Pichai is Google's Ballmer. He's ruining the company. Google's current management is 100% focused on maximizing shareholder value and the worst part is that Larry and Sergey are on board with it.
Without going into specifics, and for what its worth, I've had some great experiences with their customer service and Its part of the reason I've stuck with them for so long. I doubt that'd be the case if I experience what this guy did though.
While dealing with a fairly technical sms issue, I was pleasantly surprised how far up the food chain I got when the first agents couldn't help me. The biggest speed bump is usually getting through the first round of questions that filter out the kruft and grandma-issues, but I understand the necessity
edit: I realized after I wrote this that most of my experiences were during the Project Fi phase, before it went full Google, so theres that...
Even companies that are great at building fantastic products and great technical solutions tends to struggle customer service organisations. It seems they always assume that everything fits in to neat little buckets, and require adherence to them. This is true for both Google and Valve (Steam).
Trusting your customer service teams to have a great degree of autonomy in solving issues can sometimes be really important.
It's a shame you never know whether a company has sucky customer service before you buy their services.
And what would those have changed? Do you believe that some EU consumer right agent would bust down the door at Google and get you your $70 and an apology for wasting your time?
Sure, you'll have a great time in court (as the OP would in the states, Google is clearly in the wrong here), but that doesn't help you in the slightest, because it's a lot of hassle, time and effort, you'll have to pay your lawyer up front etc pp.
The thing with Google is that things work well 99% of the time for 99% of the people, but if you hit that 1% of 1%, your life will become an absolute nightmare filled with support site loops, chatbots, automated email replies, and months of suffering. If you're lucky, your story will make it to the front page of HN and somehow get resolved immediately.
Google Fi support went down the drain when they expanded. I had a recent experience with my mother's phone being stolen while she was at a hospital, here's the summary after it was confirmed missing and police contacted, with a lot of redundant messages removed.
1st chat with agent
Me Hi, my mother's phone was stolen, I'm tracking it on find my phone.
Them: Sorry to hear that, we can black list the phone but you must message us from the member's account
(I am the sole payer on the group plan, paid for the phone, etc.)
Me: Okay, fine, I will contact you from chat on her google account
2nd chat with agent:
Me: Hi, this is [mom]'s son, I am helping her report her phone stolen to blacklist it.
Them: Sorry, we cannot blacklist a phone on a group plan if you are not the primary account holder, please contact us on the primary account.
3rd chat with agent:
Me: Hi, I'm trying to blacklist a stolen phone, please see [case numbers]
Them: The phone is registered under another Google account
Me: No, see these case numbers, I refuse to end this support until this is dealt with, I am the primary account holder. Let's blacklist this phone so that it cannot be used by another carrier.
Them: Our specialist says the phone must be active on Google Fi to blacklist it.
(The phone's battery has died at this point, 90 miles away from where it was last)
Me: Does that mean it has already been transferred to a different carrier, or is it offline?
Them: The specialist says that the phone must be active on Google Fi
Me: What does that mean? Can you ask the specialist if the battery is dead that means it's not active?
Them: I cannot say.
Me: What is even the point of blacklisting a phone if it doesn't work the moment someone pops the SIM card out or turns the phone off? Nevermind. I would like to escalate to a supervisor.
Them: Okay
Escalation??
Still haven't gotten anywhere since this Thursday, no one has reached out to me.
Had a similar experience with Google Fi. It's severely negatively impacted my view of Google as a company.
Still, I hate Verizon & AT&T so much, and I travel internationally to quite a few countries a year, so I'm sticking with them for service. But I'm far from a net promoter.
Had a similar experience with Google Apps - Google's customer support process is inept by design, which is the primary reason Google doesn't get my money anymore.
it sounds awful but do you actually have any examples of them being up the drain before expansion? I ask because I'm one of these cynical about google support folks.
I have been with Fi for several years and have never had a problem with customer service. I always call and speak with a rep who is readily available to help. My Pixel 1 had bluetooth issues and I was sent a replacement within a week. The second time it went bad because the screen stopped turning on, it was an equally quick turn around.
Maybe voice is a better option than chat, at least in my experience.
It's weird -- I use Google Fi and loved it, and I got great customer service, up until the point I ordered a Pixel 3 through them back in November. I had to contact them so many times to find out why they hadn't shipped yet, and the regular customer support people had no idea what was going on, and when it got escalated to shipping, they also seemed to have no idea but were much less apologetic about it. After a few weeks of not having my phone shipped, I ordered it through the Google Store (with 0% interest financing instead of paying it off through my bill, oh well) and I got it within a week. It's ridiculous. I'd been a loyal customer of Fi for over two years, but that ordeal almost made me want to quit. If I had to go through what this author went through, I would have done the same.
About to leave for Paris on google fi for the first time from the US and praying that it works well. Supposedly I don’t have to notify them and it should be the same price for data and just a little more for old-fashioned sms and phone calls.
I've enjoyed it, but none of my SMS messages ever seem to be delivered while I'm overseas. I just fell back on over the top services and didn't worry about it, thought it was happening to everyone on those networks.
