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Comment by homosaur | Hacker News Reader

Google, for a company that reputes to perform services, is probably the single most consumer-unfriendly company on the planet. Their customer care dept. consists of one crazy cat lady in a cabin in the hills of California. They've sold enterprise services for years (or pretend enterprise services, at least), sold multiple phones and devices, have the largest ad network on the Internet and they STILL don't have anyone you can call if things go wrong. Unless you're Kevin Rose and Google will get bad pub, they absolutely do not care about your problem. Shut up slave, or go back to Hotmail.

Your experience is not even irregular. I'd say this is the typical experience for people dealing with Google when everything doesn't go 100% correct.

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Actually, their core enterprise services - Google Apps and AdWords do have phone support, which I have used extensively:

http://contact.googleapps.com/?&rd=1 and http://support.google.com/adwords/bin/answer.py?hl=en-GB&... for example.

AdWords support is outstanding. As a client getting started with Google advertising, I had a dedicated account manager who set up the entire campaign for me, who would call me back whenever I had any questions I'd email to him and was very intelligent and helpful.

I am not surprised that their free services don't have a phone number to call. Can you imagine providing call-centre support for 400 million Gmail users, or 1 Billion+ Google search users?

Of course, if they want to enter other customer facing businesses like selling hardware or broadband Internet, they will have no choice but to set up call-centres for those departments.

    Google, for a company that reputes to perform
    services, is probably the single most consumer-
    unfriendly company on the planet.

They're really not. This is overstated.

Try dealing with some kind of loss-making monopoly, where the people who work there don't care or may even have a perverse grudge against customers and want to cause them harm.

Look at the way united airlines treated a passenger whos guitar they busted up: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YGc4zOqozo

There are companies who wage campaigns against their customers. They have a policy of not paying credit notes except under extreme pressure. But they might also have call centre staff with no job tracking system call you to chase you for your bill, where the staff don't even know whether you've paid it or not. Why? Because some stats somewhere said that bullied customers are more likely to pay.

Google is flawed but has some endearing things going for it: the employees are intelligent people, they tend to be caring types.

Worse examples have never ever been a good excuse.

Worse examples are useful when someone starts by saying silly things like "probably the single most consumer-unfriendly company on the planet."

Ah yes, the mythical intelligent and caring Google employee. At least United Airlines has a fucking phone number.

Google has phone support for a wide variety of products. Google Wallet is at 1-855-492-5538, Google Play is at 855-836-3987, and other products support numbers are available in the administration console (Apps, Ad-related products, etc.)

They are real people and they do care.

At least those bother to acknowledge their customers, even if their response is wrong. At least it gives you a chance to fight back.

Google simply utterly ignores any kind of complaint. There is no worse way to treat people than to completely deny their existence.

At the risk of being slightly cynical I'd like to point out you can actually phone and talk to someone if you're having problems paying them (i.e payments via Google Wallet) just not after they've taken your money.

For example I was having problems with a payment in Google Wallet for something off the play store. I was able to ring them, speak to someone from America and get the problem resolved in under 5 minutes.

> At the risk of being slightly cynical I'd like to point out you can actually phone and talk to someone if you're having problems paying them (i.e payments via Google Wallet) just not after they've taken your money.

Two Nexus 7s I ordered for Christmas were not delivered and then returned to sender without contacting me. Google not only sorted this out within a day or so, I spoke to people on the phone and by email with a quick turnaround.

I've heard many horror stories, but I just wanted to add that they're definitely not universal. The fault was not with Google but they still sorted it out to the best of their abilities within a day or two.

To give them credit: Google does a lot of things right, which is why I like using their services (avid user of search, analytics, adwords, blogger.com, gmail, android, chrome etc).

In a way, that they do so many things right makes the terrible support harder to swallow ;)

I had some issues with my Nexus 7 which i bought in the Netherlands and was a bit peeved to find the contact us page for the Nexus 7 is literally an empty page. No contact information whatsoever. This was a few months back. I just checked; it's still empty: http://support.google.com/googleplay/bin/request.py?contact_...

I'm not sure if you're talking about the current state, but right now it does seem to have information on contacting them, including a 24/7 call center number: http://i.imgur.com/oonDP.png

You can't have both free (or extremely cheap) services and have highly available tech support. I'm not sure if you've ever been part of a company building a call center for tech support in the US but it is a nightmare. It can easily be one of the most expensive elements of having a service-oriented business.

