Hacker News Reader

Comment by pg | Hacker News Reader

I think this is going to be really big. But it might require actual customer service; that must have made them think twice.

View on HN

Many years ago, Google made statements like "we only do things that scale, and customer support doesn't scale". It was a strong guiding philosophy for many of the engineers, but that philosophy has eroded.

If we look at some of Google's biggest successes, it has been things that don't scale:

- The Ground Truth team in India, manually drawing the world's maps.

- Manual spam detection in search results

- Customer Support for most adwords accounts

- Customer Support for Nexus devices

I think the executives at Google have enough evidence that "do things that don't scale" can have a big payoff and it is really not that bad. They are clearly no longer too chicken shit to tackle problems that require customer support. The old Google only did things that match the business model of search, today's Google does what it takes to win.

I wouldn't bet against their ability to provide customer support. In the last 2 years, Adwords support went from non-existant to impeccable.

Not to mention, scanning many thousands of books manually.

I thought the same thing till I saw this

http://hackaday.com/2012/11/16/google-books-team-open-source...

Anything of real value doesn't scale. Just look at Google Maps a lot of companies tried to make their own Map apps and failed. Why? Because google invested a ton of money into doing things that computers can't a present and require manual work this can't be replaced by any other map app without doing the same thing.

There's real value in recognizing what computers can't do and investing into doing it anyway and it can make your app irreplaceable.

As Google's product offerings evolve, the cost/benefit of providing customer service scales too. Providing personal support to customers who use search isn't scalable because Google makes fractions of a penny per interaction from these customers. Customer support for things like Google Fiber, Google Wallet, and Adwords is a whole different ballgame in terms of the amount of money Google makes on the average user so it is likely that there's enough margin there to actual scale customer support along with the growth of the userbase.

They've already started to bite the bullet and provide real customer service with Google Fiber. We could be witnessing a huge change in their institutional attitude toward customer service.

Will better service from Google Fiber, and other large providers, push Comcast to provide a better customer service/support experience?

No, those who care about service will switch to google fiber. Then Comcast will see that the number of complaints about their service is decreasing, and go on to praise their employees. For now companies which should be scared of Google Fiber aren't. It took the US years and lot of tax money to build the infrastructure which current ISPs own. Google has done parts of one city with only 2 more on the way. It will take a long time until their business practices cause them failure against fiber competitors. ISPs aren't interested in improving their networks, only in making money off of the money they've invested into at this point.

Didn't Google already buy up a ton of dark fiber backbone? GFiber may be closer to disrupting the national ISP market than we think

That didn't stop them from rolling out Google Checkout with any (human) customer service, as I painfully discovered :(

Google seem allergic to phone or email contact with users.

How true is this still? Google Checkout was rolled out ages ago (in tech years). The Google today is quite different. I have been reading about "poor Google customer service" for years, almost like it's a running joke of anecdotes. Years ago it may have made sense, but today Google has Android/Fiber/plethora of web services. I can't imagine they haven't clued in on customer service yet with all their paid services.

I can't confirm since I closed my checkout account. Try navigating throuh their help pages to see if you can find an email address to contact a human. Used to be impossible. All they had was a selection of multiple choice boxes with predetermined solutions.

Adsense users often complain about this. They don't seem to realise that they're not the customer. They're not even the product being sold. They are trying to sell product to Google - "Buy this space on my web page / youtube video".

Google has strict rules, and sometimes makes mistakes, and doesn't have any way to sort out those mistakes. It sucks for those people. And since those people are (by definition) the kind of people with websites you do hear about it quite often.

Having said that, you do sometimes hear about people with large numbers of adsense viewers being called (real telephone call!) by Googlers offering advice about better results.

And you hear from people with adword accounts that they get to speak to real people.

I don't know any numbers, but I bet Google has a lot of people wanting to contact them.

Adsense "users" are actually business partners with google. You share revenue, pool resources, etc. In my mind, that arrangement should encourage a higher level of service than most customers.

I'm saying that the poor service offered Adsense partners isn't excused because they're not customers. If anything, it indicates that customer service will be worse based on this totally made up hierarchy that I've just made up (partners more important than customers, should have higher priority service).

