Google Voice lost my business number. How I got it back, and what I learned. | Hacker News Reader

Google Voice lost my business number. How I got it back, and what I learned.

sultansolutions.com

201 pointsjjkmk115 comments

This week I had an epiphany when dealing with both Google and Microsoft on support issues. The issues are this: when you need an answer to a question about something from your bank, such as, say, a fee that suddenly appears on your statement, you can pick up the phone and find someone at the company who will at least give you slow service to answer your question.

But with Google and Microsoft, there is no support department. You need to know how a specific service is charged? Good luck. You need to know why a needed parameter is missing on their API documentation? Forget it.

Basically companies like Google and Microsoft want to toss their products out into the wild and then go back behind closed doors to noodle on something else. It baffles me as to why enterprise businesses are able to do this.

110% agree. With 'enterprise agreements' though, which only the large companies can afford, you can get X support tickets, or call in numbers, etc.

I remember working one place that had that in place, and we hit an REALLY odd SQL Server bug (or, atleast it appeared to be a bug to us). We had top level support in place, but only had X per year, and no one would authorize us to use it just yet - "keep working on it for a bit, see if you can figure out a solution", because they didn't want to "waste" one of the calls if it turned out to be our mistake.

MS is in a weirder position, because offering direct support would cut out a lot of the consultants and ecosystem which they've trained/certified. You're expected to engage those people for support (although... they didn't write the software, so how they'd 'fix' something if it went wrong...?) Google has no such ecosystem to point to.

Yes, who would choose a bank for your critical banking needs (or a vehicle company for fleet management, etc) where your primary or only means of support was random forum postings that were staffed by volunteer workers who had no authority to fix things?

I tend to think this state of affairs evolved out of earlier beliefs that computers were "hard" and had some sort of black magic mystique around them.

I've heard the same thing about banking the support calls for an unknown future problem, and my reaction is always the same; "We have had 2 devs working on this problem for x hours, at $y per hour. MS support calls are purchasable in packs at $z each. We passed the point for calling (really hard math here) hours ago. By the way, remind me which business school did you get your degree from?"

"Hours?" In my case it was measured in days with weekends in between.

Overall, I've only worked at a few 'big' companies (more than 20 people) and was continually frustrated when requests of mine were framed as 'coming from a tech' or 'you don't understand business', which these sorts of requests tended to fall under.

In a nutshell, someone else got to choose tech XYZ, but didn't have to work with it. The people charged with using it are not given any authority to actually contact the vendor to fix the problem (or, in some cases, buy proper training or even get reimbursed for books on the subject). And somehow this is "good business"?

Few other departments in a large company would put up with this BS. Imagine the following scenario:

"Hey legal department, you're not allowed to buy a subscription to LexisNexis - just dig around on a forum for 8 weeks piecing together a defense. Oh, and by the way, we already set up the subsidiary in Brazil - forgot to tell you earlier. Just learn Spanish - I found this website where you can download Rosetta Stone for free. Anyway, Spanish is pretty easy - my son's already taken two classes in high school and took at trip to Mexico!"

Brazilians speak portuguese...

That was intentional, highlighting how little people who impose tech decisions actually know, think or research about this stuff.

"Java/JavaScript" is the worst, but I'm sure we've all encountered others.

I feel your pain!

Then you'd have to pay for the services they provide. The reason banks can afford to have support staff is because they're paid (quite a lot) for the services they provide (directly or indirectly.) Not so for Google or Microsoft (Google's profit/person << banks' profit/person)

Ah, but that's just it. I do pay. All of these accounts are paid. But there is no reliable support.

Right. But the problem with Google and most other cloud service providers is that they provide services to a large number of "customers," many of whom don't pay a dime. So, their entire corporate structure is set up with that in mind and there are few, if any customer service reps. Developers and designers are expected to create "self service" products and since they work for the majority, it's expected that it'll work even for their paying customers.

I call this BS. Ms have quite large support organization. comparing Google's non existent support Ms show how clueless you are.

You're correct that MS has a large support organisation. But your message is pretty aggressive. That kind of tone isn't liked here, and you're probably going to get down voted for it.

