Best, Terrance
It seems like you guys really need to get some call centers filled with people with some level of diagnostic ability and problem-solving authority. Yes, this is expensive and difficult to get built, but if you really want to Reduce Customer Anxiety, nothing can do that like the knowledge that there's a real person available 24/7 who can fix any problems on Google's side. Make it pay per incident or by subscription if needed to keep the jokers out, but anything is a whole lot better than nothing.
"Reduce", not "remove" - it's stinks of implying there's an acceptable level of "customer anxiety" that their platform should generate, and someone's set some easily-measurable metrics and a bunch of people's KPIs - and those people are now all working out how to game the metrics instead of solve the problems. "Hey, my bonus depends on reducing the clicks on the "Request an appeal" button. What's the easiest way to meet that goal? I _could_ start handling customer service in a professional and sympathetic way - but that's not "The Google Way". I know, I'll just move the button to a different place this quarter, rename it next quarter, and remove it all together before the end of the year."
Sorry Google-people - I know you all don't think you're doing evil, but there'a a hell of a reputation you got to overcome on the "Google just doesn't do customer service" issue.
That sounds entirely too plausible as the real root cause of this problem.
(I also get 'man bites dog' will also get more traction than the inverse, but regardless - this kind of complaint is a very common one about Google's products, from consumers and businesses alike).
I'm looking at the postmortem now and without wishing to jump the gun and talk about things I can't, it looks like this is being taken very seriously and a number of improvements and bug fixes are going to result. In this instance, I think it's doing the Cloud Support people a disservice to call them "disingenuous".
Disclaimer: Used to work on Google Cloud, now on Google Open Source Programs Office.
> I think it's doing the Cloud Support people a disservice to call them "disingenuous"
The problem is that to us from the outside, they do look the same.
In fact, that email in the article, and the subsequent events, are in exactly the same style as the "ban hammer" Play Store publishers get. You really can't blame us (Google's actual paying customers) from equating one with the other.
(And no, I do not equate consumer Windows support with enterprise Windows support either, and as it turns out they are not the same level.)
Given the story so far, you offer adwords style customer service (we don't give a damn about you) while attempting to catch up from position 3 behind aws and azure in the paas race. Complete with automated emails with outdated documentation and no human anywhere without a social media outcry. I'm sure stories like this are damaging (seriously, just use aws), and there will be some postmortem damage control, but unless I see a human support sla for situations like this, I can't see why anyone would risk their business on you.
Seriously, a fix it or we shut you down email for reasons you won't share with an 2 business day response. Of course, you're issuing a 3 day warning, so if that fell on a Friday, you would be dark before anyone bothered to look at the support ticket (3 days expire Monday, 2 biz days Tuesday evening). Amazing.
That said, we still use Google Cloud for some part of our infrastructure and enjoy its technical side.
[1] The billing credit card for one of our projects expired weeks before any invoicing would happen. Instead of informing us —after all we were paying customers for many months before, there should be at least some good faith— all our projects were disabled many minutes (maybe 15 or 30) before we got a confusing email about the issue at hand and the total downtime was two days.
Reminds me of the emergency telephone signs on the Golden Gate Bridge. They once read "Emergency Telephone in case of Breakdown", so people could call a tow truck. Then they were changed to "Emergency Telephone for Psychological Counseling" and now connect to suicide prevention. I can see someone with a flat tire on the phone, "And how does having a flat tire make you feel?"
This mindset is totally inappropriate for a B2B service. The caller is probably not anxious. They're at work, doing their job, keeping something working. They need repairs, not grief counseling.
But it's just marketing, at the end of the day support is still a large expense that some companies believe they don't have to bear. This seems to work for some companies better than others, likely due to different business models leading to different customer expectations and requirements.
It will take way more to show you guys really are reviewing similar incidents and, more importantly, to actually act on your reviews and improve your processes.
I wrote a little app to help myself learn birdsong. You copy some mp3s to a folder on your sdcard, open the folder in the app, and it will shuffle them and only show you the name of the file if you ask. Pretty simple, but I found it useful and thought it might be useful to other people. So I pay my $25, upload my app, and wake up the next day to an email saying my app had been suspended for "deceitful behaviour" and that it happened again they might suspend my other Google services, for instance the gmail account I've had since 2004.
Of course the email doesn't contain any information on what the deceitful behavior was, so like a Kafka story, I'm stuck defending myself against charges that I'm never informed of. When I heard back from support, they say that my app opens to a list of mp3 apps to download. So either my account has been hacked and someone changed the app apk, or they are unable to tell the difference between a directory listing from the sdcard and a list of mp3 apps. If the latter, how my app can be deceitful when it matches one of the screenshots I attached is completely beyond me.
Once my email migration to fastmail is complete, I'll rename my app and try again, this time with a modified UI that makes you click a button before showing a directory listing. I'd like to get my $25 worth if nothing else.
This whole incident has left me with zero confidence in their customer service or technical competence.
Buying a house built in 1910 and having to remodel and move to it financially prompted me to buy a smart phone, and Project Fi was clearly the best match, so I've now seriously reversed that ... but that also means I now won't even think about increasing my exposure to these sorts of risks by trying to write apps for the Play store, using any of their cloud offerings, etc. My main phone and its number are too valuable, too sticky to risk.
* locked out of your account
-Terrance
I'm not saying that's actually what is happening, but it feels like it to me.
People want their accounts reactivated.
Tscanausa @ Google
1. It's absurd that an automated process accuses you of trying to intrusions of third parties without providing details of what has been detected. This leaves the "accused party" (your paying customer) without ANY idea what is wrong or how to fix it.
2. The automatic suspension of the entire project within 3 days is similarly out or proportion, especially without Google attempting actual human contact first (a phone call, for example).
3. The appeal-process is apparently literally broken. Even if this weren't the case, disabling a customers entire project in an automated fashion requires WAY more ways of directly reaching Google to prevent this. Give a direct phone number in "emergencies" like this. We know it costs money and training. We expect you to accept this as a cost of doing business.
The above leads to the (at the moment rightful) impression that Google Cloud isn't ready for business, especially not small business. Turning off what could be someone's livelihood is a testament to the (possibly unintentional) arrogance that is widely perceived from Google.
There's very little information and/or reassurances.