Leaving Google Fi
jasonatwood.io
jasonatwood.io
People have lots of criticism of Amazon, some I even agree with, but working here[0] one of my favorite little cultural things is that customers can and do email Jeff when stupid things happen. And Jeff reads them. Every now and then he'll forward one of them to a senior VP with a simple "?" added to it.[1]
That question mark indicates two things: that you have 24 hours to explain how this terrible customer experience happened, and that not long afterwards you'd better have a plan for how it isn't possible for this kind of problem to happen again. A lot of incredible changes have been made based on those question marks.
Google does not have such a customer-obsessed culture. So bad things like this happen and then nothing seems to change. Next week, it will happen again. Because (in my view) Google is an ideas-first culture, not a customer-first culture. Those ideas have rocketed them to success but I wonder if it can sustain them indefinitely.
[0](All my views are obviously my own and don't reflect speaking on behalf of the company)
[1]https://www.inc.com/bill-murphy-jr/customer-service-jeff-bez...
Maybe it worked that way a decade ago when the volume was lower. Now sending a Jeff message just goes to a specialized team that's only slightly more competent than whoever would otherwise handle the issue. Have had several times where no resolution was given at all.
I think the digital/sharing/on demand/fulfillment economy needs new definitions for these concepts.
It's absurd to think $160 billion in GMV is not important to the bottom line.
Amazon does about $30B a year in selling goods, and about $7B a year in AWS.
AWS does deliver higher profit margins and more operating income than the tiny margins on selling and shipping goods, so perhaps that's what you meant to say.
Sources: https://qz.com/1539546/amazon-web-services-brought-in-more-m... https://www.zdnet.com/article/in-2018-aws-delivered-most-of-...
Because I was using quarterly for both numbers, and their net sales of merchandise was over $200B (global) in 2018, meaning their net sales were almost 10X higher on products than AWS. Since it's a 10:1 margin, I continue to claim that it's ridiculous to think that AWS > selling physical products in terms of revenue.
In terms of income, however, it's not, they make a lot more on services than physical goods (as everyone not named Apple does)
I've not tried emailing several times.
Simply because Google has never considered its users "customers" in the first place
Astonishingly enough, even at moderate ad volumes there's still no customer service. You have to start spending truly astronomical amounts of money before an actual rep will attempt to help you with essentially any problem.
So to Google, "actual customer" means "someone spending six figures per month on advertising on our platform". As far as I am aware, even similar spending on other areas (GCP) doesn't warrant "actual customer" status.
It has worked so far, but as soon as the day their technical quality starts to flag, they are probably as good as dead.
My story: I bought the first google tablet. One of the incentives for ordering early was a credit in the google store. I used it to buy books. It turns out that when you depleted the credit enough and wanted to buy something that cost more than the remaining credit, you couldn't apply the credit and pay the rest with your card.
In my case, I had like $11 left on the credit, wanted a $14 book, and couldn't pay the final $3 with my card. For reals.
Some product manager looked at this complete fucking dumpster fire and said ship it. If you can't get the simple things right, like fully spending down a credit, you're not gonna get much right at all.
I usually end up with a gift card from some promo and it always seems to end up with $3.XX left on it. I want to use it up, but hardly anyone supports multiple card payments. Including Amazon.
What they do support, though, is buying a Amazon gift card of custom value, and making multiple payments with that.
I'm sure there is a "right" way to do it but I've never been able to make it work as I want on the first try.
Become an actual paying Google customer[0] and you'll get a real person. Of course, the issue here is slightly different. The author clearly did get to talk to many real people (being a Fi customer), but they got stuck on some other problem.
As the other commenter noted, Google does not have a customer-first or even customer-top-10 priority and it shows, again and again.
In my experience those meetings have the goal of explaining you how to use the product. If the issue really is that something doesn't work, it's not something sales people can do anything about.
That said after I started working at the place I work now I've actually experienced two Google engineers come out to us for a meeting to help us troubleshoot issues with Google Cloud.
Didn't help much but I was still really suprised so I feel I should mention it.
I also got some support on mail, IIRC once somewhat great, once clueless or downright actively trying to avoid helping.
And don't get your hopes too high, while we are small (<2000 employees) we are driving driving adoption of cloud for other companies.
The could not.
Never buying another Google product again.
I don't think it's just that. I believe that Google is used to having captive faceless optionless voiceless customers, of it's search and ad platform from whom it derives most of us revenue, that most other kinds of customers don't matter.
Monopolies don't care about anything except maintaining monopoly momentum.
The occasional complaint by a paying customer is barely a paint scratch on a business surface the size of a small planet.
1. emailing "Jeff" amounts to emailing a central triage team, which doesn't necessarily sound better than emailing, say, a well-organized, decentralized support team where the customer knows more immediately who is capable of addressing their particular problem.
2. everyone who works at Amazon is deeply scared of Jeff. fear is a motivator, but maybe it's not the best motivator.
3. sending someone in an organization a "?" is not actually very helpful. there's very little information there.
4. it sounds like people within Amazon are fighting fires and the guy at the top is the one with the torch. and that seems to work ok. but, that would seem likely to create a haphazard organization and products that are not insanely great. strong, insanely great design is not prioritized.
As an anecdote I had a good experience with Microsoft too.
Issue: standalone MS Office 2019 didn't show the update button, didn't find something online. Called support thinking, oh no, but it was pleasant:
- after quick waiting period contact with representative
- one or two min. standard talk then support concluded there was an issue indeed
- on hold for one or two minutes
- then problem was fixed via remote app, didn't take long
The only thing I disliked was that support tried to call my office at 3 am and then was confused I wasn't there even though I had to enter my timezone in the support form.
Hope they'll fix it before they lose customer trust? Hasn't it been a decade or more now? They do. Not. Care. As long as the money keeps coming in. They are scum.