IOW, you get what you pay for. That said, Google could do much better in customer service -- they indirectly make money on the backs of these customers. It seems deceitful to let people invest heavily in your ecosystem, knowing you won't help them when stuck (and they're so entrenched they just can't leave).

>you get what you pay for

Unless you do not, as in this case.

> indirectly make money

Indirectly? Read the blog post. $5 moved from the customer's credit card to Google's bank account. Clearly, Google is directly making money from this person.

It's a nominal amount. There aren't too many people who are developers, and the amount is likely dwarfed by several orders of magnitude by the 30% revenue on purchased apps. The $5 is purely an anti-spam mechanism. If it were free, spammers could flood the app store with cruddy apps.

Not that this excuses their behavior. App developers are a source of revenue, and treating them as such would be less evil.

The chap in the post isn't seeking highly available tech support. And it's not a free service - he paid.

Customers/users should never be left guessing about whether they've been forgotten or not. If you have users, have some flow like this:

1) Receive the customer communication. If you can't fix it immediately, then you immediately respond to the customer to tell them what you're doing, and clearly indicate when they will receive their next communication from you. It might be "we can't even look at this for six weeks", but if you've taken their money you should give it back.

2) Set a calendar event for your team so that they know about this if you get hit by a bus.

3) On the date, you contact the customer. If you haven't fixed the issue, then you indicate what you're doing at the moment, and give a new date by which the customer will hear from you.

If the customer is unlikely to be happy with the resolution then you describe why and describe their options.

What about paid enterprise services with tech support?

I work in a remote IT office and I would absolutely pay per incident for support as a user. I don't expect a free meal ticket.

Echoing other posters' comments, I have received excellent Play Store support both by phone and email. In both cases I had no rouble reaching a real person and the issue was resolved within hours. So you might want to dial back the hyperbole. Or maybe not, since I'm guessing you knew your claims were outrageous to begin with.

The point of whining is that it gets better. Nothing gets better when you making a pragmatic point.

As someone who used app engine a few years ago but also used the much better customer service recently, I still choose to whine. And I will for a long damn time considering the shit I put up with.

To play devils advocate: Does this mean that customer care isn't necessary for big success?

Apple prides itself on good customer care, so I wouldn't say so.

He said isn't necessary, a counter example does nothing to argue against that statement.

I had a similar issue with my Apple Developer License. My address wash Spanish, my credit card from the UK (as I was working there in that time) and they systems locked me out of everything because it wasn't normal.

I shot a mail address using a contact form and in less than 24 hours I got a phone call which solved all my issues in that same call.

I've been locked out of my AdSense account for breaking the TOS, but they won't tell me which point of the TOS I've broken (which, as far as I can tell, was none) and the only way to get around this was just to create a different AdSense account. Which is against their TOS BTW.

PS. That interaction with Apple was not the first not last, but the only related with an online service. They've fixed hardware, dealt with recalls and even took care of stuff outside warranty.

Unless you are trying to get an app past App Store reviewers.

Apple's developer support on the other hand, is atrociously bad. This article is about a developer account.

It means you can have big success in an industry (search results) that doesn't require customer care.

The problem is Google is trying to approach other industries the same way they have with Search: If it can't be solved by a group of engineers and a rack-full of servers, it shouldn't be solved.

>The problem is Google is trying to approach other industries the same way they have with Search: If it can't be solved by a group of engineers and a rack-full of servers, it shouldn't be solved.

Is that a problem, though? If people in a particular market segment value high quality low cost services over accessible customer support, the strategy succeeds. If customers in that market segment value accessible customer service enough to pay extra for it, it fails when another competitor comes in to provide that and takes all the customers.

But what Google is providing seems to be what most customers want most of the time: People bitch about bad customer service when something goes wrong, but they still choose the free service over the paid one pretty much knowing that that will be the case going in.

The market decided that what Google is doing is what people prefer. The general population could have a change of heart and decide to start patronizing companies with better customer service who charge correspondingly more, but they probably won't.

> Is that a problem, though?

It's a problem to the OP, and it's a problem to a lot of users who suddenly lose access to their GMail accounts and don't have the luxury of getting to the front page of HN. Just because it's not a problem for 95% of people doesn't mean it's not a problem.

I'd also argue that most people aren't aware Google doesn't have customer support going in. Did you explain to every person you recommended GMail to, if you've recommend it to anyone, that there isn't any customer service should they get locked out of the only email account they might be using for the next few years? You might be a smart hacker and know to back up your mail on multiple drives each night, but most folks assume good faith about a company they deal with.

