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> Now, of course, I understand that even Google can't reasonably be expected to provide free 24/7 customer support for the entire Internet. If they had a normal phone number available where anybody could reach a human at any time, every confused person would call them with issues that are completely unrelated to Google's actual products and even Google would be overwhelmed.

No it is entirely reasonable. Even with a decline this quarter, Alphabet is sitting on ~$116 Billion cash on hand. Spending $1B on customer service would be trivial.

They won't though, because end-users are not the customers of Google, advertisers are. You can betcha advertisers get excellent customer service.

> They won't though, because end-users are not the customers of Google, advertisers are. You can betcha advertisers get excellent customer service.

You would think so, but no. Even advertisers get bad support from Google. Even companies using Google as replacement for Microsoft stack (Gmail and Calendar instead of Outlook, etc) get bad support from Google. Even Google Cloud customers spending millions a year get bad support from Google.

The terrible support might have started for the reasons you mention, but it turn into whole organization dysfunction.

This is just not true from my experience. Google Cloud has proactive and responsive support staff.

It might be a relative perspective they had. I've heard that AWS and Azure provide much better support. I can't say firsthand, but I've heard that fairly consistently.

The joke we had was AWS has better support, Google had better products, and MS had better sales.

Even websites using Google's advertising platform to serve those advertisements get horrible support.

Can confirm. I work for a company that spends >$10MM on google cloud compute every year, and it's a common internal joke that "talk to google support" means "get fucked." Their support is outrageously bad.

> They won't though, because end-users are not the customers of Google, advertisers are. You can betcha advertisers get excellent customer service.

Have you ever advertised on Google? I'm guessing not.

Go search on Reddit and other places for stories from people who got their Google Ads accounts banned, including advertisers spending millions of dollars a year, and see how much help from customer service they've gotten.

Excellent might not be the word that comes to mind after you've been through that exercise.

Yeah, WTH. The Reddit thread is about a transaction involving money. Google can't do better support than ineffective, then incorrect, directions?

Furthermore, if Google is going to shove search, email, maps, Chrome, ChromeOS, Play Store, Android, etc, etc, etc, down our throats maybe they should be made to actually do a little customer service.

I think that's a sore underestimation of the support costs Google would have to cover. It looks like support costs average around $4/call. (https://www.google.com/search?q=how+much+does+the+average+su...). Google has approximately 4 billion users (https://www.google.com/search?q=how+many+users+does+Google+h...). So, if you allowed for one single support call per user per year, Google would be footing $16B annually.

In general, I don't think you can expect free support for a free product. I do think businesses should let you buy support for any tier of product, both as part of a subscription and on a one-time basis.

That’s at 98 cents per minute, I suspect at google’s scale they would have massive cost savings.

Savings from scale usually comes from automation, and people are generally looking to talk to humans, not bots. This is the exact reason Google avoids human support in the first place - there are no massive cost savings, because it does not scale well.

There’s a lot to automate when doing phone support. The vast difference between the sub 20 cents per minute you need to pay people to answer phones and the 98 cents per minute each call costs are largely things that could be automated.

And that’s ignoring trying to minimize call length or even the need for any calls in the first place.

There are definite cost reductions that can be made, but they pale in comparison to keeping humans out of the loop.

For sake of argument, let's pretend you can shave half off the costs. So, now we're talking $8B annually for one support call / user / year. Does this undermine my argument about under-estimation of $1B costs?

That’s just the most obvious approach, adjusting the product and internal processes to avoid having people call is even more effective. Upselling people is another way to drop net costs even further, etc.

I suspect they could get net costs below 800m/year.

Ok, I agree to disagree then! :)

Advertisers are not getting any customer service from Google, at all. I've had accounts locked for no reason, ads cut off, etc.

Their ad platform is so confusing, I had to take a Udemy course just to make head or tails of it.

This is besides the fact that their ads are nowhere near as effective as on other platforms.

> Now, of course, I understand that even Google can't reasonably be expected to provide free 24/7 customer support for the entire Internet. If they had a normal phone number available where anybody could reach a human at any time, every confused person would call them with issues that are completely unrelated to Google's actual products and even Google would be overwhelmed.

That would be the fair consequence of wanting to dominate the whole internet, no?

If any company providing a product would refuse to have a human that is reachable, they would never get to a dominating position.

And IMHO, google should be forced to provide that human service given its dimension, or scale down until it does.

I said that because of my life experience. I run some small businesses in some quasi-technical fields.

We've gotten phone calls asking for help with fixing peoples' Yahoo mail accounts, asking for returns to stores that were completely different than ours, trying to get refunds on products we don't even sell, and many other nonsensical and time-wasting calls from confused people.

If we, at our extremely small scale, were often annoyed by dealing with irrelevant phone calls, I have no doubt that Google would be drowned out by every person who had an issue installing Windows, trying to setup their printer, asking for help getting their money back from a shoe store, running out of gas on the highway, their apartment not turning on the heat high enough, and a host of unrelated things that most of us would never dream of calling Google about.

