Ask HN: Why Doesn't Google Believe in Customer Support?
I was setting up a Google+ page for my company two days ago and my email was suspended because I used the company founding date as the birthday which is less than 13 years.
More Issues:
Of course the first thing I did was check the Google Support Forums to see what the solution would be. The solution the forums stated was to verify a credit card or to mail or fax scanned legal documents (Passport, Birth Certificate, etc).
Things were looking good until I realized that when I tried to login, I was not redirected to the verification process, it merely stated "Account has been disabled" which is completely different than what was written in the forums.
Horrible Customer Support:
When I emailed the Google Support Team, they merely redirected me back to the same forum posting without offering additional help. Obviously I know about the process to verify my age, however, it was impossible for me to begin the verification steps as that page did not exist for me.
What this means?
I have lost my email account containing thousands of contacts and clients. All the relationships I have established and all the business plans that I was working on are all lost at this point. And Google has done absolutely nothing to fix this.
So my question is why doesn't Google believe in good customer support? And no, it's not a scaling issue because companies like Zappos and Amazon handle it beautifully.
My suspended email is: carlos@ravn.com (email hosted by Google)