Welcome to HN though.

The guy decided to interject Microsoft into Google's fiasco. I don't know if he had some experience that he felt represented the rule and not the exception, or if he just wanted to rub shit on them (MS). Either way, that was completely uncalled for; especially considering Microsoft does and can provide support, and even very good support at that; and especially considering that you could mention at least a dozen major corps that provide much worse support on their best day then MS does on its worst day.

"I'm surprised to hear you mention MS in the same sentence as Google. In my experience MS has a big, well run, very good, support department. There are many other big companies you could have used as examples of poor customer service"

Cut the 'in my experience'. MS objectively has a large support infrastructure that goes through to the engineers. Also 'should' fits better than 'could' when that is a sentence by itself. You don't need to neuter the message to be polite.

Tell you what, call up your MSFT rep and ask them to set the Smooth Streaming flag on an Azure CDN blob and see how you feel how good their support is.

Well, thanks for calling me clueless based on...your hunch, I guess.

This is a great thing for startups to exploit who really care deeply about all of their customers. They can easily take business away from large, monolithic companies that don't really care about losing one measly person.

Many of our big wins come from doing something better that Microsoft or Google already might do, but doing it 10x better AND offering great customer support.

I'm still looking for a great alternative to Gmail/Google apps for my business email. Something that supports IMAP and has a reasonable webmail front end. Fastmail is the closest thing i've found but this could be a perfectly fine startup which probably simply isn't sexy enough for anything to actually go and do.

Gmail's IMAP implementation is really buggy. No distinction between tags and folders, non sorting done at the server level, etc. Frustrated, I also moved to fastmail two years ago; it is slightly expensive, but is standard's compliant and works flawlessly.

I should have maybe clarified that i too have moved to Fastmail (about a year ago) and am a happy customer. But both the price and the UI leave a lot of room for improvement, i.e. competitors.

And yes moving mail out of Gmail was a pain because of the weird IMAP structure they use.

I always use a local IMAP client (alpine), so am not really bothered by fastmail's rather basic UI.

I thought gmail didn't have folders; how is it supposed to distinguish the two?

IMAP has tags (rather keywords), that you can assign to multiple posts. Just because you assign a keyword to an email, doesn't mean that it should be moved to a new folder. Gmail does that, and therefore breaks IMAP.

Microsoft has a number you can call for any problem with their paid products. Admittedly, it's not free, but the fee is refunded if the problem is found to be caused by Microsoft. Anyone can call and open a case, regardless of support contract.

Yes, I know. I called it. It's been a week and I have gotten one minor response to what should be a routine question about a setting on Azure blob storage.

I work on Windows Azure. Email me ntotten at microsoft and I'll make sure you get the issue solved.

Will do, thanks.

If you can afford it or stomach it, directly providing support is a great way to manage your product design. Get enough calls where you have to explain that same thing over and over again and your developer brain will be in overdrive with ways to make that call stop. In a big company bad design doesn't directly cause pain for the developers, but if you're a small company you can practically let your customers condition you into building the best product.

There is one call you can mostly disregard: the smart guy with too much time on his hands who wants your product to be his custom design for free.

Let's be honest here. It's not that Google and Microsoft don't have support departments. It's that the price you're paying for the product is too low for them to provide general support on an individual basis.

Of course, that doesn't mean they shouldn't be working on ways to identify those very rare issues that need manual intervention and provide ways to get the support you need at that point, but that may only be 1 case in 100,000 or so.

> It's that the price you're paying for the product is too low for them to provide general support on an individual basis.

Exactly. It's always puzzled me why they don't offer a higher tier of support for more money.

The only reason I've been able to come up with so far is that they want to keep the flexibility to rapidly evolve their services. Customers who pay more money tend to get bent out of shape when you do that. But I think there ought to be a happy medium where 1) it's understood that things can change, and 2) you have at least email support for the service you're buying, and maybe even phone support. Peace of mind is worth a lot of money for some things.

There's a real tension between stability and pace of change and finding that balance isn't easy.

