmonster 4y ago
  I said that because of my life experience. I run some small businesses in some quasi-technical fields. We've gotten phone calls asking for help with fixing peoples' Yahoo mail accounts, asking for returns to stores that were completely different than ours, trying to get refunds on products we don't even sell, and many other nonsensical and time-wasting calls from confused people. If we, at our extremely small scale, were often annoyed by dealing with irrelevant phone calls, I have no doubt that Google would be drowned out by every person who had an issue installing Windows, trying to setup their printer, asking for help getting their money back from a shoe store, running out of gas on the highway, their apartment not turning on the heat high enough, and a host of unrelated things that most of us would never dream of calling Google about. I'm not asking for perfection from Google: I'm just asking for Google to help desperate people that are completely screwed and giving them some option, even if it requires some payment, to fix major life-changing issues.
  - McDyver 4y ago
    That is the price of dealing with the public, tbf. People are how they are and will always find the path of least resistance to get their problems solved. That doesn't exclude them or anyone from providing support to the services they offer, and that people pay for (one way or the other)
  - noAnswer 4y ago
martyvis 4y ago
Google One is only a few bucks a month and gives human support. It certainly helped me in getting someone from Google confirm to me with written info that an issue I was having was caused by the phone manufacturer and not Google.
josefresco 4y ago
> o me, the issue with Google's products and services is that they're not willing to provide any human customer service to resolve the real issues. I don't get this, I engage human Google support for paid Google products at least a few times a month. It's not great, but definitely on par with other tech giants. Are you expecting human support for ... free services?
- SamBam 4y ago
  "Free services" aren't provided by Google out of the goodness of their heart. This isn't altruism. We're not choosy beggars to want support for being the very products that make Google the most money.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- snotrockets 4y ago
  I don’t know what consumer support looks like, but Google Cloud support (with a premium support contract) is significantly worse then their competitors.
- michaelmrose 4y ago
  He paid them money for a phone they themselves lost and then charged him for. He should reasonably expect support for that transaction and any situations that stem directly from that transaction. Furthermore when you do something that deleteriously effects people like take away access to more than a decade of email/files/photos/contacts not to mention apps and other purchases for which google was indeed paid you should expect that action to reasonably generate a support request and actually provide it in case as in this situation it is unreasonable and unjust. But its free isn't an automatic get out of jail free card for the expectation for a company to behave like reasonable human beings.
educaysean 4y ago
I think you might be conflating "free users" of their search engine product and a customer who paid a thousand USD to purchase their mobile hardware. I can see the reasoning for refusing to provide human-based CS for their search engine users, but to give their Pixel users the typical run around and then capping it with disabling their account? I would expect this kind of behavior from the various shell companies selling gadgets on Amazon. Google is really eating their way through the goodwill they took decades to build up.
dheera 4y ago
> Google can't reasonably be expected to provide free 24/7 customer support for the entire Internet IMO they should be legally required to provide an appeals process with a real human and reasonable turnaround time (e.g. 1 business day would probably be fine with me) for all forms of account banning or website banning. For payment disputes they should also be legally required to provide human assistance within a few business days. If you can't do that then you shouldn't be allowed to take payments. I had a location-based file sharing website banned across the internet because Chrome falsely labelled it as a suspicious website or some BS. That new Chrome version marked the end of that project. No way to reach a human. I can't imagine how many businesses and startups have been ended because of Google's rash policies and no appeal process.
- TechBro8615 4y ago
  Did you try opening a bug report on the public Chromium bug tracker?
Keyframe 4y ago
Now, of course, I understand that even Google can't reasonably be expected to provide free 24/7 customer support for the entire Internet. How about only paying customers outside of consumer subscription services (and maybe even those)? I don't know why it's reasonable to expect them not to be able to provide that service at volume when I can and have reached amazon support for small sales and even before sale events and I'm sure they move more stuff around than google does pixel phones.
afandian 4y ago
There's a massive cultural blind spot at Google IMHO. And it's not as black and white as "if you're not the customer you're the product". I used to be a paying Google Workspace customer and I cancelled my account through the usual process. After my account was closed _and deleted_ they sent some unknown invoice amount to collections, sent threatening emails. Was there a reply-to? Was there a phone number? No, "log in with your account and raise a support issue". The account that you deleted. And another threatening email with no help about how to answer. I emailed the Collections address and I got auto-generated responses. And I spent days combing help pages. Finally sorted it out by opening a new trial account (and then the help agent was very helpful). But even then it was awkward. I will never send a cent their way. Oh, and I know a google employee who was kind enought to look into it. He followed the internal channels to try and help and ... it was broken. Best he could do was file a bug report.
erikerikson 4y ago
> they're not willing to provide any human customer service They do: https://one.google.com/about/support https://one.google.com/about/support
A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
<< Now, of course, I understand that even Google can't reasonably be expected to provide free 24/7 customer support for the entire Internet. See... for me that is actually an argument that they are way too big, because they are not able to properly service their existing customer base.
NaturalPhallacy 4y ago
I think a reasonable law here would be: If you paid real money for services, you're entitled to direct human to human customer support.

