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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Google may have a hard time with this. Google has never been good at paid services which require people on the ground to keep them working. Look at the Google Fiber debacle. Or the problems of being a small Google advertising customer. Google just doesn't have a customer service culture.

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Isn't that part of the reason why they restructured and departments like Waymo are now separate from Google? I would imagine this way they have people more familiar with these types of services running things at the higher levels instead of having the same CEO and other administrative roles managing a bunch of unrelated or loosely related products.

My cynical view is that it is a voluntary "breakup" of their monopoly. Google & Waymo are under the same banner iirc. That means that essentially the only things that can make money/matter to alphabet are still business as usual

That's one way of looking at things.

Another way is: Google is good at things it wants to be good at and, as most corporations, it wants to be good at making money.

I can't speak to Google Fiber but if you were running AdSense (a self-serve ad buying and publishing operation at a massive scale), you would also be "bad" at customer service or you would loose all your money trying to help not-so-bright people that can't be helped or engaging in good faith with very bright people who want to defraud you and will use every trick their smart brains come up with to con you.

You have to understand that the bottom worst 0.1% of AdSense would-be customers is still a massive number of people in absolute sense. They want help just as much as a savvy digital marketer running ad campaigns for McDonalds but will cost you more in support than they will ever spend on AdSense. And if you're dropping McDonald's budget on AdSense, you get assigned account rep.

Google's customer service for AdSense is exactly the kind of service that is needed to make money in that business.

A taxi service will require a different kind of customer support and Google will excel at it, just as they excel at so many disparate things like writing search engine that can search unimaginable amount of data in millisecond, designing and building their own data centers, laying their own fiber or running a cafeteria that serves excellent food to their employees.

> Google just doesn't have a customer service culture

It's not a "culture", you either hire a bunch of people or delegate to a contractor or outsource the whole thing, it's not this fundamental thing.

I pay for G suite their customer service is fine.

There really is such a thing as a customer service culture. Either everyone in your company contributes to customer service or they don't. Either everyone cares about customer satisfaction or they don't.

You can't outsource a helpdesk and consider customer service to be "done". The hard part, the culture aspect of it, is how those tickets get routed and prioritized after the support call is finished. The hard part is actively trying to minimize support calls. The hard part is your developers learning from those calls.

Either everyone contributes and cares or no one does? I can't deal with hyperbole.

Everyone has a job to do, and I'm sure that some sort of a bug tracker is attainable for everyone by now, it's not a company DNA thing, you allocate enough resources to something then you can adequately support it.

"Allocating enough resources" means everyone. It's an all or nothing. If you have a single team that says "customer service is not my job", you've already lost. It's not hyperbole. It literally is an all-or-nothing. Customer service shouldn't be a DNA thing, and at many companies it's not. It's just how they run their business, just like having lights and HVAC is not a DNA thing. At some other companies, though, customer service is someone else's job and it can be solved by outsourcing a helpdesk. That is a company DNA thing, and it's toxic.

Customer service is everyone's job because without customers you don't have a job.

Maybe that is true for a startup you just launched otherwise that doesn't scale (or make sense).

How does it not scale? How does it not make sense? It sounds like maybe you work in a company where everyone is not responsible for customer service/support (which would be very unfortunate) or you're misunderstanding what customer service/support actually is (which I hope is the case).

Your backend developers shouldn't be answering phone calls from customers. That's the job of the helpdesk. But if the helpdesk doesn't know how to fix a problem, they should forward the call or the ticket to the developer. If something is messed up in the database, the helpdesk should have the ability to put the customer on hold, call the developer, and have them make the required change. If the documentation doesn't match reality, the helpdesk should have the power to get the developers to update the documentation. The helpdesk should be analyzing tickets and sending reports to development teams with the mindset that it is the responsibility and the expectation of the development team to make sure these calls stop happening, or that the helpdesk is empowered to resolve them without escalating a ticket.