No it's not.
I've started to receive Spam & Phishing on the email alias I exclusively use for Amazon shopping. The emails include my full name as written in my Amazon account. I've informed Amazon support about this and asked them when, why and with whom they shared my account details. They replied, saying that they had their "specialists" look at the email I had forwarded, and that it was phishing (it wasn't, it was an "invitation" to join an amazon-review-for-free-product site) and that I should ignore it. I once again reached out to tell them that this wasn't what I asked, and that they apparently had/have a data leak. Guess what: no reply.
Amazon doesn't care either. Now, that might be different in the US, but Germany's Amazon support is terrible. I get that hiring people in Germany is expensive, but it's just annoying when you have to communicate with people that don't have a solid grasp of the language / use some low quality auto translate to handle your case.
Once not too long ago I came across this article: https://consumerist.com/2013/06/18/amazon-cancels-my-6000-or...
I thought it was interesting and amusing, but filed it away in my head and forgot about it.
Then, one day, I got an email something to the effect of "fax photocopies of your drivers license and credit card or we, Amazon, will shut down your Amazon account permanently. Do not send emails, only fax, to X number."
At first I naturally thought it was spam. However, I kept getting systematic emails of this sort, with a date attached to them. It seemed weird for spam to be so deliberate, and as phishing attempts go, also sort of weird. There also seemed something strange about the content of the emails that made me think it might be serious.
So I called Amazon customer support (totally independently of anything in the email), and they said "Yes, that's a real email. You need to respond to it or they will shut down your account." I was puzzled by this, because nothing unusual had happened from my end. So, after talking to someone who made it clear they knew nothing about it other than that it was real, I asked to speak to a supervisor.
This supervisor sort of chuckled and said that the email was from the security division, that customer support knows nothing about them, that they cannot access anything about why I was getting the email, and that this division only communicates via fax, including with customer support. So basically I was being threatened to have my Amazon account shut down for a reason Amazon couldn't explain, because they themselves can only communicate with the people who know via fax, and I can only communicate with them via fax.
So I figure, ok, fine. I search out an office supply store (because I can't use work fax for personal business, and don't have a fax machine). I send them photocopies of my drivers license and credit card. I make sure it's completely visible, and include information on the cards in the fax, in text.
A few days later I get an email saying "we received your fax, but the photocopy wasn't legible enough." I was like WTF??? because it could not have been more legible. Also, any info not legible (even though it strains credulity to be considered illegible) was in the fax. So I tried again.
Again I receive a similar email saying "we received another fax but again it's illegible." I called customer support again, and again they threw up their hands and said they can't communicate with that division either.
At this point I gave up because what was I going to do? Amazon's own customer service can't even communicate with this shadowy fax-only communicating security division, I know nothing about why my account is being shut down, there's no recourse or appeal, and when I try to comply, I capriciously am told it's not sufficient.
About a week later my account gets shut down.
About that time I remembered the article, which was eerily similar to my experience. So nothing had changed in those years.
I kept my materials (email printouts, including the faxes); I think I still have them, but am not sure as we moved in the interim.
The whole experience convinced me Amazon simply has zero incentive to care about customer service after an experience like that (which apparently is not the first time this has happened).
- Prime Exclusive Items was the big one. Amazon arbitrarily selects everyday items that people regularly order like diapers and razors and Blu-ray movies and marks them "Prime Exclusive", meaning you can't order them without a Prime subscription at any price from Amazon. This isn't just Prime exclusive pricing, and it's usually not even being sold cheaper than other retailers. It's literally Amazon just saying "f--- you for not having Prime, shop elsewhere!" And often, I've done just that. This has been going on for years, Amazon has not so much as commented on the practice despite massive forum threads about how arbitrary and punitive it is.
- Annoyingly complicated return mechanics. Around Christmas I bought a thing, and then bought a better version of it, both on Amazon. This was a Blu-ray set, so a small item, and it was shipped and sold by Amazon. I was confident I could return it because I'd seen all the ads about free returns at Kohl's. But it turns out, only select items can be returned at Kohl's, even if they're, you know, small items sold by Amazon like a Blu-ray. I had to pitch a fit to get a return label to drop it off at a UPS store, because the Amazon guy couldn't do a return at the Amazon return desk at Kohl's, when the only reason I was returning it was because I bought an even more expensive version on Amazon. Amazon has half a dozen return options, and it's a toss up which one will be available for the given product ID you want to return and how much it will cost to do so. If I buy from Walmart, I can just take it to a Walmart store and it's done.
My reason for leaving Prime was that I was buying more stuff from 3rd parties who had free shipping for all than from Amazon or Prime 3rd-party sellers.
Also it started costing me a lot to just click the default buy option and I was having to do CSI-level due diligence on every order if I didn't want to end up with a counterfeit and/or pure scam. Several items I ordered were just straight up fraud that required annoying customer service interactions.
Losing the 5% credit card discount seemed painful until I realized that I buy 30-50% less stuff I don't really need now. Or that buying elsewhere I save much more than 5%. I'm surprised to be saying it, but I've returned to eBay for a lot of purchases and been pleasantly surprised.
I did accept the 30 days they just gave me, so I have Prime again for the moment, but will not let it renew/charge. I'm doing some household crud so having one day shipping on cheap crud for a month is probably going to be somewhat helpful as long as I didn't pay for it to begin with.
Prosecutions need to happen for this kind of thing. They really do. Start with the frontline and work your way up the chain, ordering a frontline employee to commit a crime with a policy document is a crime for all who wrote and approved the document.
If a google customer engaged in fraud of a similar against google there's no doubt google have the option of involving the police and getting a prosecution. A corporation is people who are all responsible for their actions.
Their records show that first phone as delivered. They think their device has been stolen from them. Then the 'fraudster' tries to get another device sent to them - which is 'returned' under suspicious circumstances.