That said, some Internet companies--I'd add eBay in my experience, Facebook also based on lots of stories--use huge amounts of automation and just don't seem to have the processes (and likely the staffing) to resolve problems with competent individual attention when a person has to intervene. It's partly a matter of scale but Amazon, for example, seems to do a much better job overall.

Amazon also is an expert at losing money and having no margins.

Retail, in general, is a low margin business. In any case, notwithstanding Amazon's current financials--it's been investing a lot in expansion--any retail business, even a large volume one, that can't do a reasonable job at customer service (a fair bit of which will inevitably involve talking to a human) is probably not going to be very successful.

If one out of 100,000 cases requires support staff, surely the $50 or so per year (for Google Apps business) should be enough to cover that?

Low price doesn't mean that you can never afford any service. I received a personal response/apology and vouchers from a marketing representative once after I complained by e-mail about a €2,99 food product (Iglo brand).

Google is either just greedy and reckless, or their prices are below the cost of the actual product (with no support costs factored in), but even then they could afford some level of support. But hey, if they get away with it, no big deal, right?

(Edit: another example, I have a €0,90 per month e-mail account from df.eu and receive personal, thoughtful reponses when I ask them about technical issues like TLS support - how is a much smaller company able to do that and Google isn't? It's obviously not the product price.)

Because support hurts margins.

Google has a fiduciary duty to shareholders, and supporting anything other than their ad products doesn't make sense from a cost-benefit perspective. I'd wager that most google products lose money, and I'm almost certain that GV is unprofitable.

Is this morally correct? That depends on ones value system. Google tells customers that they don't provide support and users continue to consume the service. If you want support, the price tag is higher than free.99.

Plenty of public companies have support departments. Support services hurt margins from a naive analysis of a business. Good support services can strengthen a brand, which can create loyal customers over time.

Amazon is a perfect example of this. Their site is convenient, Prime is handy (even though their streaming is useless), but it's their customer service which made me 'loyal.' Over the years, I've had a few items arrive damaged, including a few very expensive ones. The customer service calls seem to take at most 5 minutes. For instance, I had a computer arrive completely destroyed. I called them, explained what happened, and the rep asked whether I wanted a refund or replacement. I said "replacement," and she replied "I'll have it to you by tomorrow."

That level of service, as a consumer, means so much to me.

That doesn't make much sense. If the products are losing money and Google's fiduciary obligations to shareholders consist only of maximizing margins, Google should shut down those products. Not supporting paid products for businesses(!) will hurt more than just the reputation of those products, as a shareholder I would consider it irresponsible on behalf of Google (I'd assume that they're also pissing off some shareholders who use those products).

After years of jealously/furtively reading HackerNews at my BigCo IT job, finally an advantage! I can get my account manager at MSFT and GOOG on the phone whenever I need something, and they make sure we get help quickly.

All it takes is spending a significant amount of money with them, year after year...

The one time we hit a problem with SQL Server and needed a solution, a MS tech support guy did daily teleconferences with us for 10 days after opening a case. I don't know what level of support plan our company had but was amazed by the responsiveness.

Microsoft has always provided amazing support for our Office 365 account (hosted Exchange, like Google Apps). Its a paid service though ($6/user/month), so perhaps that's the difference in our experiences.

Most recently, I filed a support ticket online and my phone rang a few minutes later. On the other end was an MS support rep who stayed on the phone with me for 40 minutes, including a screen share, until my issue was resolved. At the end of the call he left me with his direct # and email, and said that I could contact him directly with any future inquiries.

Really can't ask for much more than that.

I just want to echo this to make sure that everyone understands Google and Microsoft are worlds apart on support.

We've all heard about the horror stories that it doesn't matter what you do with Google you cannot get human support unless you get to the top of HN or Reddit.

MS are totally different, they offer support for every service, you just have to pay for it. I think they also offer different levels of support, some of our programmers at a previous (small) company could talk to the Silverlight team over problems they were having after it just came out.

Funnily enough, when I google "google paid support" the top result is this little (frightening) gem:

http://support.google.com/accounts/bin/answer.py?hl=en&a...

Compare that to this, "microsoft paid support":

http://support.microsoft.com/gp/services/en-id

I'm in no way affiliated with MS, actually use Google Apps myself.

