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Comment by vortico | Hacker News Reader

This would be completely avoided if the service they used had good support. This is most important considering when choosing a service: Can non-standard issues be fixed quickly? Can I build a professional relationship with the company so I can ask them things that don't fit a typical "customer support" pipeline? Vimeo has great support and appear to be run by humans with emotions. Youtube basically doesn't have support. It is entirely machine-run like Apple, some national banks, your cable service, etc.

A litmus test for determining whether a company has sufficient "support" is to check whether the following conversation is possible:

"I really appreciate your service X!"

"Thanks, means a lot. We're glad you like it!"

If the response is "We'll pass that onto the team!" it's okay, but not great. If the response has the jist "This message is miscategorized", you're in trouble. If there's simply no channel to send that message, you're screwed.

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There's nothing about Apple, banks or cable companies that are entirely "machine run". In fact they're the exact opposite of Google in that they invest significantly in customer support.

Okay, then can you put me in contact with an Apple developer to discuss their software, or Apple to discuss a business deal, or a cable rep to negotiate a price? No, they're all too large for me to be worth their time, so I spend 98% of the time looking at a machine-served webpage or a machine on the other end of the telephone in their attempt to make me annoyed enough to drop my question. Those services are simply not profitable enough to justify the time spent talking to their customers. This is why I pay premium for services, which are often smaller with happy employees to communicate with me.

I have had good luck with Apple support treating me like a real person.

For example, I once called them about getting rEFIt and dual boot working on a Mac Mini, and the support guy did his best to figure out how to help me, even though it is definitely not supported and it is a very unusual configuration.

Was I talking to an Apple developer? No, but I'm not asking them to implement a new feature on my behalf, so I don't expect to.

YMMV.

I made a stupid mistake to do with iCloud and after talking to the support manager who wanted to help, but there were some technical details they weren't completely confident in discussing, I was able to talk to a software engineer and decide what to do withe possible recovery options.

You don't think that developers might have things to do other than answer your support queries?

I'm primarily talking about companies that require more than basic customer support, not users who need help installing iPhoto (since this is Hacker News by Ycombinator after all). If you build your company upon the assumption that your target operating systems work without interaction with the vendor, good luck! Even if you're a $1m revenue startup targeting iOS or Mac, you will run into a blocking issue and discover that all Apple employees other than support and PR are outright banned from communicating with external parties about their products. No Apple employees are allowed to participate in their own public forums except in exceptional circumstances, and their "developer support" team seems to only be capable of copy-pasting vaguely relevant links from apple.com. Compare this to companies like Mozilla, GitHub, and even Adobe, who allow developers to be open and honest about issues that companies and individuals bring up. Apple, Google, and Facebook are the worst. Microsoft is decent and is fairly receptive to "user companies" if the issue is important enough.

I will admit I was being a bit facetious.

I work in a company that sells B2B software for developers, and as developers we do sometimes talk directly to our customers, it's a lot faster having a person on each side debugging the problem.

But our software does cost upwards of $5000 per year, so they certainly pay for that level of support.

I do understand why Apple bans people from helping outside of official support channels. Imagine how annoying it would be if you were in support and talking to a customer who is now telling you that an Apple developer somewhere on the internet suggested you try some solution that didn't work or even made things worse.

No they do not have better things to do. Most developers should be required to spend time with support queries. They might get a better understanding of what they are building and a little more perspective.

I'm going to contradict my earlier comment and say that I agree with you.

At my old company, they made devs do 2 hours of support a week, that was frontline support, so we got all the bullshit queries.

It definitely helped resolve some common issues. For instance, we got a lot of support queries about people forgetting their password. There was a reset password option, but it wasn't large on the screen, so customers missed it.

I made a fix, so that if they got their password wrong, there was a nice big message with the forgot password link. We didn't have a single forgotten password query after that. It was a 10 minute fix.

There were a lot of other support queries that had easy fixes that didn't make it back to the devs.

> Okay, then can you put me in contact with an Apple developer to discuss their software

Yes, if you use one of the two "Technical Support Incidents" per year you get as part of the standard (paid) developer program:

https://developer.apple.com/support/technical/

There's also Radar (which despite its reputation as a black hole does reach engineers), and WWDC.

