One of the interesting things I discovered was that their idea of 24/7 support simply meant was that I could leave a message anytime, and they'd get back to me at some unspecified point (but usually within 48 hours!) between 8 and 5, Mon. through Fri.

When I did get a calls back, their first questions never pertained to my problem. They were far more concerned with the state of their self-help system, and wanted to know if and how failures there led to my calling them directly.

This was a couple of years ago, and it may have gotten better since then. However, the steady drumbeat of posts like this indicates that it hasn't.

My only experience with Apps phone support was when I signed up for the 30 day business trial to use the IMAP import feature. Half way through a massive import, I got an email from Apps saying that I was going to be charged the $50 yearly fee about 25 days early and then another that my account had been downgraded (I did not downgrade it). Called phone support, got a real person in what sounded like England very quickly. They were helpful and reported the issue to the engineers. They reversed the charge no questions asked, I re-signed up for the demo, and all was well.

So tl;dr the phone support seems ok.

Very bad, at least in our case (small company). They reply mostly with templates. When one issue would have taken a bit more time to solve (Thunderbird IMAP issue with ONE of our user names) they simply stopped responding after a while.

AND: You can NOT go back to the free service, at least not easily! Talk about lock-in...

Might be worth throwing out a Ask HN in prime time, I'd really like to know the answer to this too having experienced my own mini-google hell today and realizing I had no source of support apart from sub-standard forums that only 1/4 of questions seem to get answered in.