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Google, for a company that reputes to perform services, is probably the single most consumer-unfriendly company on the planet. Their customer care dept. consists of one crazy cat lady in a cabin in the hills of California. They've sold enterprise services for years (or pretend enterprise services, at least), sold multiple phones and devices, have the largest ad network on the Internet and they STILL don't have anyone you can call if things go wrong. Unless you're Kevin Rose and Google will get bad pub, they absolutely do not care about your problem. Shut up slave, or go back to Hotmail.

Your experience is not even irregular. I'd say this is the typical experience for people dealing with Google when everything doesn't go 100% correct.

Actually, their core enterprise services - Google Apps and AdWords do have phone support, which I have used extensively:

http://contact.googleapps.com/?&rd=1 and http://support.google.com/adwords/bin/answer.py?hl=en-GB&... for example.

AdWords support is outstanding. As a client getting started with Google advertising, I had a dedicated account manager who set up the entire campaign for me, who would call me back whenever I had any questions I'd email to him and was very intelligent and helpful.

I am not surprised that their free services don't have a phone number to call. Can you imagine providing call-centre support for 400 million Gmail users, or 1 Billion+ Google search users?

Of course, if they want to enter other customer facing businesses like selling hardware or broadband Internet, they will have no choice but to set up call-centres for those departments.

    Google, for a company that reputes to perform
    services, is probably the single most consumer-
    unfriendly company on the planet.
They're really not. This is overstated.

Try dealing with some kind of loss-making monopoly, where the people who work there don't care or may even have a perverse grudge against customers and want to cause them harm.

Look at the way united airlines treated a passenger whos guitar they busted up: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YGc4zOqozo

There are companies who wage campaigns against their customers. They have a policy of not paying credit notes except under extreme pressure. But they might also have call centre staff with no job tracking system call you to chase you for your bill, where the staff don't even know whether you've paid it or not. Why? Because some stats somewhere said that bullied customers are more likely to pay.

Google is flawed but has some endearing things going for it: the employees are intelligent people, they tend to be caring types.

Ah yes, the mythical intelligent and caring Google employee. At least United Airlines has a fucking phone number.
Worse examples have never ever been a good excuse.
At least those bother to acknowledge their customers, even if their response is wrong. At least it gives you a chance to fight back.

Google simply utterly ignores any kind of complaint. There is no worse way to treat people than to completely deny their existence.

At the risk of being slightly cynical I'd like to point out you can actually phone and talk to someone if you're having problems paying them (i.e payments via Google Wallet) just not after they've taken your money.

For example I was having problems with a payment in Google Wallet for something off the play store. I was able to ring them, speak to someone from America and get the problem resolved in under 5 minutes.

> At the risk of being slightly cynical I'd like to point out you can actually phone and talk to someone if you're having problems paying them (i.e payments via Google Wallet) just not after they've taken your money.

Two Nexus 7s I ordered for Christmas were not delivered and then returned to sender without contacting me. Google not only sorted this out within a day or so, I spoke to people on the phone and by email with a quick turnaround.

I've heard many horror stories, but I just wanted to add that they're definitely not universal. The fault was not with Google but they still sorted it out to the best of their abilities within a day or two.

You can't have both free (or extremely cheap) services and have highly available tech support. I'm not sure if you've ever been part of a company building a call center for tech support in the US but it is a nightmare. It can easily be one of the most expensive elements of having a service-oriented business.
Echoing other posters' comments, I have received excellent Play Store support both by phone and email. In both cases I had no rouble reaching a real person and the issue was resolved within hours. So you might want to dial back the hyperbole. Or maybe not, since I'm guessing you knew your claims were outrageous to begin with.
To play devils advocate: Does this mean that customer care isn't necessary for big success?
This kind of thing is one reason I trust others (eg Apple) more than Google with my computing services.
With the frequency that this comes up, I'm a little surprised that no one has tried to build a start-up around this. I'm sure there's enough latent demand for customer service for Google that you could probably charge a fee for it - not sure how much it would be but still something.

Also you've probably got a willing acquirer in Google, providing you can prove out the model.