Can confirm that you can actually reach developers at Apple by contacting DTS (developer technical support). However, in my experience, the answer was either "sorry that's out of scope" or "can you please report this as a bug" or "this feature intentionally doesn't do what you want.

I once found a bug in Safari that affected reading LibreOffice's OpenGrok instance on iPads. I reported it to Apple, but eventually I managed to find the radar incident, then I was able to find the WebKit Safari commit where an Apple person fixed it.

I emailed him directly and he very nicely replied, though there wasn't anything he could do.

This all worked outside the Apple support system. Ironically, Apple probably have the best consumer support system out of anyone, and they are still not brilliant.

Do you know if they allow companies to purchase more than two?

Yes you can. "Additional TSIs are available for purchase in either a 2-pack for $99 USD or 5-Pack for $249 USD in the Code-level Support section in your account."

Thanks! Noted for later, I might need it.

"I'll take 5 2-packs please."

"Sure, we can just do two 5-packs."

"No, I'm trying to save three bucks here."

That Google doesn't provide support is a myth.

They provide one of the best support I've seen for G Suite. You can get somebody on the phone no matter the timezone and the issues I've had with G Suite thus far have all been fixed.

And Blender did mention that they had access to higher level support actually, due to their channel being popular. Support people however are often powerless and what happened to Blender seems to be human error.

People speak of Microsoft's support being good for example. Remember the Skype transition to Microsoft accounts? I lost half my address book in that transition, contacted their support and they kept insisting that it isn't true and that I might be having a second Skype account. After several attempts with different people, I couldn't get them to transfer me to somebody technical that can recognize this is a bug. I gave up eventually and lost Skype IDs of people I've know for a long time.

Microsoft's support is shit, it's as if it doesn't exist in some situations actually and yet people don't mention Microsoft as having poor support. Is that because you can get a dummy to read textbook replies back at you? I'll never know.

Support people however are often powerless

I don’t think it’s possible to label someone as support if they’re powerless.

That's what the company calls the team anyhow.

They can't call them "customer deflection team" :)

AS for the parents, I also have absolutely horrible experiences with Microsoft support, in fact last time I contacted them with a problem they hung up when they couldn't solve it.

If the service / product has limitations that need to be fixed (aka bugs), then support is powerless because it depends on the policies, the timeline, the priorities of the development team.

To give an example, also with G Suite, once upon a time when it was called Google Apps, I asked them to switch my primary domain to another domain — they couldn't because the feature wasn't implemented and they refused to manually change it, but they subscribed me to an early adopters program and several months later I got the feature available.

I am not sure I care about the hierarchy of the company I am working with. If I do have an issue that can not be resolved with a standard “look up in the issue database” method - I need to be switched to someone with the necessary skills to fix that for me.

That is mostly not the case with Google as it usually ends up in a situation where I am meeting a group of their lawyers instead.

"Comfort people"? "Though luck people"?

> That Google doesn't provide support is a myth.

Try getting support for anything that's not G Suite or Project Fi (which have arguably good customer support). Sometimes the "support" is just a link to the forums.

I interacted with their German hardware support twice and the experience was great.

I'm no expert, but maybe it's the free-to-use products that lack support.

Nitpick: Can we please stop saying "free-to-use" and instead say, for example, "paid-with-data"?

Nope.

Or "spyware"? The fact that it historically meant something else doesn’t make it less fitting in my opinion.

But that implies you don't (also) pay with data if you pay for the service, which is often not true

"Paid with data" sounds nominally accurate but misleading.

Suppose there were a paid mail service, and another free one with a billion users, and the paid service's spam filtering relied on the free one for accuracy. (Spammers can't very well spam a hundred thousand people without hitting at least a few thousand of the billion.) Would you say that the users of the free one pay with data? They do, but to me, the phrase "paid with data" suggests other data than just the spam you get and whether you click "this is spam" on a particular message.

It's not always true. Many things (often smaller things) are free to use and not paid with data.

There is Google One for all Google products. I used it and it was quite good.

