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Comment by sundarurfriend | Hacker News Reader

>Simtec: How come there isn’t one here? https://www.google.co.uk/chrome/browser/desktop/

>Google Support: Lol

>Simtec: No really?

>Google Support: That’s a great question

This is the most telling part of the conversation to me. Not just for the hypocrisy others have mentioned, but for the attitude of the Support rep that it reveals. The rep feels so powerless and so disconnected from their own company that a resigned laugh is their first response to an inconsistent rule.

The few companies that manage to have mostly excellent support folks are the ones that:

1. Keep the support guidelines clear and sensible, and more importantly 2. Give the support folk the power to make internal changes (or at least to start discussions) when they aren't sensible or consistent.

Amazon has done very well along these lines, while Google apparently still doesn't trust Support enough to do this.

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If that's a full and accurate transcript; then there's a lot of things deeply wrong with that.

If you pay a company over a million dollars in advertising fees, you'd expect a phone call prior to service cancellation. And you damn sure wouldn't expect a chat window analyst to say "lol" to you when you pointed out their own hypocrisy. I know they like young employees there, but are they staffing their customer support team with teenagers now?

I get sense of humor, but there's a time and a place. A customer just had their account blocked, now's not the time to be anything but apologetic. Customer Service 101 stuff here.

I thought the "lol" was one of the first things that support guy did _right_. They demonstrated a disturbing lack of empathy with the rightful outrage of the client. The "lol" was the first point in that conversation where you see the support staff essentially saying: "I think you have a point".

> If you pay a company over a million dollars in advertising fees, you'd expect a phone call prior to service cancellation. And you damn sure wouldn't expect a chat window analyst to say "lol" to you when you pointed out their own hypocrisy. I know they like young employees there, but are they staffing their customer support team with teenagers now?

The great thing about Google is that they don't just treat the end users with contempt - they treat the paying customers with the same contempt!

(seriously, try getting support for a paid-for GApps problem)

Same stuff goes with Google Cloud which Google advertises as “business oriented”. We had a $20/month project that for some reason its billing account became invalid. It was the first week of the month, billing is at the end of the month, they could just ask us to fix the issue.

Instead they chose to suspend all our projects on Saturday morning, despite paying them more than $10,000/month for the rest of the projects —which had no billing issues.

We found out when all our external service monitors went crazy. Google emailed us a couple hours later and didn't restore our projects until Tuesday.

Extra credit should be given for when they informed me that they turned my personal, non-commercial / developer account to a business account because “google cloud should only be used for business”.

Side note: clicking on the download button on that page reveals the EULA which the user must accept before downloading. I agree that the support agent probably shouldn't have responded "lol", but Google's download page is up to their own requirements.

The support agent points this out:

Google Support: Ah okay, So if you click the download (for Chrome) there’s a popup with the TOS

Because Chrome is using the many of the same tactics and methods as the malware that Google supposedly hates.

- constantly running in the background

- autoupdates

- annoying ads to install it everywhere

- comes bundled with various freeware and checked to be installed by default

- constantly phones home by default

- consumes lots of memory, eats your battery life, eats a lot of disk space and generally makes your computer less efficient

Well, you actually got a meaningful question/answer back/forth conversation going with support at Google. Congratulations. I'd say you scored.

Sorry, my experiences have been far worse to the point that I am actively moving away from all things Google.

Not that it will register one iota on their corporate landscape. However, it will make me feel better and work better. And that's what matters.

Microsoft could win big here just by answering the phone.

We don't have the whole conversation. How do we know that the author didn't selectively show us his conversation with Google? Let's not jump to a conclusion.

The author did selectively show us his conversation with Google. The author mentions this:

> Here’s a subset of our conversation with Google Support:

(emphasis mine) My reading of it was that the author appears to further denote where the conversation is snipped with ellipses:

> Google Support: Unfortunately I don’t have control over that right now but I can look into it for you

> ….

> Google Support: I looked through this, and it seemed that one of the issues was a lack of an End User Agreement (EULA)

Regardless, the blog author is trying to make a point. Removing irrelevant content is something the author should do (in my opinion), to keep the post to the point. Besides,

> How do we know that the author didn't selectively show us his conversation with Google?

…we of course have no way to verify that this is the actual conversation that took place. We assume, on good faith, that it is.

Nothing would ever get done if nobody jumped to conclusions.

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