hedora 4y ago

> Now, of course, I understand that even Google can't reasonably be expected to provide free 24/7 customer support for the entire Internet. Microsoft did this back in the 1990's. It provided a strong financial incentive to reduce the number of support calls generated per Windows installation, which is what they ended up doing.

dhimes 4y ago
And often Microsoft would not put the charge through, at least if you were working to try to solve the problem without them. I don't know what their criteria were, but I don't think I ever paid despite calling a few times.
- snotrockets 4y ago
  The terms I remember (note that there are so many different Microsoft licensing agreements, so yours could’ve been totally different) were that you weren’t charged if the problem you called for was indeed a problem with Microsoft software. And that definition was quite liberal: not just obvious software bugs, but also confusing documentation, etc. In other words, as long as you RTFM before you called, it was free.
  - DaiPlusPlus 4y ago
    That’s still the case today, even though the base charge is now $500/incident. I always get a refund.

glitchc 4y ago

> Now, of course, I understand that even Google can't reasonably be expected to provide free 24/7 customer support for the entire Internet. If they had a normal phone number available where anybody could reach a human at any time, every confused person would call them with issues that are completely unrelated to Google's actual products and even Google would be overwhelmed. No it is entirely reasonable. Even with a decline this quarter, Alphabet is sitting on ~$116 Billion cash on hand. Spending $1B on customer service would be trivial. They won't though, because end-users are not the customers of Google, advertisers are. You can betcha advertisers get excellent customer service.

glogla 4y ago
> They won't though, because end-users are not the customers of Google, advertisers are. You can betcha advertisers get excellent customer service. You would think so, but no. Even advertisers get bad support from Google. Even companies using Google as replacement for Microsoft stack (Gmail and Calendar instead of Outlook, etc) get bad support from Google. Even Google Cloud customers spending millions a year get bad support from Google. The terrible support might have started for the reasons you mention, but it turn into whole organization dysfunction.
- TechBro8615 4y ago
  This is just not true from my experience. Google Cloud has proactive and responsive support staff.
  - kenjackson 4y ago
    It might be a relative perspective they had. I've heard that AWS and Azure provide much better support. I can't say firsthand, but I've heard that fairly consistently.
    - toddreedy 4y ago
      The joke we had was AWS has better support, Google had better products, and MS had better sales.

McDyver 4y ago

> Now, of course, I understand that even Google can't reasonably be expected to provide free 24/7 customer support for the entire Internet. If they had a normal phone number available where anybody could reach a human at any time, every confused person would call them with issues that are completely unrelated to Google's actual products and even Google would be overwhelmed. That would be the fair consequence of wanting to dominate the whole internet, no? If any company providing a product would refuse to have a human that is reachable, they would never get to a dominating position. And IMHO, google should be forced to provide that human service given its dimension, or scale down until it does.

logicalmonster 4y ago
I said that because of my life experience. I run some small businesses in some quasi-technical fields. We've gotten phone calls asking for help with fixing peoples' Yahoo mail accounts, asking for returns to stores that were completely different than ours, trying to get refunds on products we don't even sell, and many other nonsensical and time-wasting calls from confused people. If we, at our extremely small scale, were often annoyed by dealing with irrelevant phone calls, I have no doubt that Google would be drowned out by every person who had an issue installing Windows, trying to setup their printer, asking for help getting their money back from a shoe store, running out of gas on the highway, their apartment not turning on the heat high enough, and a host of unrelated things that most of us would never dream of calling Google about. I'm not asking for perfection from Google: I'm just asking for Google to help desperate people that are completely screwed and giving them some option, even if it requires some payment, to fix major life-changing issues.
- McDyver 4y ago
  That is the price of dealing with the public, tbf. People are how they are and will always find the path of least resistance to get their problems solved. That doesn't exclude them or anyone from providing support to the services they offer, and that people pay for (one way or the other)
- noAnswer 4y ago

martyvis 4y ago

Google One is only a few bucks a month and gives human support. It certainly helped me in getting someone from Google confirm to me with written info that an issue I was having was caused by the phone manufacturer and not Google.

