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.
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To add some more context: for every successful person that reaches Google via social shaming, there are hundreds of cases of people that are not heard. I don't know how to fix this problem at your scale (a gigantic problem), but as I understand it, there is something wrong in your value system which rewards innovation and engineering experience much more than customer satisfaction.
I had an issue with GSuite for Education that I was able to get resolved by cavitching about it on Reddit (and someone gave me the email address of a high-level GSFE Program Manager), when, we had opened about 12 different tickets over the course of a month while waiting for our accreditation to post online.
The woman never responded, but, our issues were fixed the next day.
I needed support from Google Cloud, and the only way I was able to get meaningful support was to bother the Sales guy who started to bother me once he saw the news that we had our Round C go through.
When google punts their partner program at you, they openly say that they suck at support, use partners and get support better/faster. At least they're honest about it...
Hold on. I'm an admin on a few paid GApps things. One got locked out, removed me, switched phone numbers, made a mess. Then owner hit me for help, I went through the channels with G and we were back on in a few hours/next day. This was only three months ago. The process was largely automated, IIRC there was one 15 minute call.
Sure, documentation & automation works for the majority of cases. The problem is with the other cases where you hit a wall and have no way to talk to a customer service rep to get your issue resolved.
So I'm clear: we hit walls using the normal process. It was abnormal from my prior experience too. Then it was escalated and a CSR called me. Then the issue was resolved.
I disagree specifically with the "no way to talk to" part.
Point taken! I'm basing my point on a single negative personal experience from long ago (as a paying customer) as well as seeing similar posts over the years on HN. It's certainly possible that Google has improved their CS for many products since then. That being said: if you can show the OP a way to get his issue addressed by Google support, please do :)
To your point though, until some automated system escalated your case, there was no way to talk to. Assuming another user doesn't trigger this escalation, then they are stuck. I'm glad your experience was better, don't get me wrong.
Yea, thats true. The owner reached me cause I'm good a pressing buttons on websites. And I had to press a bunch before we got to the human. The process for non-technical humans is not easy (those would also be the most expensive calls)
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.
It’s obvious that Google doesn’t want to incur the cost of client support staff.
They're ruining so much goodwill that they've built up over the years by cheaping out on customer support that even customer hostile companies like Comcast do better.
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.
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.
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?
I suppose you can argue users vs customers, but Amazon does a much better job. Their support isn't perfect, it's off-shored, but it's still good enough for most purposes, I think.
This user is explicitly not paying for that old account. If you do pay for an account, you can get slightly better support.
But the account in question is closed for non-payment.
They can afford it, they just don't value it. If your org thinks this way, then Customer Support will not be a place where your best people end up (this goes for all levels in the organization). Consequently, if the CS department does not have the respect or mandate from top-management, the other departments will ignore issues that CS brings up and it will be even less empowered. And Google already has tech abandonment issues that make support super difficult. Google support employees: I feel for you.
Compare this with Amazon that publicly claims placing customer service above all else. At least if you work in CS there, you have the feeling that you are always a fundamental part of the company.
I'm a small business using gapps ( and paying for it).
And the support I received was fast ( just a timer or something of 40 seconds) till I got "in".
I personally have no complaints, but I'm not using it as a free service also.