Only thing is you would need to have plenty of connections into the inner workings of Google to actually be able to serve your customers.

Your post needs a giant asterisk. Everything you said is completely fair, excluding AdWords -- which is where Google actually makes its money. As an Adwords customer, I have absolutely no problem getting my account rep on the phone if I have a problem.
I think this is just a pattern with companies that have high numbers of employees. Facebook is just as inaccessible. Although I suspect that it's hard to troubleshoot Facebook to begin with since the particulars of their product changes so often.
I don't know, it seems to me they're focusing a lot on automation (to reduce costs, among other things).
Sorry in advance for the rant but i think it is fucking stupid to charge developers at all. Yes, it is nothing, but the principal itself leaves a sour taste. I am improving your platform, you are going to take 30% of anything made, and you want me to pay you for that privilege.

I know this applies to others too (worse at times) and that there is some rationale behind this (reduce hoards of crap), but it just stinks, to me, in principle, and i'm sure there would be better ways of going about it.

It's an incredibly effective antispam technique. Metafilter does something similar, charging a $5 lifetime fee at signup. Existing accounts were not charged when it was introduced.
I have no problem with the charging a nominal fee to keep out spammers. However, they should just donate the $5 to charity like Atlassian does for their $10 starter pack.
With the Chrome extensions you can't actually charge any money yet, so I'm just doing it pro bono to help the users of the crappy website.
Just a thoughts - May be they charge these $5 just to make developers value their accounts and not register just for fun or when they forgot their email address. Also, to connect extension author to real credit card data. In case of malware extension - this might be very valuable for LEOs.
I've been a google supporter for years, until they do something ugly to you, and now that love is gone. Fuck you google, if you don't listen to your users you're doomed to extinction.

You stole my hard earned money in adsense for over a couple of years. All of a sudden you decided to close my account for activity fraud. I swear to god I never clicked a damn ad. My stats show no abnormal visits (analytics from google) just a steady flow of a hundred visitors a day, just ten cents a day in adsense.

But you stole it without any explanation, just that you can't give any info to protect your algorithms and your sponsors.

Well fuck you, then who protects the user?

You stole just $100 from me, but I hope you lose it all. I'll do all I can to see you on your knees.

Fuck you google.

This isn't really related to this post. Also, this is just childish whining that your precious ad sense revenue account gets banned. Well, shit happens. 100$? That sounds like your first ad sense paycheck, so call me skeptical but you probably did click your ad, maybe without knowing or violated some other term of service.

Google can't answer the millions of cases like yours one by one specifically, nor should they since somebody who's trying to game the ad sense system shouldn't be told where they messed up anyway.

Why not start your own version of ad sense if you think you can do this better.

If that is stealing at all, it is on behalf of advertisers. Google doesn't get paid when you don't.
If the $5 is to keep out spam, doesn't the fact that he has already confirmed that he is not a spammer by paying the $25 from before for the android thing? Why keep asking for money and bounce him around like this? This is what you expect from a crappy company with outsourced customer support , not google.
> This is what you expect from a crappy companies with outsourced customer support , not google.

I'd expect you to expect algorithmic customer support from Google.

I've actually had the same issue with Google for over a year. I can't use Google Wallet to pay for anything (including Android apps on the phone)! I've tried removing and adding my card back. It gives me the same error. I've resorted to asking family members to use their accounts to purchase items on my devices. This error is really frustrating!
Google is not anymore a company it used to be. They are now just in the process of streamlining their profits - closing down products that are not creating huge amounts of money , making free products into paid ones , over-promoting their social network and making lives of webmasters into roll-coaster rides by frantically updating their search algorithms .

I suppose Customer Support is the least of their concerns

But ironically enough as you have posted the problem on HN , it will surely be solved very swiftly less in the sense of customer goodwill but more of a PR move. This just reminds me of how are governments work - You have to know somebody from the inside to get the work done - and this is what Google is becoming.