All the delays might be a police investigation they aren't allowed to talk about.
And finally now the 'fraudster' wants a refund of all moneys paid too! Who are they - they've stolen one phone, tampered with another, and want a full refund to boot!
Packages get lost for all kinds of reasons. If you ship things regularly, it happens occasionally. You open a case with Fedex, the driver gets a week to find the package. If he can't, the package is declared lost, and the insurance on the package is paid out.
You're ridiculous if you think Google is calling the police for every lost package. What would they even base a case on? Fedex tracking of a package delivered without a signature? Geez. The cops would just ignore their calls.
In reality they never order crimes in writing, though. They say your metrics need to be above a certain level to keep your job, and the only way to boost your metrics is to commit a crime. See: Wells Fargo fake account scandal.
My mom spent the last half-decade of her career (at a hospital) working large amounts of unpaid overtime because her boss made it clear that was the only way to keep her pension.
And that's got to be how Google can, intentionally or not, get away with such blatant fraud, the pool of people able to escalate is kept very small.
1st chat with agent
Them: Sorry to hear that, we can black list the phone but you must message us from the member's account
(I am the sole payer on the group plan, paid for the phone, etc.)
Me: Okay, fine, I will contact you from chat on her google account
2nd chat with agent:
Them: Sorry, we cannot blacklist a phone on a group plan if you are not the primary account holder, please contact us on the primary account.
3rd chat with agent:
Them: The phone is registered under another Google account
Me: No, see these case numbers, I refuse to end this support until this is dealt with, I am the primary account holder. Let's blacklist this phone so that it cannot be used by another carrier.
Them: Our specialist says the phone must be active on Google Fi to blacklist it.
(The phone's battery has died at this point, 90 miles away from where it was last)
Me: Does that mean it has already been transferred to a different carrier, or is it offline?
Them: The specialist says that the phone must be active on Google Fi
Me: What does that mean? Can you ask the specialist if the battery is dead that means it's not active?
Them: I cannot say.
Me: What is even the point of blacklisting a phone if it doesn't work the moment someone pops the SIM card out or turns the phone off? Nevermind. I would like to escalate to a supervisor.
Them: Okay
Escalation??
Still, I hate Verizon & AT&T so much, and I travel internationally to quite a few countries a year, so I'm sticking with them for service. But I'm far from a net promoter.
Maybe voice is a better option than chat, at least in my experience.
I can't wait and hope that one day Amazon takes over Google somehow. SO far, my experiences with Amazon support has been outstanding. If an item doesn't arrive in the "prime" 1 day shipping window, they immediately ship a new item right away and gets delivered the next day and simply ask you to return the item if the first one shows up eventually. They have done this for a knife set which was over $300 in value and the first item never showed up, so they sent me another one the next day. Other times when I have contacted Amazon support, they have been amazing too. If a delivery is late by even a day, they offer me a month of free prime shipping. And this is simply via chat, not even phone support.
Google should take a few lessons from Amazon and at least offer decent support for their paying customers and developers who help flourish their play store considering they take 30% cut of the developer earnings.
I mean, this is the history of Google in a nutshell. They deserve to be systematically dismantled by Amazon for this alone.
Edit: Someone downvotes my experience? Wut?
I kid.
HN does actually have better customer support than Google.
[1] If you find yourself doing this you are taking arguing on the internet entirely too seriously.
> Edit: Someone downvotes my experience? Wut?
This conversation is about Google. That's like saying, "Costco has great customer support though," in a conversation about travel agents.
Product did not arrive on time, spoke to support rep.
Rep said that it was delayed because it was coming from overseas, which the tracking information easily disproved - it was coming from Illinois. Illinois is not overseas. When told this, the rep accused me of making things up, despite having the link.
The rep then said that it had been delayed because of weather in my town. I live in this town. It was sunny the entire day in question, and the day before. When I pointed this out, he flat out called me a liar.
I then asked to speak to a supervisor, because I had been lied to twice at this point. The rep immediately began stonewalling me, and for the next 45 minutes, I became increasingly impatient with his behavior, and told him that if I did not have a supervisor in the next 5 minutes, I would be ending the chat and sending the transcripts to someone else at Amazon and following up.
At this point, he made a thinly veiled threat to ban me (I have thousands of dollars of digital content tied to my account), and I immediately ended the chat and sent the entire log to anyone and everyone associated with Amazon that I could think of.
As a customer, on the other hand, Amazon has among the best service I've ever received.
People should stop being surprised that Google’s side projects that don’t even make a blip on the earnings report are not to be used.
Don’t build on google APIs unless it’s Android and don’t make them your phone carrier.
A credit card chargeback bans you from Google Pay/Wallet/Android Pay/Google merchant services/google shopping basket/gBilling/whatever it's called now and all services requiring payment. I think you can still use gmail/youtube/whatever.
Something nice like $10k per violation.
The exception is if you pay good money to advertise with them.
With regards to consumer products. It‘s probably not possible to support 2.5b+ users with humans. Voice assistants are getting there though. 5 to 7 years maybe?
Really random aside incoming:
I once was only able to quit my League of Legends video game addiction because I gave my account away that I had so much vested in (skins, all characters, rune pages) by basically messaging a random stranger, changing the account to their email, going to a random password generator site, changing the pw copy+pasting the password without me looking, and sending it off -- in effect "suspending myself".
I was unnerved for a couple of weeks, but eventually, the itch to play died off. I tried starting up a few times, but it wasn't worth it especially knowing how much time I sank into it previously.
I wonder if I got myself permanently suspended from Google, (I want to quit Google given how unethical they have become) would I rid myself from them for good?
Stop being so helpless, "hacker" community...