This "Google has no support" is a myth that I see consistently repeated on Hacker News that I can't understand it's repeated. Google's support situation is actually the same as Microsoft's: if you pay (i.e. have a Google Apps for Business) account, you get 24/7 phone support. I'm pretty sure that it's for any service linked to your Google Apps for Business account (including Voice), but not completely sure since I've never had to use it.

You can find it here: http://support.google.com/a/bin/request.py

No it's not, you can't get consumer support for Google, you can for MS. You can't pick just one of their many services and go, "look at this one!".

I just went their with my free apps account and it's not exactly forthcoming about how either.

What are you talking about? I posted a link with their support options and your response is "No, you can't get support". Clearly, you can - I linked to it. If I go there with my free apps account it's crystal clear, in big letters: "Email and phone support: Not available for the free edition of Google Apps. Find out about upgrading to Google Apps for Business."

I've used Google Apps paid support and had disappointing experiences. Apps is only one of many Google products, many of which have no paid support options. I've had mediocre support experiences with support for other (expensive) products, like DFP. Overall, whenever I hit a wall (bad/missing/unclear documentation, apparent bugs, etc) with a Google service, I wince because I've learned to expect some pain.

Microsoft is also pretty slow moving, because they worry about all this crap.

MS engineers complain about all the bureaucracy involved in change anything - check with legal, update user docs, update support docs, update the tests, check the internationalization and accessibility. But that's the cost of providing a solid product.

Google has two big products - ads and search. Search is more or less a single text box, and a list of results. There's some bells and whistles, but as long as you can type in a search box it's good enough. Ads are similarly bullet proof (though plenty of people get pissed off at being blacklisted).

Same here. I've had extremely good experiences with Microsoft support - a particularly difficult issue was escalated 3 times so we ended up in contact with one of the original developers.

I worked for a Gold partner at the time. Now I work for a company that buys hundreds of thousands of dollars of Microsoft software, and while I'm not in contact with support, I hear they've also done well by us. They even do special patches if needed.

OTOH one of the biggest retail companies here tried a companywide rollout of Google Apps for businesses and discarded it mainly because of the lack of support.

There is a difference between Google and Microsoft - Microsoft does list phone numbers for support and you can call them up and actually speak to someone at the other end - and they do provide a paid option for support for many of their products. They also sell many of their products through VARs (value-added resellers), who are generally quite helpful if you get stuck or need help.

The thing is that with Google, we are not the consumers, we are the product. That is true to a lesser degree even if you pay them.

"I own a Samsung Galaxy 3, a Nexus 7, run over 10 paid Google Biz Apps accounts, and will continue to use and recommend Google services to my clients and friends."

Why? Vote with your dollars. Oh, wait - you're already paying them and realized you have no reliable support.

Look, I use gmail too, and google search, and adwords. The gmail going away might be somewhat problematic, but I also run my own mail servers for other addresses, and shifting to those as my primary for everything wouldn't be too hard - a small PITA, but not devastating.

I expect a better level of service for something I'm paying cash for. To continue to support them just means its harder for other companies that might be providing good service to get traction.

I've recommended twilio and tropo to various people, and the first reaction is "oh it's like google voice?" the second reaction is "WTF? I have to PAY?! Google Voice is free!" This seems suspiciously like MS 15 years ago using profits their dominance (monopoly) in one market to get in to another market.

When I look at the web pages for Twilio and Tropo, it isn't clear that they are actually replacements for Google Voice.

You're right - they're essentially a step removed, although I'm working on webvbx.com which would be an easier on-ramp to using twilio as a hosted service.

I think this is an appropriate time for me to mention the service calltrackingmetrics.com. We offer a service, that allows you to manage the call flow as well as track many other features of a call - but in this case I believe the major selling point is we have people who answer the phone and work really hard to make sure your phone numbers port over to our system without issue. The Twilio team also helps make sure this process is exceptional.

The target audiences are a little different, but you can replicate the functionality of a Google Voice number pretty easily. You can forward voice calls with a little bit of XML - https://www.twilio.com/labs/twimlets/forward for example - or use something like SendHub to view/reply to incoming SMS messages.

