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Comment by emestifs | Hacker News Reader

Now only if it were that easy to get a phone number to speak to a human at Google

But Google doesn't require you to provide a phone number that reaches a human. It just needs a phone number. It could be voicemail only. It's the equivalent of Google providing a generic phone number like 6502530000 on their own business listing. Is there any expectation that this number leads to a human customer support agent that can actually help you? No.

Depends on the product. If it's something you pay for, you can get a phone number. For example, GPay and Play store for billing issues has an accessible phone numbers.

Any place where scaling customer support to the revenue vs number of users tends to lead to a lack of phone numbers.

(Googler, opinions are my own)

Absolutely. As a paying Google Workspace customer (or whatever it's called this week) I have called support on a number of occasions. Zero times have they been able to help in any way (despite technical issues that they admitted were Google's responsibility), but I had a phone number.

Exact same experience contacting AdWords support when we were spending over a million a year.

You can get a hold of someone but they can’t really help you. When issues crossed over into any other area (engineering, other Google products, etc) the answer was basically “I can put an internal ticket in… but you probably want to find a workaround.”

We were only ever contacting them for bugs/issues with Google products or internal processes they had screwed us, not for “help me use the product” type support. Maybe they would have been more successful with that.

My experience: Even if you pay Google, they don't offer adequate phone support and they don't take customer support seriously.

Google Ads sent me an email saying my ad was rejected, then billed me anyway. No idea if the ad ever ran, but they attempted to charge me and suspended my account when the charge didn't go through. It was difficult to get in touch with a support person because they do not offer phone support for accounts that are suspended, and I ended up paying for the ad without ever talking to someone over the phone to figure out why the ad was run after it was rejected. I filed a web form request after payment asking that they reinstate the Google Ads account, but they rejected the request.

I was billed twice for a certain month of Google One, and I had to file a web ticket and send emails with screenshots in order to get one of the charges reversed. There was no option to talk to a person.

Any place where scaling customer support to the revenue vs number of users tends to lead to a lack of phone numbers.

This makes sense, and yet Google will apparently be requiring phone numbers for apps that aren't monetized at all.

it has been my experience that this isn't true. I worked at a fortune 100 that dumped millions into GCP, and they did not offer any type of support for GCP. we had to purchase support through a third party.

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