If alcoholism, luckily it is taken "more seriously" than video game addiction. Although now as I get older I just realize addiction is a trait we all have the propensity for, and some people just manifest it in healthy ways where as some of us in not so healthy ways. I have people in my family that were compulsive gamblers, alcoholics, workaholics, and drug addicts, sometimes a combination of all four -- all different forms of addictions. Sometimes I view my video game addiction in that light: "well at least it wasn't drugs or alcohol" but, who knows, maybe in 50 years we will find out that it harmed me just as much.
- Posteo.de
- Runbox
- Mailbox.org
- Mailfence
As a Gmail user, you’re probably not as concerned about five eyes surveillance as some others may be. If that’s true, then add Fastmail into the above mix.
I'd chargeback Google in a heartbeat if I had even minimal reason to do so.
I really need to be able to walk into a store or physical location to talk to an actual person. Plus the accounts of Fi customers getting locked out or if you can’t use Google Payments, you can’t pay for Google Fi.
I had to pester him a couple of times, file a BBB complaint and finally ask Google for the registered officer of the company since I was literally going to sue. That's when they filed a "remorse exception" that actually helped.
Also - ask for a "Specialist" - they're the only ones who can help. Every other guy is a "supervisor" at Google Fi support and they can't do anything. Had to call in more than 30 times and exchanged upwards of 60 emails. It's a shame.
I called up customer service to complain about poor service twice. Nothing happened. I just don't have the patience or time to follow up. Kudos to Jason for bringing up this issue. Also, here is a conversation between me and a friend in Mountain View who works for a large company there :D.
Me: I have Project Fi. Let me call you back using WhatsApp. Him: Oh I have Project Fi too and was going to tell you the same thing!
The call quality is absolutely terrible when both ends are using Project Fi!
Down the list is their relatively cheap service for undemanding users (people who use less than a couple GB of data per month). I'm pretty sure I could just go get a better unlimited plan for slightly more (with more phone choices) tomorrow. But I wouldn't really use the extra service and so I'm happy to get the extra $100/yr or whatever I'm saving.
That being said, I've had extremely mixed support from Fi. The support is responsive, human and polite. But for issues almost exactly like this one, Fi's support staff is entirely unable to cope. In our case, Fedex had even taken a photo of the delivery (which was the wrong house). Fedex needed some kind of shipping code from google to release the photo so we could prove it's not the same house (or at least figure out who had our new phone).
Not a single person at Fi could provide the code to Fedex.
We escalated 3 times and it took about a month to resolve, but in the meanwhile we were charged for a phone we didn't receive, and the clue as to where it went was readily available.
Fi did eventually send us a new phone and everybody was terribly polite, but anybody else would have just noticed the phone hadn't been activated, and sent a new phone immediately (and if the phone were to be activated contact local PD).
It took dozens of chats, emails, calls and so on, and each time the support person on the other end would lose the script and try to resolve our issue with some non-sequitur that wasn't solving the problem.
It's not the worst customer service experience we ever had, but it was down there. The only reason we didn't pull the plug was we were about to travel outside of the U.S. and having service that just "works" was a big part of our planning.
It’s not ideal, but its an alternative to Google Fi
I'm disappointed to hear that Google's customer service is bad, but when I signed up I wasn't even sure if they had a customer service department. T-Mo's support was OK, but for the past few months I've been living without it just fine.
When I moved to the US I agonised for months about getting a local number vs. just keep paying for a monthly UK Three sim forever.
T-Mobile One accounts get this in 120+ countries, works like a charm. But I've done the math and renting a USB hotspot or buying a 1-month SIM works out to be cheaper for my needs, and I can avoid having to confirm my phone has the correct network support in some countries.
The first is I worked at Google when the whole "real names" saga of Google Plus was going on. The worst part about that was if some algorithm decided your name wasn't real, it could block your entire Google account. You'd lose access to GMail, Drive, everything. I don't know what bright spark PMs, lawyers and executives signed off on that one but it was insanity. As a result I would strongly recommend against any family or friends use any G+ features in case the Real Names bot zapped their accounts. This was ultimately fixed but it should never have shipped that way. Ever.
The fact that disputing a charge with you credit card provider like this could result in you losing your GMail, Drive, Android developer account, etc means you should absolutely under no circumstances use that service, ever, period, no exceptions.
Don't get me wrong: I like GMail and Drive. I use them all the time. Thing is, I want to keep using them so they get firewalled from every other service that I use.
The second is something Eric Schmidt said a lot. He didn't say it first but he's well known for saying it, and that is that more revenue is the solution to every problem.
That's both true and not true. It's true in a high margin business (like search). If you look at Google financials 10+ years ago there was a point where the profit per employee was nearly $1m. It's less now but it's still pretty significant. Low margin businesses are not in its DNA.
Let me repeat that and make it clear: Google simply cannot compete in a low margin business.
Personally I learned this the hard way as I worked on Google Fiber until that was quietly shelved (by "advancing our amazing bet" no less). Fiber services are capital intensive. They require strict financial discipline and planning. There are far more moving parts to this kind of business than many people realize. Comcast, Verizon and AT&T have gotten very good at this sort of business. Google didn't (and IMHO never will).
I put Google Fi firmly in this camp. I also put making hardware at scale in this camp (compared to, say, Apple who is second to none when it comes to logistics, procurement, financing and supply chain management).
Google's DNA is hard technical problems at scale with no UI like an almost blank page with a text box and a search button. The infrastructure behind that is unbelievably good.
But telecommunications? Tied to my Google account? Sorry but that's a hard pass for me.
That reminds me of Intel. The addiction to high margin microprocessors and a captive customer base had two effects. a) Intel doesn't know how to play with customers that have a choice. b) Customers with a choice avoid designing in Intel solutions like the plague. Over the long haul Intel is a much smaller company than they would be otherwise.