I wonder what you would say when you personally experience a $15,000/mo sudden AdSense account shutdown in a bootstrapped startup, with confiscation of $30,0000 earnings already on the account. The email will be just a template to accuse you of "fraudulent activity", and there will be no human at all that you can call. Speaking with the first hand knowledge of the matter.

I think that a lot of folks are in denial about some of Google's downright evil business practices because they admire Google's technology and like Google's attitudes towards open source software. I greatly admire this stuff too, but Google has some shocking business practices that quite frankly are unbelievable until you experience it firsthand for yourself.

When you're a small business and Google bans you for some unknown reason and seizes your money - here is what will happen.

* You might receive some type of form letter in response, but you will not be able to get an intelligent reply from a trained customer service agent. * You will not be able to reach anybody on the phone for any price that will help you out. * You will not find out what the issue was that caused a ban. * Your small business will die a slow death. * Depending on the amount of money the owners have (most small businesses don't have a lot) they will struggle to even pay their employees their final checks with this cash seized. * You are forever banned from using AdSense again, so forget starting up another online business ever again.

Google is an amazing company that has some frankly despicable business practices that more people need to pay attention to and call them out for.

Google looks after Google and that's it. Exhibit A is search and how much more money Google makes after major updates.

People are in denial but some truth is coming out little by little.

I wonder if anyone has (for example in the UK) simply taken Google to the small claims court to resolve an issue like this.

I, of course, know nothing about your case. And if I did, I wouldn't be able to discuss it in public, because it'd get me fired. It must be nice taking shots in public where you know no-one can shoot back.

But since I'm completely ignorant of your case, I'm gonna shoot my mouth off a bit, and hope I don't get in trouble for it.

Google spends insane amounts of effort tracking these cases. I've met lots of six-figure-salary folks who hours or days of every week looking into corner cases. And they're just the tip of the iceberg. Again, I'm not speaking to your particular case, but the thing we learn is that out of every hundred people who say what you're saying, at least 99 of them have repeatedly violated the rules, and more than 50 of them got multiple warnings.

And it's not like Google is keeping the money. Google's fraud-fighting effort is not a profit centre, by any stretch.

I'm not saying that Customer Service is Google's forte, but the internet is full of a lot of lies, and lots of them are told by people who tried to scam us, or scam our customers, and are hilariously outraged that we caught them.

You could have left the first two paragraphs off and the tone of the post would have been much improved. It sounds like you've got a chip on your shoulder which impacts the positive impact your (unofficial) representation could have.

I am posting this from Tor, since we are still dependent on Google in many ways. We had a similar situation, where a growing startup that many people here may know about (getting 15000+ signups per day at the time, now more) was getting threats from AdSense that some of our pages violated some vague and amorphous content policies that are actually written to be violated (and 99% of AdSense publishers that do not 100% control their content violate them- think of Myspace.com for example- but they were too big to violate AdSense policies). Our account bringing over $10,000/mo was shut down.

We have documented everything and we are now in a much stronger position, thanks to our users. We have access to Techcrunch/Techdirt, and we have considered publishing a comprehensive documented story of our experience with AdSense, but decided to put it on hold, since we do not want to associate our name with any controversy. When our start-up successfully exits or if it fails, the situation may change.

I just want to add a couple of things to jholman:

You start from the presumption of guilt. An old adage is that your customer is always right, but your starting point is the opposite. This is probably driven by hubris, that's embedded in Google's DNA: you KNOW BEFORE your customer that your customer wants to commit fraud, BEFORE they have actually committed it.

My point is simple: when you threaten to turn off a $5,000+/mo client, provide knowledgeable PHONE SUPPORT. Have your specialist CALL the victim business. These amounts are not a small change to many people, they will lead to bad PR, like was linked in this thread earlier https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3803568.

And do not worry, you will not get fired for defending Google!

I'd be spitting feathers!

But customers don't have to buy from you, and they don't have to give you a reason when they stop buying from you.

you do sometimes hear about people with large numbers of adsense viewers being called (real telephone call!) by Googlers offering advice about better results.

I had a fun experience with that call a few years back, when Twiddla was in the spotlight and everybody was calling trying to give us money and free stuff now that we'd proved we didn't need it anymore. I got to explain to the cheerful AdSense Optimization Team guy how I couldn't use his help because we'd had our AdSense account permanently clobbered on a whim a year or so previous and hadn't ever been able to get it reinstated.