A couple of weeks ago, a friend of mine was shut out of Google Apps (yes, the paying one) for "abuse"

Just like that, leaving them locked out of their (company) emails.

There is a support line but it's helpless, it said "Your account may be unlocked in 72h"

Yes, may be unlocked. This is not a proper answer to a paying customer Google.

So I lost my confidence in Google Apps, if I need a similar service better contract from somebody else.

(It's been a while but I still haven't heard the rest of the story)

What good alternatives are there to Google apps? I may hate them for not having support, but because it's such a good product i may be forced to use it.

Word? Excel?

Back before Google Apps, I was using 1and1 for hosted Exchange.

You get support if you pay for Google Apps for Business.

This person claims he was locked out of his paid google apps for business account. I think one solution is to purchase through a google apps provider. You pay the same costs but they get some cut of the money for providing service. I think this is the model Google wants to implement, have another company handle simple support and they can handle real issues when contacted by the company, not the end users. I think this actually happened for us, but it is invisible. We had an issue with Mac mail and google apps when we started. It wasn't behaving properly. We contacted our provider who I think contacted google and an engineer actually looked at the logs and explained it as a bug in Mac mail which after a timeout was initiating more connections and flooding the server.

Anyway I think google apps providers probably can provide sufficient support, maybe google voice just needs to get there.

Exactly. It was a payed account.

Providers may be a good idea, although I'm skeptical about the ability of Google Apps providers of having direct channels to Google support. Your story is certainly interesting and favorable in that aspect.

The provider claimed he had his chat list filled with google engineers because he would go out to googleplex and met them. Dunno if it's true, but my idea was that I am going to pay the same amount for google apps and these people will be more responsive if i do have issues. I think it worked out.

"This person claims he was locked out of his paid google apps for business account."

Yes he did. And he didn't include what his service representative told him. You see on my paid account under the tools "Manage this account" there is a support tab, and that tab lets you send email to a real person with your account id and generally they respond reasonably quickly. So what what did they say? Now the poster says "locked out of his account" what did that mean? Can't login? Or can't send email? Can't use Drive? Can't use Calendar? Was it just him or everyone who uses the account? When you're paying for a service, if your service provider denies you that service you can sue them more easily.

Now I have been emailed when my logging application tried to send a bunch of emails, I was notified that it had been 'spamming' and disabled until the spam stopped. I sent back a nice explanation of what our systems were doing, and a whitelist of addresses that could send that sort of email, and they set it up. No more issue.

The bottom line is that there are missing bits in this anecdote that would help give context to the 'abuse' comment. But they are missing.

So I am actually a Google Apps Reseller. Our customers can go directly to Google for support, or through us. Most choose to come through us at no additional cost, some pay us for a higher level of support. Generally, we solve the easy stuff that doesn't actually require Google's intervention much faster than Google would for our customers, and are able typically able to get resolution to Google Support tickets for a couple reasons: (1) we are very experienced interfacing with Google Support (2) Because we are in the top tier of Google Apps Resellers (Enterprise Premier), our customers actually get a higher level of support by default.

The guy below who had another reseller claim they have all the Google Engineers on chat...that is probably true but they don't handle support issues. They will tell you to open a ticket, even if they are your friend.

Not sure why my comment above got down-voted. You DO get support from Google by paying for your Google Apps account.

Seriously just use office with a hosted exchange account somewhere. It just works and doesn't suffer from this sort of pain.

If your exchange hosting company goes down or dumps you, you have a copy of your mailbox, calendar etc already in a PST file on your disk.

Office 365?

Google apps has support if your big enough.

Anything else, if you run your business on it. Seriously.

Edit: Or your schoolwork, or anything important.

I really like the collaborative editing environment, but my concern over the potential danger of a loss of data that I have no control over means I'd give that up without thinking twice.

My solution is Dropbox and native apps.

Office 365? Free versions of the Word and Excel webapps can be tried via SkyDrive[1] and you can try the native app integration using the Office 2013 preview [2].

Other strong alternatives could be Zoho[3] or Zimbra[4], depending on your exact requirements.