Here is a good one. In the late 80's Intel fucked over Panasonic badly enough that Panasonic put Intel in their prohibited vendors list. I worked for a group that managed to get Panasonic in as a customer. And then Intel fucked them again. And back on the list they went.
Google has the same mindset that Intel does. They can't process the ramifications of their business practices on future business opportunities.
Here's where that really hurts them (IMHO). Google, as a whole, has a very short attention span. A lot of things at Google began as bottom-up engineering-led projects, the poster child for which is probably GMail. This seems to work really well for things that are engineering problems. I think it works incredibly badly for a bunch of other things though.
We, as engineers, tend to get bored. There are all sorts of quotes for this in software development like after you finish the first 90% you need to finish the second 90% (I forget who said this).
I see project after project come out of Google that might be promising but it gets abandoned as the talent moves on to the next hot thing until finally it's killed. The cost of this, as you say, is paid by future projects.
The classic counterexample to me is Apple Pay (vs Google Checkout/Google Wallet/Google Pay/Android Pay/Whatever it's called now). Every few weeks Apple announces some new bank or merchant or country is launched. Over years now they've slowly been building out this ecosystem. Google just doesn't have the commitment, focus and attention for this schlep [1], which is why they'll lose. Apple does.
Apple has their failures too (Ping anyone?) but it's fair to say Apple really does put more wood behind fewer arrows [2].
[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/startupideas.html
[2] https://www.techradar.com/news/internet/page-more-wood-behin...
I don't know who said it either, but I heard an alternate phrasing: "The first 50% of the project takes 90% of the time. But the second 50% takes the other 90% of the time."
> The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time
I mean, if it starts with "The first 90% of the work takes 50% of the time ..." how do we maximize the unexpectedness of the punch line?
Cargill's original formulation, as Cletus quotes from Wikipedia, is best, I guess.
I had the same type of shenanigans with their customer service. Eventually after calling every day for about two weeks I managed to find a competent supervisor that managed to follow up on what he said.
Since then I moved my main number back to ATT and I keep a Google Fi account open for my international travels. I only ever use Fi outside the US and I pause the account whenever I'm in the US.
GoogleFi is a good deal financially but if there is something I learned after years dealing with shady companies is that you don't want any of those shady companies have any leverage by keeping something essential such as your phone number under control as a leverage.
Sadly I saw exactly the same type of issue with their Google Cloud customer service. I really think that Google employee still think they work for the best company in the world and that people cannot wait to do business with them. They need to get out of their little bubble.
I think there are two major issues: first, Google doesn't really care all that much about Google Fi. It's just them keeping their foot in the water for later, not a major focus right now, so it doesn't get the attention and care it really needs. Second, Google Fi is honestly great, right up until the point it isn't: if you ask around the community, there's a strong split between people like me, who have had nothing but good experiences, and people like Jason, who have an amazingly awful experience. It's basically that Google Fi is thoroughly buggy: you're fine as long as you stay in the happy path, but the moment you get to something untested (stolen phone, FedEx loses shipment, the discount fiasco a couple weeks ago), everything goes to hell.
I've stuck with Fi so far because the pain I've hit has been negligible for me [1], but I currently assume that it's just a matter of time before I get burned in some capacity. It's a trade-off that makes sense, given how I use my phone, but it's annoying having that in the back of my mind.
[1]: The one thing they did flub was the Pixel 3 discount a couple weeks ago, wherein they accidentally charged and then refunded the entire value of a Pixel 3. Because I pay my bill by credit card, and because that card is nowhere near its credit limit, this was just two lines on a bill for me that I never really have to think about. But for those who pay their bill by debit, or who were near a limit, or whose bill rolled over between the charge and the refund, that was also a horrible experience that angered them about Fi. Those kinds of stories have been par for the course.
Usually humans fix those outliers, but if things are just too stuck on rails, there may be no fixing derailment.
It's like even if a CSR individually has excellent intentions and believes there will be a follow-up, it's not actually on any scripted recovery plan, so it just won't happen.
While dealing with a fairly technical sms issue, I was pleasantly surprised how far up the food chain I got when the first agents couldn't help me. The biggest speed bump is usually getting through the first round of questions that filter out the kruft and grandma-issues, but I understand the necessity
edit: I realized after I wrote this that most of my experiences were during the Project Fi phase, before it went full Google, so theres that...
For some things you can opt out of arbitration, but not for others.
The online fi related contract (which I obviously not the actual carrier contract) I found is: https://fi.google.com/about/device-protection-terms/ which indeed has a mandatory arbitration clause.
It's high time that the arbitration act gets dramatically scaled back. I don't have problems with reasonably sized companies agreeing to arbitration in contracts with each other, but it doesn't work for end users and employees.
However, given that it takes years for any case to settle, if you could even find how to start the process in the first place, that ain't happening.
I am former Fi user, started back when it was a "Project". My Nexus 5X's battery swelled but was still working and had a full charge, they wanted me to ship it back to them which I morally felt I couldn't do, and replace it with a generally low quality Lenovo Motorola phone that was reported to have serious WiFi problems, negating that major part of their business proposition where it uses any accessible WiFi for data and voice if possible. Felt stupid for having paid them $5/month for device replacement coverage.
The G+ real names debacle prompted me to remove as much exposure to Google as possible, now I'm down to Google Groups which can only be had from them. They're just too risky for individuals to depend on.
At least with data-funded services, I can choose to stop any time. I'm never on the hook via some form of contract.
Basically I signed up for AT&T home internet, and it DID NOT WORK, period. It was unusably slow and cut out constantly. I couldn't use it. I told them so within a week, they sent someone to fix it, they failed to fix it, I told them I'm canceling. I proceeded to return their router and switch to a different provider and immediately got fine service.
But AT&T didn't cancel my service. They said I couldn't because I was locked in for a year or some arbitrary time period. It's been five years now so some details escape me-- but the key thing is that after some months they claimed I owned them $600, and I said I wasn't paying when I never got anything from them, end of story, goodbye.