This is nothing new, Google customer support has always been terrible.
I had a similar terrible experience spending $10 to transfer my number on google voice. Got the whole "Uh oh. There was a problem" error. Waiting for support like you, and then I found some obscure google group post that suggested my address on google wallet was wrong. After fixing that and waiting a day or so I finally made purchase successfully.

Google checkout/wallet is less than good, combined with virtually non-existent support is a terrible combination.

Another example of how Google does not (or is not willing to) do customer support.

If it works: great, if there's a glitch, well, tough.

Isn't this what your credit card company is for?

I had an issue where Paypal never refunded the $2 fee for verifying my account and instead pocketed the cash instead. I got my bank to issue a chargeback over the phone - it took all of five minutes.

Then your GMail account is instantly locked for fraud activity, since you foolishly used the same account for everything. Good luck contacting them for support to fix it.
That can only get the money back, while the author would clearly prefer he get the service he paid for months ago (and be able to deploy/promote his software).

Complicating the transaction with a dispute/chargeback could make that real goal even harder to achieve, not just by making the previous purchase attempt appear 'unpaid', but also perhaps giving his account/card a 'uses chargebacks' flag within Google.

Well, I was a Google Apps customer and paid my money for a year of paid GMail with my own domain. There was a technical error, my card was indeed charged and despite countless e-mails and trying to call anywhere for a resolution nothing. E-Mails just like this article had.

I wonder how many customers Google owes money to for things like this? Maybe we could tally this up and petition them to pay out.

I would not be surprised if they get hit with a Class Action someday. For their long tail products, the impact to single users is small but across the board, i'm sure it adds up.. reminds me of that evil scheme to take .0005% of a penny from everyone.

Their B2B services is also lacking, turn over for their employees is high y/y.

..maybe this is the new of state internet services at scale?

edit: grammar

I'm not excusing it, but it seems plausible to me that the Android charge is separate from the Chrome charge because they are different projects that probably have completely different systems. It's the same poor experience you sometimes have with tech support phone trees with e.g. a credit card company, where each time your call is redirected they ask you for your information again -- poor integration between different wings.
Google may actually penalize their phone support for being on the phone for over 3 minutes.

Story: An acquaintance got on the phone with support department to troubleshoot a problem. The support person was struggling to help. As the 3 minute mark approaches, the support person gets increasingly anxious. Finally, he straight up confesses that he has a 3 minute call limit beyond which he may get penalized.

And then hung up on my acquaintance seeking help.

I've been bitten by googles non-existent customer support too while dealing with my adword account(s). Somehow I had two accounts, but one of them was transferred to my friend by changing all the info + have him verify the new bank account. Sure, I probably messed up somehow.. but it should be easy to fix but it's impossible to get in contact with them. I mailed multiple times over 1-2 months.. with details what I had done. Never got a single reply. Extremely frustrating. I want to put their ads on multiple sites, but they wont let me :).
Google really need to sort their support out. When evaluating Google Apps for our organisation, we couldn't even get through to a human. This pretty much killed the evaluation up front.

Chargeback!

I had a friendly human call me shortly after I signed up for a trial for work, and had good impressions of the onboarding process. But they didnt give contact numbers before that initial contact...
The problem here is that it's not just a Chrome Developer account, it's a Google account. There may well be an automated process to lockout users that owe them money.

Steam has a similar flaw. If you file a chargeback on any game you purchase then you'll be locked out of every game you ever 'bought' until you resolve the issue.

You get my upvote. It's long overdue that Google overhauls this.
Seems like an open-and-shut case for a chargeback.
The trouble is its only $5 and it's not even worth worrying about getting the money back, it's not going to hurt Google doing a chargeback anywhere near as much as this blog post will hopefully hurt them.

Unfortuanlty for Google, because they have essentially no human face, public shaming is our only option to open up a dialog with them.

Only downside of that is that it might flag the account as being fraudulent.
That's why google is working so hard on AI, that way they don't have to staff a proper customer service department.

Hopefully they'll get that done in time for them not to be out-competed by a company that actually cares about their audience / customers.

Can't he (or couldn't he) dispute the charge with the credit card company?
I could but I really can't be bothered. The fact that I can't publish my extension does bother me.