[1] https://skydrive.live.com/

[2] http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/

[3] http://www.zoho.com/productivity-apps.html

[4] http://www.zimbra.com/products/

When Google Voice was new, I signed up and got a number, but my account never got properly activated to send or receive calls. After more than a week of trying to get support, I payed the fee to get a different number. Unsurprisingly, that number didn't work either, but the financial transaction did at least get me a line of communication through which I could dispute the charge on my credit card and force Google to react. Two or three days later, my account was fixed and the number switch and fee were reverted.

Bringing a financial transaction into the mix is always the most reliable way to get in touch. Google may play hard-to-get with their users, but they can't do that to a bank.

This person paid to port their number into google, from my understanding. So there was a financial transaction- google's complete lack of anything resembling customer support is the issue here.

Thats right, I did pay to port the number in. And then I paid to buy the number back (google must have seen this, so they sent me a refund today).

I had my own Google frustrations lately:

http://journal.dedasys.com/2012/10/16/the-dreaded-google-loc...

Nothing as serious as a phone number that was already in use, but frustrating nonetheless.

What's even more frustratingly difficult is that they do provide a tremendous amount of value with a series of fairly integrated products.... leaving would be very difficult and costly.

It is true that Google has no support for free (or mostly free) services but they do generally for paid services. When I have issues with my google hosted (and paid for) domain a real person answers the email and follows up. At some point I expect them to just flip the bit and bring up a customer support service for 'real'. I suppose they could buy zendesk or something like that but here is an interesting question, how much would you pay for your Google stuff? A gmail account, a hosted domain, docs, etc? $10/month? $100/month?

At NetApp I got a chance to sit in on some meetings where support costs were being evaluated and there is a pretty clear calculus that can be done. (I recommend all engineers at an enterprise products company experience it since the 'cost' of s bug (and thus the value of testing) is pretty clear) So I wonder if Google decided to add revenue from all of their products in this way (clearly they do that right now for Google Apps) would folks sign up? I know a number of Youtube 'publishers' who would if only to have someone to call up when they get a robo-takedown.

Something has to be done about these kind of goof-ups when dealing with Google customer service. It's ridiculous that their primary contact point for servicing paid customers is a online forum manned by volunteers.

quit using them. perhaps people dropping service with them MIGHT send a message? Companies that have has waiting lists for people to use their free service don't usually seem to give a hoot about customer service.

IMHO, it should be stronger than that. When they charge people money for products, they are responsible for supporting them whether they accept it or not. Aren't there any legal protections for customers in scenarios like this ?

Yes, if they're charging money, I agree. I also think the revenue those money-paying customers bring is such a small slice of the pie that they simply don't care. But yes, there possibly are some consumer protection laws in place. Good luck finding anyone willing to try to sue Google over this though.

> Aren't there any legal protections for customers in scenarios like this ?

Sure, but to avail yourself of these legal protections, you need to go through the legal system -- filing a suit in court. The law might guarantee you'll get what you paid for, but it can't force Google to offer phone support.

What about Small Claims court?

A lot of people in small claims court would at best irritate them. Best is to just leave.

I used to look for the best product on the market when I was considering a new service.

I no longer do that. I now look for the product whose support will be there for me when disaster strikes.

No matter what product you choose, at some point, something bad will happen.

Besides the support issues, it's worth noting that Google Voice is also impossible to use when you are (temporarily) outside of the US due to their braindead geographical IP limitation that blocks you from even accessing the site.

For my voicemail-to-email (and occasional forwarding, etc.) I am currently using Sonetel (http://www.sonetel.com). $1/month for a US number and you can contact real humans when things go wrong. (no affiliation, I'm just a happy customer)

This is just not true.

I'm from the US, living abroad. I registered for my google Apps account and GV number while in the US (before I moved). I can log into GV just fine while abroad (no VPN). My wife also has a google account (non-apps), with a GV number that works just fine while abroad.

Since I don't have a 'real' US phone number, my GV account is a software phone only, ringing in Gmail (computer) or Talkatone (iphone).