My bank took their side on the part of the bill that had already been paid for that first month. I explained what had happened, and the bank "talked to AT&T" who no doubt showed them a sheet of paper with the words "He signed up for our internet and we installed it," and my bank said there was nothing to do. So that first month was a sunk cost.
But I never paid that $600. Simple as that. They forwarded it to a collections agency, I ignored it. I told them, "don't call me: I will never pay you."
It went on my credit report and my credit dropped about 40 points, making no appreciable difference to me. I ignored it. Over time the credit report recovered, and somehow after about four years AT&T withdrew the whole thing without any further action from me. It's no longer on my credit.
Moral of the story: if you can withstand a small dent in your credit, just tell MEGACORPXYZ to fuck off.
Sad that this is what you have to do these days, but it's better than no options at all.
If they finally get paid, it won't be $600 - it'll be $600 + $1500 of interest at 55% APR and $1200 of fees for letters, visits, phone calls etc.
If they willfully violate this non-contact demand, they can be on the hook for $1,000 in statutory damages. They can also be on the hook for disruption they caused at a work-place, or emotional of physical distress.
https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/damages-fdcpa-violat...
If a debt-collector is getting overly aggressive, send a certified letter to their headquarters explicitly invoking the FDCPA and demanding that they not contact you further. Document the letter, and save the certified letter receipt.
If they contact you further, or harass your family, document it thoroughly and then speak to a lawyer about filing a lawsuit.
It looks like it has different protections, but gets at the same general concept.
When I moved into my current place, a collection agency (agencies?) kept sending people over looking for the deadbeat who lived here previously. They would tell me why they were there but never from what agency so there was no way to preemptively make them stop.
After a few months of telling them that the previous person moved out it died down. But every four or five months another one shows up. Presumably because the debt has been sold to a different company.
This has been going on for five years.
It's great that you know the law. They know it, too.
They don't. Or, if they do, they're actively violating the law by refusing to tell you what agency they were from. It's definitely an effective tactic to make enforcement of the law hard to impossible, but they are not working within the bounds of the law.
From: https://www.creditkarma.com/advice/i/debt-collection-rights/
> You have the right to ask for the debt collector’s name.
> As noted above, debt collectors are also required to furnish the name of their company or agency.
They cannot (legally) refuse to provide you the name of the collections agency.
If they do so, I'm not even sure how you would be able to make a payment. If this were to happen, I might try to imply (without explicitly stating) that I wanted to make a payment, and then ask who I need to contact to figure out how to write a check. I'd then use whatever address/contact information they gave me to start researching them.
But I was thinking somewhat along those lines, take a picture of the perp while keeping one hand close to my concealed gun. And you could well be generally right, I'm pretty sure from some of the snail mail I get or that shows up in USPS Informed Delivery that some of the past residents of my current location are dodging bills, but no one's every showed up to my house, nor have I ever heard of it happening around here.
I ended up having to call my bank to get a refund. It was a very frustrating experience and I really wanted to like Google fi.
* The dependence on rigid processes. Customer support reps are cogs in a machine with no ability to override automated actions or to circumvent when processes go awry.
* Google does absolutely zero of the inventory or shipping. It's contracted out to Ingram Micro. Anyone in the IT world who has dealt with them knows they screw up a lot. Not terribly, but unless you have a direct line to them, you're hosed.
Combine these two factors and then add some typical call center metrics focus and nobody is empowered or interested in going to bat for you when the process falls apart.
Their support is bad. I would not recommend using any of their products. I would not choose to work there because I cannot imagine it is any better internally.
Unfortunately, my experience with Fi customer service has been no better than Atwood's. Basically, if you can't solve a problem on your own, you're out of luck. To be fair, I've had terrible service with other providers, too (I haven't tried Apple but for technical reasons the iPhone would not work for me).
But it's not going to help their brand or encourage others who are too tied to Google to sign on to services like Fi, and if not with this guy, in general it'll encourage people to find other lines of work.
I suspect so many people are sufficiently tied more or less to Google that the pool able to do chargebacks is small enough it won't prompt Visa/Mastercard on down to take action.
I've noticed a pattern that many companies have adopted. First they silo the customer service division usually culminating in remotely locating the customer service frontline. They then cut ties between any part of the company and rank and file customer service workers, linking them only to their supervisors. In the final step the supervisors are prohibited from forwarding customers anywhere. Then customer service becomes like a separate company within the company. I've seen this structure over and over and the companies with the worst service always have this shape.
You call. You get a call center. They can't transfer you anywhere. You ask for a supervisor. They try to tell why you don't need one. You insist. You get one. The supervisor takes your call. You discover they can't fix your problem. You ask who can. They can't say. You ask if there's anyone else you can talk to. They say no. You ask for their manager. They say you can't talk to them. You ask for corporate level customer relations. They don't have that number. On and on and on...
My theory is that structuring customer service into such a separate silo actually breeds a combative relationship between customer service and company leadership. Without more contact between the people building and servicing the products and frontline customer support people, customer service just looks like a big fat cost center. No useful information makes it out (by design) and year after year it's just a big red line item for everyone else. Of course this leads to a perpetual push to decrease costs in customer service which leads to really regressive behavior. Too many customers are need free replacements tighten the grip on all comps. Too many high level customer support people are still giving things away. Get rid of any high level customer support personnel. Could we save money with less supervisors? Yes but the one's we've got are already overworked. Well, track the number of times an employee allows customers to escalate and create disincentives.
In this way customer service actual becomes the opposite of what it's meant to be. Instead of enabling customers or helping them it becomes a hindrance. It becomes a wall that protects the rest of the company especially the leadership from having to have any contact with the unwashed masses.
I think the remittance expiration is b.s. because the remittance period never began because the buyer never took possession of the goods.
