Hacker News Reader

Comment by vvanders | Hacker News Reader

> Google already offered 24/7 support for paying business users with a G Suite account, but this is the first time it actively offers live support for consumers.

About fucking time.

I know so many people who will never purchase another Google product because it's was literally impossible to get another human being on the other end of the line.

View on HN

As an anecdotal counter point, the only thing I've ever bought from Google was a Glass as part of their explorers program. I had to get in contact with their customer support over an issue I was having and was blown away by how above and beyond they went.

I also had awesome support from the Glass Explorer program when the foil on mine started to peel. But, they charged $1500 for it and it felt like they really wanted it to succeed, so I would expect the support to be top notch. I'd love if they could bring that level of support to all their products.

I've actually had great experience with Google Express support (when it was a subscription service; haven't needed to call support since it's gone free.)

I think Google's mostly got bad support for services (particularly free ones) whose scaling relied on near-zero marginal cost, and that is because scaling support isn't cheap even if scaling the underlying service is.

OTOH, if their storage charges are enough above costs to support the support burden for their consumer products for a customer, rolling consumer support into their storage plans resolved that scaling issue.

I wonder what they mean by Google experts. Will there be an actual human being or some hybrid solution at the end of the line? Not that it matters to me as long as it's efficient.

With Google Duplex I'm sure we're heading towards a future where a computer is going to be answering all our customer support calls without us knowing about it.

Google Duplex was a cool demo but those intents were quite well defined. There is a handful of form slots they are aiming to fill where they can enumerate all the entry points to a conversation as well as misinterpretations. I do agree that this is the direction we are going, however since Google Expert is a broad term tackling a much bigger search space, I'd expect it to work differently.

>About fucking time.

They've offered chat and phone support for their phones and Google Play for years. I've never had a problem chatting or talking to a CSR on the phone. In fact, every Nexus and Pixel phone has a built in 24/7 support app that allows you to chat, talk or get a call back from a support person.

This is the reason I think Amazon will end up winning the cloud computing race. Providing support is simply not in Googles DNA.

I think providing supports to regular consumers may not have been in their dna, but I've been using the business chat/phone/email support through Google Apps, and they have always been top notch. While their answers weren't always what I wanted to hear, that was because of Google policy, versus the reps themselves. Most all of which have been very knowledgeable and human over the years versus most all of the other support channels I've used for companies other than Apple of course. However, there is an enormous amount of more consumers than business customers, so no idea how that support will scale, and if the consumers will get the same level of expertise as business but will be interesting to find out.

The cost of support has to come from somewhere -- is either Amazon or Google generally cheaper for cloud computing? (I know ~nothing in this area). I could definitely imagine a market for both a cheaper service that's lacking support and a more expensive one that offers increased support.

With that said, with Amazon's efficiency in logistics, I could definitely imagine them implementing support at a negligible cost.

Amazon.com’s support is so terrible, even for those easy consumer questions I sometimes have. Their AWS support is amazing though.

Support is something you pay extra for, usually some fixed percentage of the total cost of service.

I'm also going to chime in that I've contacted Google Support for GSuite, Project Fi & the Google Store and always had a great experience.

Enter Google Duplex.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com