Providing support doesn't mean hiring bunch of offshore low wage call center workers who patiently explains to you how to power plug cables and move mouse to click buttons on your side.

If something bad happens on their side and it does happens eventually, they must fix the problem by manually editing the system. If they don't allocate human resource for that task or their system is hard to edit by hand, they don't provide the support.

> Providing support doesn't mean hiring bunch of offshore low wage call center workers who patiently explains to you how to power plug cables and move mouse to click buttons on your side.

If 90% of you customers are phoning to complain the service is down and they can't reboot the modem because the lights are turned off because of the power cut, you can't have skilled support engineers dealing with them. Setting aside the money, the engineers would just go stir crazy and turn into BOFHs.

The trick is to either vet your customers, or enable a shibboleet protocol

Please restart your computer.

How do you propose filtering out the tech savvy vs. unsavvy folks needing support? I think a big problem with "tiered support" (shudder) is that the support folks on the 1st level are often less tech savvy than the people who actually need something fixed... but they deal with so many customers who don't actually have an issue to report that it makes it worthwhile.

Oh, the restart fixed youtube.com for you? Great! Have a wonderful day.

Really? Have you ever tried to use the G Suite admin console?

I'm not at all surprised that Youtube support is so rubbish though. The interesting thing is, if they had better support they wouldn't be in such a disastrous position now.

>They provide one of the best support I've seen for G Suite.

Of course. With G Suite, you are the customer.

On YouTube, you are not the customer. You are the product, whether you're a viewer or a creator. Advertisers are the customer.

You are not a 'product' you are a vendor and companies have to maintain good relationships with their vendors or they will lose them.

Curious of the ramifications of the fact that companies normally only have a handful of vendors relative to their employee size, but have tons and tons of "vendor" end-users.

It depends on the kind of business you're in. I work for a sales driven MSP and we have a ton of actually vendors in the normal sense of the word. We probably have more vendors than we have employees but I haven't counted. We spend less time maintaining out relationships with them than we do our customers but that's more because half of them are big impersonal companies like MS which don't require a lot of effort, just a little bureaucracy.

I think that Youtube is in a different situation in that their creators are mostly individuals who use Youtube because it affords them advantages that they can't get elsewhere. If that were to change, either with Youtube becoming less popular or another platform becoming good enough, Youtube would lose a lot of its video makers and that would lose them a lot of business. I don't think Youtube's problem is that they see creators as products so much as that in order to maintain their market position, they have to be all things to all people and they desperately want to automate their business. That means there's not going to be any policy that works for everyone that uses Youtube and no matter what they do, somebody is going to get screwed.

Not when you do not monitize your channel. At that point, you're not even a product.

In that case you're a loss-leader.

They provided me horrible support on Gsuite. It took nearly 2 months of badgering them to get them to fix an error on their end with setting up DKIM.

They refused to extend my trial at all while we were getting it sorted out.

I left Gsuite and immediately received much better support from Office 365. I left them for other reasons. I also get good support from Zoho and Fastmail.

Google has been the worst by far.

You think Microsoft has bad support, try raising a ticket with Citrix. You will regret ever being born.

The only great customer service I've experienced at Google is with Google fi. Which is exceptional. Everything else is "don't even bother"

> "Thanks, means a lot. We're glad you like it!" If the response is "We'll pass that onto the team!" it's okay, but not great.

Why rank them in that order?

Is your point that the representative should feel like part of the team?

The ideal case is that the representative is part of the team. Perhaps he/she is in the same office or actually a developer. But it's okay if they're in a different team as long as they can open a communication channel if needed to say, clear up some confusion of a docstring written deep into an SDK by a developer.

I have programmed my machine to serve you in the manner you appreciate.... We will be glad you like it...

> This would be completely avoided if the service they used had good support.

If Google wants to force monetization onto Blender then the response from a good support would be "we gonna force monetization onto Blender".

And your post wouldn't be about the bad support. It would be more like about the starving Google or the shortage of money/freedom on the Internet.

So there is no business point in the good support.

The primary reason seemed to be misunderstanding, misinterpretation, and the long delay between Youtube's eventual resolution.

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