I have also rigged up a Twilio # which forwards to my non-US cell phone so that I can use GV when my 3G connection is not so great. This is the only stupid part of using GV when you are abroad, I'd happily give my money directly to google but instead I have to give it to Twilio for a hacked solution.

Thank you for the fact check, I am happy to be wrong on this.

It looks like things have changed since I last gave Google Voice a try. It used to be that they would just ignore you while physically outside the US, now it looks like they behave reasonably. Great news!

Has google ever commented on the "no support" policy?

It's incredible to me that this is their stance.

It also seems to directly violate "Do no evil" pretty frequently--effectively shutting down someone's livelihood, in this case.

Google's policy isn't "do no evil". It's "Don't be evil". Subtle, but important.

Your insightful comment made my day (and freaked me out a bit too). So true.

effectively shutting down someone's livelihood, in this case.

They just lost a phone number on their cheap service. The fact that losing that phone number endangered someone's livelihood is not their fault.

So the amount of money google needs to pay dedicated support staff to field customer complaints will not be covered by their Google voice revenue. Or they simply don't care and a few numbers falling through the cracks won't hurt their revenue.

Wow, based on the title I assumed the issue was resolved easily.

Almost two weeks with no number, then being forced to buy the number back?

Great article that highlights the main issues with fast-growing billion-dollar behemoths like Google: "[...] I was so dreamy eyed about Google that I didn’t take the proper precautions [...]". It's insane that they get away with providing 1st level support for critical infrastructure to paying customers using a forum manned by volunteers!

Did the OP ever say that he was a paying customer?

I don't see anything concrete in the article. He says he transferred his _business_ number over, but I don't see any mention that he had a "Google Apps for Your Business" (i.e. paid) account.

I'm fairly sure that Google Apps For Business does, in fact, provide telephone support.

<disclaimer> I'm an engineer and not an expert on support options</disclaimer>

TL;DR "Google didn't help at all. I got lucky and was able to re-register with my number before someone else did."

Is there a comparable solution to Google Voice?

I'd like voicemail, web and phone apps, text message support, and the ability to port a number in.

Bonus points for fax support, which GV doesn't have.

I'm sure that others are looking for a similar solution in light of this.

For free? No. For pay, yes. There are tooons of people in this space. This is one of the first-movers I am aware of: http://www.phone.com/features/

Take a look at http://www.sonetel.com, they are cheaper than many other options and also available internationally.

CallCentric is pretty comparable.

What about just calling the general google phone number and asking them to connect you to someone who can help with google voice?

http://www.google.com/intl/en/contact/

I am not trying to be snide, but you must not have ever tried that. Finding someone to answer a question at Google will require some serious legwork.

Have you ever tried that?

Indeed I have not tried it. It was just a question because I would have expected him at least to try it.

Offtopic: I'm sorry, but the font you're using is horrendously unreadable; the "i"s (for example) are mostly missing:

http://i.imgur.com/cwn1Q.png

Looks perfectly fine to me, guess it must be some kind of problem specific to your setup.

Most of the page is in Verdana, and looks fine. Some parts of the page are in Vegur Light Regular, and while it works when used in headings, it's too light for body copy, even if pseudo-bolded (it's not a full pixel wide on most screens). There are only a handful of lines set in Vegur at body size in the article.

What OS and Browser version?

I wasn't going to complain but since someone else experienced it, they are missing for me on Google Chrome on Ubuntu 12.04.

It appears your browser is not applying the faux-bolding to that font that the web page expected. This is what I see in Safari: http://d.pr/i/cI7f

Google does provide customer support but the end user is not the customer. The customer is the consumer of the data that is gathered on the usage data that is collected from the end user.

I lost an gmail email account, and I had no recourse. In all fairness I was not actively using it. I had registered and received the account so I could have my name. When I decided to start using it, the password no longer worked.

I also had an issue with Skype and I was paid customer. No tech support. I discontinued that account

I have a Google voice account and I use it as my primary phone number. It would hurt to lose or have issues with this account.

I'm surprised the article didn't end with explaining how he got his phone number out of Google Voice.

Google, I don't get you. You treat free service users like kings and paying customers like serfs. What's up with that?

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