As you can imagine, our AdSense account was back up and in good standing the next day. We've never used it since. Fool me once, and all that.

I get that you think or see these responses as anecdotal, and frankly, there is no other kind when it comes to a customer talking about a company they are getting a product from.

However, I would say that this thread is one of the first places EVER that I have seen someone say google support is good or sufficient or not terrible even. I have seen people have to post on HN to get things resolved by google employees reading HN threads! While it seems like a personal touch, people are resorting to it (and I assume googlers are helping) because there is not another avenue that works for MOST products that google has.

I must acknowledge have not used the google support for fiber (I dont have it) and that might indeed be great, as a man who does customer service stuff plenty of times, I know that there is a simple siloing process going on with their support departments.

Nonetheless google has a loooooong way to go to change the "anecdotal" consensus of the internet when it comes to their support, their comments about not doing things that dont scale entirely aside.

Any time I was giving Google money for something they had good customer service (AdWords)

In other cases (if I'm the product) nonexistent.

I used checkout a year ago and had the same issues. No human, only pre-fab answers based on checkboxes. I haven't used it since.

Recently, I had trouble with gmail on my iPhone (due to the whole EAS shutdown) and was looking for help or info on account upgrades. Only userland help forums for me.

I would say: Google's tech support is terrific until you actually have a problem and need to talk to someone.

The amount they pay for bug bounties has just become worthless. The value of an XSS or even CSRF bug in Google products has just shot through the roof.

I hope it works. If it does it'll have a massive impact on the world and hopefully utterly screw paypal, but the potential for fraud is huge. It's one thing to secure a payment portal, but a complex mail app with a combined payment portal is a massive challenge. I hope they can live up to it.

It depends on how the chargeback and tracing system works. Credit cards and ACH have virtually no security (especially ACH, the "secret" is on the bottom of every check you write), and the world keeps turning. If it's hard to get money out in a untraceable and irreversible way, hacking someones account is not so valuable.

The exact same thing could be said about Google Apps, or PayPal - near-total absence of customer service didn't stop adoption of either of those.

(To be fair, PayPal's customer service is pretty great now, but that's only in the last 18-24 months. They were the market leader long before they put any real effort into that.)

They were the market leader because they were the only noteworthy and reliable player in the market.

Competition from upstarts like Stripe has pushed them to take customer service seriously.

Not to mention, the great documentation they have now for their APIs! ( Go Competition! )

we're a PayPal customer and we've got a dedicated account manager that responds pretty quick and provides great communication.

PayPal has plenty of customer service, and has for a long time. The problem has been that they had very shitty and abusive customer service, though I think they've started to learn their lesson on that.

Not "might", will. They state it on the linked page:

"... our customer service team will help resolve any questions you might have."

When there's a substantial amount of money involved Google has great customer service. Never had a problem getting issues resolved with my Adwords account.

Google's phone service for business accounts is actually pretty good. I've heard they've been investing a lot in improving their customer service.

I think that Google Checkout team, as usual, would screw up execution.

On my web site users have choices to pay directly (Stripe), PayPal and Google Wallet.

New users virtually never use Google Wallet (former Google Checkout).

Given those options I always go for Google Checkout, actually. Paypal doesn't support my country(Lebanon), so that's out of the question. And I try to minimize the number of places that have my CC information. Checkout already has it from my use of the play store on android.

They already have enough relationships with governments around the world for all of their data centers and other projects (maps, mail, youtube, etc.) that I think they could do a decent job on this. I expect it'll still be several years before it's a decent competitor to paypal but it'll be nice to finally get some competition in that space (low overhead global payments without a merchant account).

Not if they say it's in "beta" for the next four years.

I suspect that this year Apple will soon release hardware and software that will leverage all those iTunes credentials to provide something similar.

However, Google will be in a great position to profit from a new source of consumer purchase info, which will flow to Adsense/Adwords and their other revenue generators. Privacy be damned? :)

The battle for your complete purchase history is now officially on!

I am a regular AdWords user and Google's customer service for it has been pretty spectacular.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com