If just 0.1% of them had some issue with their app, that would be 1.5 million phone calls.
There are ~3 people working on the messaging app usually. Thats half a million calls each. Thats 52 years to answer all those calls!
The TL;DR is that you will never make a bugfree app, and the remaining bugs will always leave some unhappy customers. At some point the team needs to decide that they need to move on to making new features rather than bugfixing, and that point is well before they start talking to random users on the phone about rare bugs. Sorry - the app isn't for you - go use another app or another phone.
And what good are new features of you can't even send a message in the first place? The solution was disabling RCS completely or, hard resetting the phone (uninstalling and or wiping messages did not fix anything).
It seems kind of systemic: defer support requests until exit/IPO, not your problem any more.
Culture is also a large part of it, it's embedded in telcos to such a degree that I and my parents use rather expensive and fairly slow AT&T DSL because its rock solid, every one of my friends and family who use cablecos for Internet have a tremendously higher rate of problems. Cablecos come from a culture where a customer or neighborhood losing connectivity for hours or a day or two wasn't the "end of the world".
Trusting your customer service teams to have a great degree of autonomy in solving issues can sometimes be really important.
It's a shame you never know whether a company has sucky customer service before you buy their services.
Now that said, the one major observation I see about Google, Apple, Amazon, Yahoo, etc. is that Google does not have a lead Architect for Google products and services. The company is certainly leading the charge with technology - yet there is no one taking the charge of bringing everything together.
This reminds me of the early days of Apple - remember the Newton? Wow a computer you could hold in your hand - and the tech community were all wowed - yet the consumer didn't understand what to do with it - they were not coders and until it did something it was just another piece of tech. Then 3Com came along and created the Palm Pilot - and the handheld computer took off.
That said - I believe this is why Google like Microsoft and Apple have such a customer service problem - they have simply become tech company - customers are just a part of their products and don't receive the attention of an advocate within the company's product development team.
Also, he mentioned he kept having to re-explain his situation to several representatives when calling them. I don't get why companies can't transfer the call and leave a note for the next agent...
Sometimes I feel like at some companies agents in general that just don't know, press a button to transfer you to a random agent in the queue (with some priority to skip over everyone else) instead of transferring to someone more specific or higher level. One reason that gives me this feel for sure is when they ask your name and details even though you already told someone else before being transferred.
I think a key thing that would make me happy with support is when transferring over to someone else they already have a description of your problem, account information so you don't have to explain over and over.
I had an issue with another provider (not Google) where you could text but couldn't make calls and got transferred to like 6 different agents then decided to give up and porting away as I felt like just a number to them. As a tech geek, I feel like something probably screwed up porting in the first place but I doubt a support rep on a phone would even have the tools to investigate a problem with like. I hate talking on the phone unless I have to. I rather try to figure it out myself or use online chat first.
Excerpt:
"Document everything. Write down dates, times, conversation points, who will do what and when. Get peoples’ names. Then if support drags on you can maintain some sanity and hold people accountable."
That's a gem of advice for anyone who needs to deal with an unresponsive customer service department in any nameless, faceless, and/or bureaucratic organization.
But, that being said, I wouldn't hold the lower-level people to be ultimately accountable... That's because they are usually not empowered to act by corporate policy, the proper infrastructure for action, internal politics, or any number of other company-imposed barriers...
Ultimately, what holds these companies to account, over time, is dwindling sales, the loss of profitability, and the migration of their customer bases to other companies...
Customers are always voting with their feet...
The author is right that it damages their entire brand. I’m now involved in advising large enterprises on their cloud strategy, and I still feel a tinge of bitterness saying anything nice about GCP!
>By law, a seller should ship your order within the time stated in its ads or over the phone. If the seller doesn’t promise a time, you can expect it to ship your order within 30 days... If the seller is unable to ship within the promised time, it must notify you, give a revised shipping date and give you the chance to cancel for a full refund or accept the new shipping date.
https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/0221-billed-merchandis...
Customers don’t differentiate branches of a company when thinking about brand identity.
Google Fi was running a special, buy the phone from Google Fi and you get $800 off of your bill. I bought the phone from Google. Not Google Fi. It took 3 months for them to figure out that I was never going to get that $800. Every rep that I spoke with except for the last one said, "it looks like you should get this money, we don't know why you aren't."
The benefits of Fi out weigh the shittiness of their customer support, or lack thereof. And none of the other carriers are any better. That's the only reason I am still a subscriber.
I ordered a new Pixel 3 as part of the Cyber Monday promotion, which was $600 for the phone with $200 in Fi credits. When ordering the phone, I accidentally used the pre-filled shipping address on Google's order form. This my mistake, but I noticed it quickly when I got the order confirmation email. The default shipping address went to my office address. My company had moved officers the month prior. The office was empty and unoccupied. I couldn't receive the phone there.
Before calling Google Fi, I called FedEx. FedEx quickly answered my call and pulled up my order. Typically, FedEx is able to re-route a package that is still in shipment. However, Google Fi has placed restrictions on the shipment which prevent recipients from changing the address. Only Google can update the address.
I called Google Fi and waited on hold for over two hours. This was around the holiday season, and Fi is a newish service, so I wasn't particularly annoyed by this. When I finally got ahold of someone and explained my mistake, they said they'd open a case with their shipping team, who would be in touch with me.
Two days later, no one had contacted me, so I used Google Fi's online chat feature. After waiting in line for an hour and a half, I was connected to someone. I explained the problem again, asked if there was any ETA. They said the problem was already escalated, nothing to do but wait.
Another two days later, no contact was made. I contacted Google again. I got the same answer. The ticket has been escalated to their shipping specialists, they will be contacting me.
At this point, FedEx attempted delivery of the package, which was rejected, since no company exists at the address. I contacted Google again. They said the shipping specialists would be getting in touch with me.
