Customers shouldn't be billed to fix mistakes that aren't their fault. In a functioning market, money is supposed to flow away from faults, not towards them.
Currently because the volume of bogus support requests is so enourmously high, and the fraud attempts also very high - the cost to properly do something like handle account lockout requests properly (on the scale of billions of users) would be EXTREMELY high.
Google is actually pretty clear for consumer accounts, if you lock yourself out your content is lost and they suggest setting up a new account.
Cell phone companies do handle this, you can do things like sim swaps etc with a real person - but you are usually paying $50 - $100 per MONTH with them. And even there plenty of folks have complained of having 2FA codes stolen as a result of this convenience.
If they could charge $50 or $100 to provide paid support (a situation that is actually very COMMON at the enterprise level) for at least some people this will be worth doing. Then the business case is there to staff / resource etc the fix.
Currently, with youtube / gmail etc, the revenue per user is so low it will NEVER make economic sense to have humans dealing with an account.
But keep on banning paid support and you'll keep on getting no support.
Google made over $6 billion in profit in one quarter this year. YouTube had revenue over $5 billion in one quarter. They announced a $25 billion stock buyback.
Google doesn't offer support because they choose not to.
Back of the napkin math - * Lets say on average customers contact Google support once a year for each product they use. That's 0.25 tickets per user per quarter. * Consider Google has ~10billion monthly productuser combinations (9 products have 1B+, most have significantly more) That is 2.5M tickets/support requests a quarter. ~28M tickets a day * If we consider an average ticket take ~3 mins to resolve, thats ~155k hours a day * If we take an employee being productive for 7 hours a day, that's 22k employees * If you take a 1:10 ratio, that is 2205,220 and 22 - 1st, 2nd and 3rd line managers. * Take the cost to be an average of 30k,60k,150k and 300k for each of those layers, thats ($661, $132M, $33M, $6.6M) which totals to ~$833M per quarter * The real world costs for this will probably be anywhere between 2X to 3X of this because all of these people come with other costs like infrastructure, tooling, space, etc. So we are looking at ~$1.7B to $2.5B.
One might be tempted to say that money can be saved vs my estimates but keep in mind the challenges of localization, time zones, compliance etc is also significant and will probably mean an even larger expense.
So yeah, it would be ~40% of the quarterly profit.
Sure this is an expense so tax etc can be changed but my argument would be that we are severely underestimating the complexity and challenge at each step.
So yes, I do think it will never make economic sense unless you are on the platform with sufficiently high spend. Just like every single other economic system we have out there.
That aside, the business model has established that you can get great service if you spend $xM+ or $xxM+ per month (whatever the number is) - its just that we expect the same for a much lower cost.
Hmmm. Could have sworn Google promotes itself as being "best in class" at solving complex problems. ;)
Google has the scale of, and is acting like, a utility.
eg power, water, gas.
But without a legal obligation to fix problems for their
users, they don't even attempt to.
In it's position as a utility, some people have (perhaps unwisely) managed to lock themselves out of a (critical) personal account.
With the corresponding problems that then occur when any other utility stops working.
The suggestion to allow people to pay for support in some situations - eg like those locked out of a critical personal account - would be one approach to solve the problem.
Because at the moment, these people have no recourse. :(
Which when it happens with any other utility, becomes a legal problem. eg Customer contacts relevant Ombudsman / gov oversight body to get it rectified
Another way to look at it is as just the cost to make that remaining profit, and that the cost has been externalized so far.
If people had utterly insisted on decent customer support from day one, companies like Google would have found a way to grow as big as they can while still providing support.
For Google, as a company that has recorded a yearly net profit of over $35 billion, this is chump change. The fact that they could afford to offer some customer service regarding such a critical issue as restoring access to lost accounts, yet choose not to, smacks of corporate entitlement.
It is unacceptable for service providers to damage peoples' livelihoods because the account in question is free or is used by a small business that doesn't spend >10k$ a month.
It is not reasonable to demand that customers pay $50 a month to protect themselves against capricious account closures. That is merely another way of a service provider saying 'nice email account you've got there, it would be a shame if something happened to it.' That's called extortion or even racketeering.
Alphabet's net profit for 2019 was $34 billion USD. The can afford to treat their customers financial interests with respect, and if Alphabet won't do that voluntarily, then it's time for governments to force them to.
What if they lock you out? You make it sound like it's some transparent and easy to understand process based on publicly available rules, and it's just user violating some obvious documented rule, therefore locking himself out.
But maybe you just travel to africa for the first time, and they just decide that now you can't login, because "suspicious activity". Bye.
If they wish to reduce support costs, one other way is to make the service better and more predictable. Maybe add a checkbox to opt out out of this "you're too stupid to keep your credentials safe" banning system, or something like that.