Tell HN: A Cr-48 Support Experience
Google's horrid customer service is well known on HN, but I wanted to give a point of superb customer service to Google on their Cr-48 notebook program.
I received my Cr-48 at the beginning of December and immediately tried to use it on my wireless at home. The system worked, but was slow and miserable to use. I fiddled with several settings on my wireless router but couldn't get it to do anything. I took it to work and tried it on their wireless with a much better result. While there I filed a problem report at the customer support website (http://www.google.com/support/chromeos/bin/request.py?contact_type=device_issue). I received an e-mail confirmation from a bot and was immediately concerned that my problem would get filed among thousands of others and I would never get contacted. I was quite wrong.
The following business day I received a personal e-mail from the Google Ninja assigned to my case. He wanted to know the most convenient method and time for contacting me (Google Talk, phone, e-mail, Skype were all options). Some phone tag resulted, but he ended up diagnosing the problem, doing some bug searches and found I was experiencing the bug reported here: http://code.google.com/p/chromium-os/issues/detail?id=10249.
After this diagnosis he thanked me for my time and informed me that any further issues could go directly to his e-mail instead of through the website.
I realize that this support is specific to a developer testing program, but it was certainly a great experience. It would be wonderful if Google took the time and money to apply this sort of experience to other Google products as well.