josefresco 4y ago

> o me, the issue with Google's products and services is that they're not willing to provide any human customer service to resolve the real issues. I don't get this, I engage human Google support for paid Google products at least a few times a month. It's not great, but definitely on par with other tech giants. Are you expecting human support for ... free services?

SamBam 4y ago
"Free services" aren't provided by Google out of the goodness of their heart. This isn't altruism. We're not choosy beggars to want support for being the very products that make Google the most money.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
snotrockets 4y ago
I don’t know what consumer support looks like, but Google Cloud support (with a premium support contract) is significantly worse then their competitors.
michaelmrose 4y ago
He paid them money for a phone they themselves lost and then charged him for. He should reasonably expect support for that transaction and any situations that stem directly from that transaction. Furthermore when you do something that deleteriously effects people like take away access to more than a decade of email/files/photos/contacts not to mention apps and other purchases for which google was indeed paid you should expect that action to reasonably generate a support request and actually provide it in case as in this situation it is unreasonable and unjust. But its free isn't an automatic get out of jail free card for the expectation for a company to behave like reasonable human beings.

educaysean 4y ago

I think you might be conflating "free users" of their search engine product and a customer who paid a thousand USD to purchase their mobile hardware. I can see the reasoning for refusing to provide human-based CS for their search engine users, but to give their Pixel users the typical run around and then capping it with disabling their account? I would expect this kind of behavior from the various shell companies selling gadgets on Amazon. Google is really eating their way through the goodwill they took decades to build up.

dheera 4y ago

> Google can't reasonably be expected to provide free 24/7 customer support for the entire Internet IMO they should be legally required to provide an appeals process with a real human and reasonable turnaround time (e.g. 1 business day would probably be fine with me) for all forms of account banning or website banning. For payment disputes they should also be legally required to provide human assistance within a few business days. If you can't do that then you shouldn't be allowed to take payments. I had a location-based file sharing website banned across the internet because Chrome falsely labelled it as a suspicious website or some BS. That new Chrome version marked the end of that project. No way to reach a human. I can't imagine how many businesses and startups have been ended because of Google's rash policies and no appeal process.

TechBro8615 4y ago
Did you try opening a bug report on the public Chromium bug tracker?

Keyframe 4y ago

Now, of course, I understand that even Google can't reasonably be expected to provide free 24/7 customer support for the entire Internet. How about only paying customers outside of consumer subscription services (and maybe even those)? I don't know why it's reasonable to expect them not to be able to provide that service at volume when I can and have reached amazon support for small sales and even before sale events and I'm sure they move more stuff around than google does pixel phones.

afandian 4y ago

There's a massive cultural blind spot at Google IMHO. And it's not as black and white as "if you're not the customer you're the product". I used to be a paying Google Workspace customer and I cancelled my account through the usual process. After my account was closed _and deleted_ they sent some unknown invoice amount to collections, sent threatening emails. Was there a reply-to? Was there a phone number? No, "log in with your account and raise a support issue". The account that you deleted. And another threatening email with no help about how to answer. I emailed the Collections address and I got auto-generated responses. And I spent days combing help pages. Finally sorted it out by opening a new trial account (and then the help agent was very helpful). But even then it was awkward. I will never send a cent their way. Oh, and I know a google employee who was kind enought to look into it. He followed the internal channels to try and help and ... it was broken. Best he could do was file a bug report.

erikerikson 4y ago

> they're not willing to provide any human customer service They do: https://one.google.com/about/support https://one.google.com/about/support

A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago

<< Now, of course, I understand that even Google can't reasonably be expected to provide free 24/7 customer support for the entire Internet. See... for me that is actually an argument that they are way too big, because they are not able to properly service their existing customer base.

NaturalPhallacy 4y ago

I think a reasonable law here would be: If you paid real money for services, you're entitled to direct human to human customer support.