That is a culture where customer support is everyone's job. If the development team is under no obligation to respond to ticket escalations, that is a toxic support environment. If development is under no obligation to reduce the helpdesk's call volume, that is a toxic support environment. If there is no helpdesk to call, or the helpdesk you've called has no direct line of communication with all of the supporting teams across the entire company no matter their role or function, that is a toxic support environment.

What you describe sounds like a horrible work environment.

In every sensible development environment I've encountered there is a wall between the developers and the rest of of the company: their manager, who's responsibilities include shielding their team members from outside bullshit + the product owner who is the one collecting feedback / feature requests from other teams and prioritizes their requests according to the companies goals (which can of course include "build a user-friendly product").

In a system where there is direct line between the development team and other teams, most of the times the developers will only be able to get very little work done due to constant interruption, and/or they will end up spending most of the time fullfilling the requests by the people who cry the loudest, regardless if that's in the companies overall best interest not.

I'm not talking about feature requests, I'm talking about "holy shit all of my email is gone, just everything, it's all gone". If I'm a customer and I'm told "we'll put in a feature request and the manager will prioritize getting your emails back according to the company's goals", I'm probably not a customer anymore.

I'm talking about "your product documentation says to check the box on the third page, but there are only two pages". If the response is "I'm sorry our developers are too busy getting work done to be constantly interrupted", how many customers are you keeping?

I'm talking about "I purchased your product but it redirected me to something called http://localhost:3214/test/test_page.html". If the response is "Hi, I'm the manager who is shielding my employees from your bullshit" yeah you get the idea.

These are things an outsourced helpdesk (or even an in-house helpdesk) can't fix. But they are problems that real customers are having right now. Maybe it sounds like a horrible work environment to some people. To me it sounds like absolute bare minimum customer support.

Bug fixes are the same thing as a feature request. They have an implementation cost, and an expected gain in revenue (= reduced loss in revenue). It's still the role of the product manager to prioritize it. A 1:10000 freak accident that is not reproducible and therefor hard to fix probably won't be fixed for quite some time, no matter how much it sucks for the single affected customer.

Unless you are running a business where each customer pays a relatively big chunck of money (I'd say enough to employ a single developer), you always have to run the numbers, no matter if it is a feature request or a "holy shit" bug.

> Look at the Google Fiber debacle.

AFAIK, based on public information, Google Fiber is well received by customers.

"Google Fiber division cuts staff by 9%, “pauses” fiber plans in 11 cities"[1]

[1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/10/googl...

Being well-received by consumers doesn't have much to do with business success, in the broadband market.

Perhaps it's a matter of low bars, but Google's customer service and general reception definitely was far superior to, e.g., Comcast's.

The issues Fiber ran into were more about taking on entrenched monopolists, and not general uptake or customer dissatisfaction.

Fiber no longer makes sense. The cost of laying cables is extremely high and 5g wireless is on pace to deliver similar speeds without the same costs. Google reallocated resources to wireless when they reduced them for fiber.

But less well-received by the neighbors of those customers:

http://www.newsobserver.com/news/business/article49959860.ht... http://www.mystatesman.com/business/google-fiber-install-pro... http://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/business/article123001...

[ disclaimer: I work at Google, but not on Fiber. This post is my opinion, not that of my employer. ]

I can understand that, my anecdotal experience with AT&T fiber when they rolled out was that they dug up half the curb in front on my driveway and left a trench covered with a unsecured piece of 2 inch plywood for almost 3 months. They blocked half my driveway and gave me no notice or contact info. I'm not even one of their customers, it's just their box happened to be in front of my house.

Yea I was not happy, and insulted when service rolled out and their rep only offered me 5% discount to make up for construction.

Sure, but this not what OP said.

>Google has never been good at paid services which require people on the ground to keep them working. Look at the Google Fiber debacle.

You sort of neglected to mention all of the lawsuits filed by cable and telecom companies to prevent its expansion.

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