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Comment by btown | Hacker News Reader

If people don't see this, might as well do an Ask HN with more context and contact information. Likely that many Googlers read this.

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I tried everything x100 on steroids over the last 2 years. I was strictly ignored and the only thing left for me to do is to go walk in to the Gmail teams office and sit down on a computer and fix it myself.

Try to get in touch with this guy

https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/5dif8j/psa_google_...

It is pathetic that someone has to get referred to a reddit user account for help with a Google-related problem. I am guessing Google just isn't that good at this "internet" thing. Maybe someone can help them setup an actual customer support portal, with real employees.

It's more Google really isn't good at this "people" thing. They see people as an issue and try to genericize everything into an algorithm then wonder why it doesn't get popular or run well.

Maybe they're good at recognizing this "people" problem is not worth their time.

laughs I'd never really thought about it that way, but it does seem to be a good analogy.

Google as the brilliant software developer whose only flaw is that they're completely unwilling to ever write a single-use function.

My understand is that customer service is a scalability problem and isn't financially feasible for free services. If they had a support number they would be deluged with the very angry people you see in the product forums. Many of these are people they simply cannot help as a CS rep because they are angry about things like missing or dropped features. And as it turns out, free users are often the most demanding in terms of attention, time and resources.

What they really need is a customer service team that finds these people that are having genuine issues that can be resolved. They'd need the means to reach out and communicate without that person being able to subsequently share contact information with the world.

That said, I don't know what I'd do as a Google employee looking at this guy's situation. If david.smith@gmail.com is dormant and my name and ID say David Smith why should that give me access to that mailbox? How do you verify the contents without violating someone's privacy? We're not asking some tiny ISP to take a quick peek, this is Google and they have a responsibility to all of their users to practice great care. So we can't assume they're telling the truth and neither can Google. This guy's situation sucks but the mistake of turning over the account to the wrong person is catastrophically worse than the bad experience of denying the rightful owner access. This exact situation is why they have recovery options.

I think it's likely they're telling the truth and I do feel bad for them and their situation. I've been there myself with a yahoo account years ago but at the end of the day the only way I could recover it was using something I no longer had. The things in that mailbox that I wanted access to were also things I would be furious at Yahoo for sharing with someone else no matter what their identification or birth certificate said.

There a lot of cases where people would gladly pay for service to get an issue resolved. I'd use that as a hedge against the people who just want to complain for free.

Allow people to purchase a "certificate of service" at a nominal cost when the account is set up, and then charge them a fee when they need service for the product, verifying the request against the original certificate. That should cover the tech support problem.

Agreed. I'm sorry, but the "these are free services, you shouldn't have any expectation of support" excuse seems to be trotted out far too often by Google to whitewash the utter lack of a support org in critical parts of their empire.

The issue, regardless of the financial model of the services, is that (a) these are now critical services for some people & (b) there is utterly no support path in the event something goes wrong.

Charge $100 or $200 or $2500 per suppprt case, refunding part of the difference if it turns out to be a Google system problem, and people would still be much happier.

The issue is that there's currently no amount of money you can throw at Google to fix things, and no one besides Google has access to implement a fix. And every system has glitches and corner cases when you're running at the scale Google is.

Would paying for Google for Business account help:

https://gsuite.google.com/pricing.html

Lowest tier is $5/month. I know my old company used Google for email. Is there a guaranteed access to support. I saw access to "Forums". Anyone have experience with that.

But then Fastmail is $3/month and you get personal support it seems.

How about just a paid phone number. Charge 10c/min.

The issue here is that even with a paid phone number, what could the support rep do?

Sure, they could provide advice, but would you want some stranger who happens to work on Google Support India the ability to look into your account? To reset your password?

It's best they provide buttons for you to fix your own problems than choose privileged people who can invade your privacy to fix problems for you.

You're certainly not the only one. Even as a paying customer it's impossible to get in touch with anyone if you get locked out.

Not even if you get locked out. I tried asking them why my paid gsuite account couldn't be used like a normal google account and all they could do was copy+paste some response about how great paying for google was and that I wasn't paying for anything else.

Alphabet REALLY needs to work on their customer service, especially for paying customers.

I don't trust having email on a domain I don't control (you can't move a gmail account to another provider like you can a phone number). Yet if you want to take advantage of all the features of google home/music/youtube you have to use a normal gmail account.

Google promises not to use any GSuite data for advertising, which limits the services that are available.

Business Gsuite data is also more tightly controlled, which means some integrations necessary to make things work properly aren't possible.

For example, calendar data of Gsuite customers is sensitive enough the assistant AI can't access it, so if you ask the Google assistant "what's my next appointment", it can't answer.

Are you sure there isn't a setting in the Admin Panel to allow this?

I wish...

Can't you just use another email provider as your main account and keep the Google one for YouTube etc.

Yeah, and I've been toying with the idea. What sucks is I'd love to use Google home for flight info but because I use gsuite it wont read emails or calendar. Guess I could have all my email forwarded to a dummy google account just for that.

I thought you could turn the consumer-only apps on in the admin interface.

You can but it limits what you can do. Example, I can use my Google home with my apps account except I can't use calendar, flight info, or be a part of my existing google music/youtube red family group.

I doubt you.

I have found google chaps do come out of the wood work when you post irrefutable evidence of a 'problem', although whether that is even possible is another thing. Try IRC, although it didnt work for me at all, I do believe they said that if the right guy at the right time is on it, he might be able to help.

I have a similar situation. I had created an account just for a specific client to share files via google drive. Don't remember the password any more and can't access those files. No recourse.

What recourse do you expect? Did you set up a recovery address? A recovery phone number? Did you download and keep the recovery codes?

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