One week after this, FedEx noted a delivery exception, and that the package would be returned the sender. I contacted Google again. Now that the package is being returned to Google, could they cross-ship me a replacement phone to the correct address? No - I would need to contact their shipping specialists, who would be contacting me.
Several days later, I finally received email contact from the shipping specialists. This team immediately cancelled my order, without ever talking to me. They noted that the shipper had been unable to deliver the package, so they would refund me the cost of the phone.
Unfortunately, at this point, the Cyber Monday promotion had ended. The phone now cost $200 more, and the Google Fi credits had been reduced to $100. I asked Google if they would honor their previous pricing, since I had been trying to change the shipping address for several weeks. My message:
> Thanks for getting back to me. When I purchased the phone on Cyber Monday, there was a promotion, with the phone costing $599 and $200 in Google Fi Credits. Today, the price of the phone on the Fi shopping site is $799 with $100 in Fi Credits.
> The package with the phone waited in XXXXXXXXXX at FedEx's facility for a week, and I contacted Fi support several times to try and get the shipping address updated. Each time, I was told that the issue had been escalated to the Shipping Specialist team, but a week later, the package was returned by FedEx. If the address had been updated when I first contacted Fi support, then FedEx would have simply delivered the package the next day.
> Will Google Fi still honor the original price I paid for the phone?
Google's Response:
> Thank you for the response. If you happen to process another order, please let me know. I can escalate your case to my higher level of Support for approval for the promotion. I cannot guarantee that the request will be approved, but I will explain the why you did not receive the initial order in full detail. Please let me know if you have further questions.
So I did that. Ten days later, and fully one month after I ordered the phone, I finally heard back from Google:
> My name is Lee and I'm a higher level Specialist here with Google Fi. I'm working directly with our Promotions Team to determine your eligibility for our "Pixel 3 / 3 XL $400 Back" promotion that was ongoing from November 22nd @ 11:00 PM PT - November 27th @ 11:59 PM PT.
> After thoroughly reviewing your account, we have determined you are ineligible for an exception to this promotion.
> Per the promotion terms: "Limited time offer available from 11/22/18 11:00 PM PT through 11/27/18 11:59 PM PT, or while supplies last"
> Since your original order GS.XXXX-XXXX-XXXX was returned to shipper due to an incorrect shipping address, we are unable to provide an exception.
> We apologize for any inconvenience. If you have any questions, you can always reach us by replying directly to this email.
Every interaction with Google Fi took hours of time. None of them ever resulted in a positive experience. Google Fi was never able to do anything to help the situation. They could not update the address. They couldn't cancel the order and ship a new phone. They couldn't honor the original pricing. There was literally nothing there were ever able to do to help me recover from my mistake using an incorrect shipping address defaulted on the order phone.
The real reason to stick with Google Fi is: it's the only carrier (ok, MNVO) that requires 2FA for a SIM swap.
Should have just done a credit card charge back at this point.
TLDR: because the credit card billing address did not match the shipping address, the customer service representative refused to accept payment for a defective tablet which needed to be repaired. They insisted on mailing the tablet all the way back, and requiring that the tablet be mailed back again with a different shipping address.
https://outlookzen.com/2016/07/24/why-im-never-buying-htc-ag...
Some of those 'app based' credit cards let you change the billing address with just a tap of a button. It's particularly useful when you're away from home and the company won't ship to anywhere except the billing address.
Disclosure: I work for Google, but honestly I don't think it has particularly biased me to say nice things about Google Fi.
I also use Project Fi; I also ordered a Pixel3 when it went on sale last month. Fedex attempted delivery when I wasn't home; I had important meetings the next day and couldn't stay home again, so I used Fedex's "hold for pickup at Fedex Store" feature to re-route the package. This was a crucial mistake.
Fedex then refused to deliver the package to either my house or the store; they sat on the package for TWO WEEKS, all while their "Customer Support" lied to me about what the status was (It will be delivered EOD today; it's already been delivered; it's going to be held for pickup...etc).
In the end the only way to get them to deliver my package was to contact the shipper, Google. It was delivered two days later.
Because shipping is the seller's responsibility. If the courier loses the package, you can't do anything, it's the seller's problem. Only after the package was delivered to you does it become your problem.
What happened to the Google that made things that Just Work™?
- which light is on?
- none, device does not power on
- do you understand that is dead and wont power on?
- yeah but which led is blinking?
At this stage i hung up and went over to Amazon, luckily i have ordered the device through them, and after few clicks the replacement device was on its way.
Phone calls I believe get a per minute charge, SMSs are free and data is exactly the same rate you pay in the U.S.
It's been flawless. Literally as easy as driving between states.
Now I'm dreading a support call...
There are no sacred cows.
I repeat, there are no sacred cows.
I am waiting for the day when we will have Amzn Mail, Amzn Phones (I think they already tried this), some type of social media shopping clone hybrid thing that takes on Insta. And for the final nail in the coffin, Amzn Search.
What's shocking is that these companies are the ones with the capital to hire the best and the brightest (alongside say GS and other IBs as well as MBB etc., say what you will, but the folks that work there are actually smart even though they're not engineers). What does this say about future prospects for growth and share prices?
In any case, it's becoming more and more apparent, that no matter how big and bad you are, there's someone as big or as threatening that can come and eat your pie.
They don’t even attempt to be competent at customer service.
A) do this well in house
B) outsource it to someone who can get the job done
then they have no business selling expensive phones tied to critical services which people rely on.
Sure, you'll have a great time in court (as the OP would in the states, Google is clearly in the wrong here), but that doesn't help you in the slightest, because it's a lot of hassle, time and effort, you'll have to pay your lawyer up front etc pp.
Good luck with T-Mobile though- I had the worst experience with them and am now a happy Fi customer...