I'm not asking for perfection from Google: I'm just asking for Google to help desperate people that are completely screwed and giving them some option, even if it requires some payment, to fix major life-changing issues.

That is the price of dealing with the public, tbf.

People are how they are and will always find the path of least resistance to get their problems solved.

That doesn't exclude them or anyone from providing support to the services they offer, and that people pay for (one way or the other)

Having a costumer only hotline which only connects you after entering your customer ID and or Support-PIN would be a start. I know of multiple company's which have that.

Maybe they could sell the space at the beginning of each call and run an ad there?

There's a massive cultural blind spot at Google IMHO. And it's not as black and white as "if you're not the customer you're the product".

I used to be a paying Google Workspace customer and I cancelled my account through the usual process. After my account was closed _and deleted_ they sent some unknown invoice amount to collections, sent threatening emails.

Was there a reply-to? Was there a phone number? No, "log in with your account and raise a support issue". The account that you deleted. And another threatening email with no help about how to answer. I emailed the Collections address and I got auto-generated responses.

And I spent days combing help pages. Finally sorted it out by opening a new trial account (and then the help agent was very helpful). But even then it was awkward.

I will never send a cent their way.

Oh, and I know a google employee who was kind enought to look into it. He followed the internal channels to try and help and ... it was broken. Best he could do was file a bug report.

> Now, of course, I understand that even Google can't reasonably be expected to provide free 24/7 customer support for the entire Internet.

Microsoft did this back in the 1990's. It provided a strong financial incentive to reduce the number of support calls generated per Windows installation, which is what they ended up doing.

And often Microsoft would not put the charge through, at least if you were working to try to solve the problem without them. I don't know what their criteria were, but I don't think I ever paid despite calling a few times.

The terms I remember (note that there are so many different Microsoft licensing agreements, so yours could’ve been totally different) were that you weren’t charged if the problem you called for was indeed a problem with Microsoft software.

And that definition was quite liberal: not just obvious software bugs, but also confusing documentation, etc.

In other words, as long as you RTFM before you called, it was free.

That’s still the case today, even though the base charge is now $500/incident. I always get a refund.

I think you might be conflating "free users" of their search engine product and a customer who paid a thousand USD to purchase their mobile hardware. I can see the reasoning for refusing to provide human-based CS for their search engine users, but to give their Pixel users the typical run around and then capping it with disabling their account? I would expect this kind of behavior from the various shell companies selling gadgets on Amazon. Google is really eating their way through the goodwill they took decades to build up.

> Google can't reasonably be expected to provide free 24/7 customer support for the entire Internet

IMO they should be legally required to provide an appeals process with a real human and reasonable turnaround time (e.g. 1 business day would probably be fine with me) for all forms of account banning or website banning. For payment disputes they should also be legally required to provide human assistance within a few business days. If you can't do that then you shouldn't be allowed to take payments.

I had a location-based file sharing website banned across the internet because Chrome falsely labelled it as a suspicious website or some BS. That new Chrome version marked the end of that project. No way to reach a human. I can't imagine how many businesses and startups have been ended because of Google's rash policies and no appeal process.

Did you try opening a bug report on the public Chromium bug tracker?

> they're not willing to provide any human customer service

They do: https://one.google.com/about/support

Google One is only a few bucks a month and gives human support. It certainly helped me in getting someone from Google confirm to me with written info that an issue I was having was caused by the phone manufacturer and not Google.

Now, of course, I understand that even Google can't reasonably be expected to provide free 24/7 customer support for the entire Internet.

How about only paying customers outside of consumer subscription services (and maybe even those)? I don't know why it's reasonable to expect them not to be able to provide that service at volume when I can and have reached amazon support for small sales and even before sale events and I'm sure they move more stuff around than google does pixel phones.

<< Now, of course, I understand that even Google can't reasonably be expected to provide free 24/7 customer support for the entire Internet.

See... for me that is actually an argument that they are way too big, because they are not able to properly service their existing customer base.

I think a reasonable law here would be: If you paid real money for services, you're entitled to direct human to human customer support.

> o me, the issue with Google's products and services is that they're not willing to provide any human customer service to resolve the real issues.

I don't get this, I engage human Google support for paid Google products at least a few times a month. It's not great, but definitely on par with other tech giants. Are you expecting human support for ... free services?

"Free services" aren't provided by Google out of the goodness of their heart. This isn't altruism. We're not choosy beggars to want support for being the very products that make Google the most money.

I don’t know what consumer support looks like, but Google Cloud support (with a premium support contract) is significantly worse then their competitors.

He paid them money for a phone they themselves lost and then charged him for. He should reasonably expect support for that transaction and any situations that stem directly from that transaction. Furthermore when you do something that deleteriously effects people like take away access to more than a decade of email/files/photos/contacts not to mention apps and other purchases for which google was indeed paid you should expect that action to reasonably generate a support request and actually provide it in case as in this situation it is unreasonable and unjust.

But its free isn't an automatic get out of jail free card for the expectation for a company to behave like reasonable human beings.