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> Google's customer service is horrible even for organizations that pay them +$10k/month or make them +$10k/month for ad sales, and that is a far smaller number.

Is this true? As a paying customer for gsuite, the 4 times I've contacted customer service I got someone immediately and they solved my problem immediately. I'm not a big customer either I have one account. I pay them $72 a year.

It's all anecdotal but I also had fast support for my G Suite issues, even when marked at the lowest priority level P4.

It's very product specific. Google Cloud Platform and GSuite have support plans and offerings distinct from other Google services for example. In a prior life I was one of the Googlers handling those support inquiries (all while also trying to scale the support operations)

As far as I remember YouTube still isn't directly profitable for Google in terms of ad revenue and YT Red. For services like that Google would probably naturally try to minimize spending as much as possible.

Do you have any recent source for this?

Personal supporting anecdote:

I have a grandfathered free GSuite plan on a domain I hardly use.

The few issues I have had have been promptly solved by a real person.

Personally I had very much opposite experience with Google Ads support. For the person who buy ads it's exceptional and with available phone support even if you only buy ads for $100. They can literally explain how every single thing work on their system, giving advice on how to improve campaigns or fix something.

It's very much opposite when it's come to AdSense, but again they don't really care when some webmaster lose his source of income since there will be other webmasters to replace him.

that's not true in my experience. the rep had no direct answer and sometimes it would take a couple days till they reached somebody that knows the answer. and for everything else that i asked that they did not know directly the answer was "it's algorithm, even when i found the answer later somewhere deep in forums or faq".

i have dealt with google europe, i even visited the offices in dublin but i do not have a confidence that they know the answer, most of them are there to try to convince you to try this new thing and incrase you budget.

   > i have dealt with google europe, i even visited the offices in dublin

I guess I should be perfectly honest: ads is obviously no my specialization and I only worked with Google Ads for small businesses with quite a small budgets not more than $10000-$20000 a month.

So obviously my impression might be limited to quite superficial questions or problems. It's very much possible that if you work with something actually complex their support isn't anywhere as useful as it's for entry-level customers.

> person who buy ads

Fundamental difference: person who buys adds --> Google gets money person who uploads videos --> Google gives money

It's pretty clear to me what the antithesis is here. Sorry to over-simplify, but yes, imho this matters.

And that's how you know it's their core business, and everything else is just gravy.

There are multiple perspectives here: the customer, the support engineer, the senior management, and more.

"Absolute certainty" aside, OP basically just said they saw the mountain from the base (only has the view of the volume of tickets pending in their queue) and most of it is in a cloud, they can't even see the top, it looked big, hard to drill, impossible to shave down to ground level. The "absolute certainty" confirms the point of view.

Senior management see it from above (see the big picture) and see total volume of work, a mathematical division based on resources, the value of each work area, which are core or not, where to focus more resources, and which parts to cut down because they set the end goal.

The customer sees the paid promise of a flat terrain. No mountain, no resources.

Now I don't expect the support engineer to know or care about more than what comes in their queue. That's their only job. But I do know management almost always sees support areas, especially for the "low value/impact" segments, as the best candidates for some savings when you have shareholders to please. Successful management will strike a balance between saving more money from cutting costs than they are losing by losing customers and image. Anything else is considered shortsightedness: they either leave money on the table, or they choke the business for short term gain.

In this particular case YouTube could solve the issues but they have deemed this not worth it. The amount needed to fix this is higher than the return so it can't be justified. Fixing one offs and high visibility cases is cheaper than eliminating the issue entirely.

Yes, Google has never been good at customer service. They believe that providing feedback tooling is the better approach. I think Google has succeeded _despite_ this not because of it

Google was always great at _customer_ service, but their only customers are in advertisement, paid subscription SaaS and cloud departments. When you use any other services you are not customer, but a product and no one owe you anything.

I don't have experience with AWS to compare, but I can say that my experience with Google Cloud support has been exceptional, and even for a P4 case I opened I got an initial response in 4 hours and a person who dedicated some time for the next week setting up a cluster and application in the exact way to reproduce and diagnose my issue.

> They might have 1 billion free users, but they definitely don't have 1 billion partners or 1 billion paying customers.

Paying or not, people will complain.