Ask HN: Google have lost one of my customers; potential legal trouble | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Google have lost one of my customers; potential legal trouble

40 pointsg105b25 comments

I set up my business 12 years ago, and since then it's been just me, mainly doing freelance software development, but I have always offered "Gmail for work" which became "Google Apps For Business" which became "GSuite" which became "Google Workplace".

Over the years, after becoming a reseller of Google's services, I resell Google Workplace for a slight profit margin, as I've found that my customers often have a real requirement of what Gmail for work can offer, so it's always been a good fit.

Three months ago, a customer asked me how to add a user to their organisation, so I sent them a link to the documentation (https://support.google.com/a/answer/33310).

They continued to email back, claiming they couldn't do it. After a few back and forth emails, I logged into my reseller console, which allows me to administer my customers' domains... but the customer's domain was not in the list.

The customer was getting a generic error when trying to access admin.google.com - please contact your domain administrator (me). When I tried to log in, their domain was simply not in the list of customers.

Since then, I've been on countless live chats, phone calls and email threads with Google support, but nobody's listening. Every time I get passed to another person, I have to explain everything from the start again, and I'm pointed to a Google Forms page to submit my "I can't access my account" request. Submitting the form doesn't do anything.

In fact, the support feels like I'm being trialled on teaching some kind of defective AI how to discuss problems with my Google account, or maybe I'm communicating via Google Translate to a non-English speaking sweatshop?

Anyway, my customer has been waiting to add a user for 3 months now, and they're getting shirty - possible legal issues are coming my way because of my incompetance.

I honestly don't know what to do. Google have just pulled the plug on a customer, and now I'm in hot water with nobody to talk to.

Has anyone got any advice?

Posts like these remind me to stay away from Google for Business.

Google doesn't seem to care about their users-- This is a common problem with Google: There's no way to get in contact with a human-- unless you create a viral twitter post about the problem.

It's impossible to instantly migrate, but I'm slowly removing all dependencies to Google, Amazon, etc. Wish me luck.

Stay away from Google products altogether... See Stadia just now and the list is endless. They're an ad company. Nothing more.

Unrelated but for any Googlers, you can't add a domain to Google Workspace if it has the word 'mail' on it. Perhaps makes sense for fraud but we were working with a company that does something physical mail-related and were unable to use Google workspace.

They also have a list of restricted words for email addresses. For example, you can’t create a gmail address with Support in the name.

They're too big to communicate.

Personally, I would never trust a company with critical things where it is impossible to talk to a human who is in a position to understand and own a problem.

There are literally zero people who work at Google who 1) talk with end users, and 2) can understand and own a problem until it is fixed.

> They're too big to communicate.

This is BS. I recently had an interaction with Grab and was surprised how responsive they were in support. Here is the situation: I ordered a Pizza from a store that had its own delivery, so the delivery was not handled by Grab itself. For some (or whatever) reason, the delivery guy never showed up but he marked the transaction as "delivered" and my card got charged accordingly.

So I tried to contact Grab for support. I was told by support that since this was delivered by the Store itself, I have to go to some web form from the store to fill for a refund request.

I simply answered the support that this is ridiculous and that unless Grab was to issue a refund, I'd force a chargeback from my card. What happened is that the support guy escalated the ticket, and another higher up issued a refund. All of this happened in the same day.

So stuff can move through in big companies if you give the employees enough authority.

Are you saying Grab is as big as Google, and because someone at Grab can help you, that it's NOT the case that Google is too big to communicate? If so, that's a bit of a stretch.

Google have two business models:

User as a product: Create free services/products (search, Gmail, android, chrome etc) These are sometimes bad, but they use brand name and reach to become popular. Users of these services are a product that is sold to advertisers.

Obviously, there is no need to provide human support for free product. Since users are dumb enough to become a product, there is even less need to care.

Software as a Service. Create a bunch of products/services and sell these to companies (GCP, Adds, Google for business) These are sometimes built on top of free services/products. Companies that use these because these are way cheaper than alternatives. Google and MS would use market position to bundle these products into attractive lock-in.

Obviously, there is no need to provide human support because there are too many clients and profit would suffer compared to the first business model. Google has so many clients that it would require multi-million people to provide support.

> Every time I get passed to another person, I have to explain everything from the start again

Just keep the whole thing in a FAQ text/md document and give them that instead of spending time explaining it? Then you can respond with 'I've explained that, please consult item 5 in the document'. If they say 'you need to talk to X' then respond with 'sounds like you need talk to them for me, I have no insight into your corporate structure.'

As with many other issues of this type, if you are running a business then at some point you should delegate the issue to an attorney because it will be cheaper than spending more of your own time on it, and writing the issue up on paper makes it real in a way that open support tickets are not.

When I run into issues like this, I always get a case number after each chat and then pass it to the next person and ask them to read up on it to start. May not work with Google, though.

They don't listen. I always quite the previous case ID and show the transcript, but I'm sure I'm talking to an AI each time. They just keep asking basic information until I tell them.

Then hand it over to your attorney. Since you mentioned that you are still being billed for it, those receipts should make it easy to frame as a commercial dispute.

Sounds like good security to me, if you are no longer affiliated with the account they shouldn't provide you with any information. I've never heard of the Workspace reseller stuff before. Did they bill you for the customer account? If so, when did your bill get lower? Then you might figure out when something changed. I'd guess the client either made someone else admin or was somehow compromised.

They are still billing me for the customer's domain.

Check for a typo?

Looks like reselling is a thing: https://developers.google.com/admin-sdk/reseller/v1/how-tos/...

I think what you should be focusing in is their business continuity, they are losing money over that, gotta migrate them out of google.

I understand, and that's exactly what I'm recommending now but it looks so bad on me because I originally recommended Google as fit for production.

I'm quite certain they'll understand. The right frame is "Google is the best fit back then, but right now it evidently isn't." Committing with your decisions is great, but being able to adapt in a timely manner seems more impressive here.

I setup a whole bunch of gsuites and for one company all their tech a few years back...

They forgot to pay the fn domain fees and their domain got hijacked and then accused me of stealing their shit -- but everything was logged in slack - but they chose to tell me "we dont slack bro" (literal comment -- and they never checked slack, and then deactivated their slack and lost all the logging of where their accounts were and such... TWO FN YEARS LATER they called me for help....

I told them that because I was admin, I deactivated myself from their systems and because they didnt read their shit, lost all access to their shit -

pretty sure G admin has audit logs, have you verified it wasn't caused by something else?

They can’t get into admin, that’s the whole point…

What about the logs for OP's reseller console? That is, there might be a record of them creating the domain for customer X, which they can then submit to Google.

There is no mention of the customer domains in the audit log on my reseller consume. I am still being billed for the domain, but there's no change in the audit logs, and as others have mentioned, I can't see the audits for the actual domain, because it doesn't exist any more.

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