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Has anyone else had a positive experience like this? I've literally heard of zero positive customer service experiences with Google, that didn't involve a blog

Has anyone else had a positive experience like this? I've literally heard of zero positive customer service experiences with Google, that didn't involve a blog post/rant making it to page 1 of Hacker News

srik 14y ago
Yes, I was offered help about fixing some indexing errors. They really do reach out and were very available in the google groups. Although Ive not had a chance to check how things are now after theyve migrated to stackoverflow.
- daivd 14y ago
  It worked fine for me. I asked an obscure stack overflow question about the Google App Engine SDK and an OpenSSL bug in Ubuntu 12.04 a few days ago and got prompt support. Besides that it is trendy to pick on Google, I think that the problem people have had with customer support is mostly with ads.
azylman 14y ago
I've also had experience like that when I was developing with one of their APIs (specifically, Blogger). Basically, it was when they were rolling out a brand new version of their Blogger API and the documentation was outdated. I was trying to get it to work and one of their developers looked at my code and helped me get it running.
- gmazzotti 14y ago
  I have a free Google Apps service, once the system ask my age and I decided to put my company "bithday" instead of mine. Great error! the system block me because I was under 13. I try everything and didn´t know how to fix it so I e-mailed Google, 2 days later (i thought that I won´t get any reply) somebody from Google call to my phone and explain me step by step how to fix it (it was like a 15 minutes call)
sonnym 14y ago
This is a clear example of a sampling bias. The voices of those angry with an experience of poor service will raise a cacophony compared to those who have a pleasant experience and simply carry on with their lives.
- alecco 14y ago
  On the contrary, positive experience raises. For example, everybody knows AWS has excellent support. Try to badmouth them here and see what happens.
JackC 14y ago
In 2008, shortly after App Engine launched, I was running an app that was a totally bad fit for it (tons of concurrent writes to the same rows). I actually talked on the phone with a Google engineer to try to figure out how to optimize the problem. That was pretty sweet. On the other hand, I was managing the community for that same project through a Google Group, and one day the group simply disappeared for 24 hours or so -- it was as though the group had never existed, but couldn't be recreated. Then it popped into existence again, no explanation. There was absolutely no way to even ask for support, let alone get it. My takeaway, was, I guess, the obvious one: if you're relying on a web service for something important to your business, you need an SLA. If you're getting a service for free, you should assume it might vanish one day and never come back, taking your data with it. (Especially with a company like Google that's known to let old products languish and to have no meaningful path for reporting problems. ) Sometimes that's OK, sometimes it's not.

srik 14y ago

Yes, I was offered help about fixing some indexing errors. They really do reach out and were very available in the google groups. Although Ive not had a chance to check how things are now after theyve migrated to stackoverflow.

daivd 14y ago
It worked fine for me. I asked an obscure stack overflow question about the Google App Engine SDK and an OpenSSL bug in Ubuntu 12.04 a few days ago and got prompt support. Besides that it is trendy to pick on Google, I think that the problem people have had with customer support is mostly with ads.

azylman 14y ago

I've also had experience like that when I was developing with one of their APIs (specifically, Blogger). Basically, it was when they were rolling out a brand new version of their Blogger API and the documentation was outdated. I was trying to get it to work and one of their developers looked at my code and helped me get it running.

gmazzotti 14y ago
I have a free Google Apps service, once the system ask my age and I decided to put my company "bithday" instead of mine. Great error! the system block me because I was under 13. I try everything and didn´t know how to fix it so I e-mailed Google, 2 days later (i thought that I won´t get any reply) somebody from Google call to my phone and explain me step by step how to fix it (it was like a 15 minutes call)

sonnym 14y ago

This is a clear example of a sampling bias. The voices of those angry with an experience of poor service will raise a cacophony compared to those who have a pleasant experience and simply carry on with their lives.

alecco 14y ago
On the contrary, positive experience raises. For example, everybody knows AWS has excellent support. Try to badmouth them here and see what happens.

JackC 14y ago

In 2008, shortly after App Engine launched, I was running an app that was a totally bad fit for it (tons of concurrent writes to the same rows). I actually talked on the phone with a Google engineer to try to figure out how to optimize the problem. That was pretty sweet. On the other hand, I was managing the community for that same project through a Google Group, and one day the group simply disappeared for 24 hours or so -- it was as though the group had never existed, but couldn't be recreated. Then it popped into existence again, no explanation. There was absolutely no way to even ask for support, let alone get it. My takeaway, was, I guess, the obvious one: if you're relying on a web service for something important to your business, you need an SLA. If you're getting a service for free, you should assume it might vanish one day and never come back, taking your data with it. (Especially with a company like Google that's known to let old products languish and to have no meaningful path for reporting problems. ) Sometimes that's OK, sometimes it's not.