>Just because it's not a problem for 95% of people doesn't mean it's not a problem.

It's not a problem for 99+% of people. That means it's not a problem for 99+% of people. It's like any rare but unfortunate event that people rationally choose not to insure against. And it sucks to be you if you're the statistical outlier, but you already know what to do if you're worried about that: Choose a different service that has a worse overall user experience because they spent their money on giving you someone to talk to on the phone instead of on producing a well-engineered service.

I'd bet that the customer service for google's actual customers is top notch.

Actual large budget customers, maybe

What, I just created an account in Ad-Sense, and got a thread of emails explaining to me how can I use it, with a dicount coupon. After I failed to use it, I got another thread of emails, each time more personal, with hints and phone numbers I could call to get a personalized campaign, and an increase in the coupons discount. Now, about each 6 monts I get physical mail from Google with phones and coupons, each time with a more elaborated impression (they tought about nice paper, credit-like cards, nice envelopes).

All this time I've given Google no money at all.

I think you meant AdWord. Adsense is for publishers. Create an Adsense account and you won't receive a single mail with a phone # listed in them.

It goes somewhat like this:

If you paying money, you might have luck getting a phone support based on your investment. However, if you are on the other end of receiving money, good luck having someone respond to your email or on the forums.

Haha, no. Take a look at how the customer service for the Nexus 4 went. You have customer service making shit up to get people off the phone. You have people not having any way to figure out the status of their order (or even if their order actually went through).

Well, hey, look at Zynga. They even treated their employees terribly and got their success.

This kind of thing is one reason I trust others (eg Apple) more than Google with my computing services.

Apple is a retail business and they can deliver tech support at scale by doubling their retail locations into support centers.

It's unfair to compare a retail company's availability to a SaaS provider such as a Google. It would be wise for Google to start opening retail locations if it intends to get into the retail game for this very reason.

This isn't an unfair comparison at all. From the consumer's perspective both provide many similar services. And products, for that matter.

And (serious question) what's stopping Google from providing support, when other SaaS providers can (and do, profitably) and other ad/media companies can and do?

Specifically, paid support would be nice.

According to Steve Jobs' biography, this was a deliberate decision on their part, to better control the user experience.

They didn't need to become a retail company, but they understood that the customer would be better served that way.

With the frequency that this comes up, I'm a little surprised that no one has tried to build a start-up around this. I'm sure there's enough latent demand for customer service for Google that you could probably charge a fee for it - not sure how much it would be but still something.

Also you've probably got a willing acquirer in Google, providing you can prove out the model.

Only thing is you would need to have plenty of connections into the inner workings of Google to actually be able to serve your customers.

You can't build a startup around this because:

1) it would instantly flounder due to an overload in requests

2) a service department only works when it can deliver customer satisfaction, and you couldn't

The only party that can fix this is google, and they'll only fix it under competitive pressure.

Your post needs a giant asterisk. Everything you said is completely fair, excluding AdWords -- which is where Google actually makes its money. As an Adwords customer, I have absolutely no problem getting my account rep on the phone if I have a problem.

For Adsense, in contrast, the user is told:

>We offer email support for our higher-earning publishers. To find out if email support is available for your account, visit How can I contact AdSense support? [1] Publishers who have access to support via email will find a contact form where they can email our specialists.

It turns out I'm lucky enough to be "eligible for email support". How flattering!

[1] https://support.google.com/adsense/bin/request.py

Why is 'flattery' part of your vocabulary of businesses relationships?

I don't get any email support from a soda vending machine.

Vending machines frequently have a number you can call for support if the machine malfunctions.

Add devices to the list, too. If you have a hardware issue with a Nexus 4 / Nexus 7 / Nexus 10, clicking through the support center will eventually drop you at a phone number to call. Returns/exchanges and warranty repairs are handled by phone.

I think this is just a pattern with companies that have high numbers of employees. Facebook is just as inaccessible. Although I suspect that it's hard to troubleshoot Facebook to begin with since the particulars of their product changes so often.

It's because once a company gets to be over a certain size, everything is part of a process, and processes tend not to care all that much about their participants. When you get really good service from a company, it's generally the individual service rep going above and beyond what the process calls for, rather than the process being one that delivers good service.

Amazons millions of customers and thousands of employees would disagree.

I've never had to call or email Amazon though. Not for retail anyway. Just getting into AWS and we'll see how that goes.

I don't know, it seems to me they're focusing a lot on automation (to reduce costs, among other things).

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