For all the issues with Google Fi (and I've had blissfully few, but I believe these stories and hear sadly too many of them), I have had zero issues going internationally with it. It just works, and it works better than T-Mobile's equivalent functionality (even though I was told at one point that they're "just" piggybacking on it). I've gone to Japan and all over Europe, and never had a single issue.
Unfortunately they control a large portion of the mobile market. For many it is a career-ending move to not support Android. Same on the YouTube end of things - they're the only game in town for certain audiences.
I’ve been on T-Mobile for years when many friends went with Google Fi. Service on T-Mobile is spottier in CONUS, but internationally my experience has been far superior to that of my friends. Good choice.
Fi's "killer app" is their seamless international experience for U.S. travelers. I travel outside of the U.S. at least twice a year and firing up my phone on the plane and being greeted with a "welcome X country" like I had just traveled between U.S. states is amazing.
Down the list is their relatively cheap service for undemanding users (people who use less than a couple GB of data per month). I'm pretty sure I could just go get a better unlimited plan for slightly more (with more phone choices) tomorrow. But I wouldn't really use the extra service and so I'm happy to get the extra $100/yr or whatever I'm saving.
That being said, I've had extremely mixed support from Fi. The support is responsive, human and polite. But for issues almost exactly like this one, Fi's support staff is entirely unable to cope. In our case, Fedex had even taken a photo of the delivery (which was the wrong house). Fedex needed some kind of shipping code from google to release the photo so we could prove it's not the same house (or at least figure out who had our new phone).
Not a single person at Fi could provide the code to Fedex.
We escalated 3 times and it took about a month to resolve, but in the meanwhile we were charged for a phone we didn't receive, and the clue as to where it went was readily available.
Fi did eventually send us a new phone and everybody was terribly polite, but anybody else would have just noticed the phone hadn't been activated, and sent a new phone immediately (and if the phone were to be activated contact local PD).
It took dozens of chats, emails, calls and so on, and each time the support person on the other end would lose the script and try to resolve our issue with some non-sequitur that wasn't solving the problem.
It's not the worst customer service experience we ever had, but it was down there. The only reason we didn't pull the plug was we were about to travel outside of the U.S. and having service that just "works" was a big part of our planning.
I’m writing this from Australia where I arrived today and my Sprint phone roams for free: I get free texts and slow 2g/3g data(enough for WhatsApp and FaceTime audio calls) as well as $0.25 phone calls.
2 years ago when I was also visiting Australia I was with T-Mobile which offered similar free/low cost roaming.
It’s not ideal, but its an alternative to Google Fi
The difference is in quality. I am also right now in Sydney, on the last day of my week-long business trip, and I have had constant 4G connection with Google Fi. Back when I had T-Mo I needed to find WiFi whenever I needed to download a large attachment, and obviously whenever I wanted to stream videos. Now I don't even ask for the WiFi password. And yes, I'll be watching Game of Thrones this evening using my phone's hotspot which has a US IP, so I can really feel at home.
I'm disappointed to hear that Google's customer service is bad, but when I signed up I wasn't even sure if they had a customer service department. T-Mo's support was OK, but for the past few months I've been living without it just fine.
I had good experiences with it while traveling in china. Other people in my group bought local data sims which were 100 times cheaper than the $10/gb that google fi charges but everything they wanted to use (google search, google maps, facebook) were still blocked by the Great Firewall. Google Fi has built in vpn and didn't have that problem.
FWIW, the built-in VPN isn't actually what matters for why the internet is unblocked in China when on a foreign SIM. Instead, the way cellular data networks works is such that your traffic is tunneled back to the provider first.
> I travel outside of the U.S. at least twice a year and firing up my phone on the plane and being greeted with a "welcome X country" like I had just traveled between U.S. states is amazing.
T-Mobile One accounts get this in 120+ countries, works like a charm. But I've done the math and renting a USB hotspot or buying a 1-month SIM works out to be cheaper for my needs, and I can avoid having to confirm my phone has the correct network support in some countries.
This is fraud. As soon as any rep sees the evidence of the fraud and stonewalls they are engaging in a conspiracy to commit fraud. At that point the law should take over. "The policy says I must break the law" is not a defence. "The fraud was opportunistic rather than pre-meditated" is not a defence. You can't break the law because of a company policy, you're a human you have responsibilities.
Prosecutions need to happen for this kind of thing. They really do. Start with the frontline and work your way up the chain, ordering a frontline employee to commit a crime with a policy document is a crime for all who wrote and approved the document.
If a google customer engaged in fraud of a similar against google there's no doubt google have the option of involving the police and getting a prosecution. A corporation is people who are all responsible for their actions.
There is a good chance that Google views the complainant as fraud too... And that's why they can't talk clearly about what's going on.
Their records show that first phone as delivered. They think their device has been stolen from them. Then the 'fraudster' tries to get another device sent to them - which is 'returned' under suspicious circumstances.
All the delays might be a police investigation they aren't allowed to talk about.
And finally now the 'fraudster' wants a refund of all moneys paid too! Who are they - they've stolen one phone, tampered with another, and want a full refund to boot!
nope. Packages delivered without a signature can still be lost and the insurance paid out. How else would they prevent their drivers from stealing packages?
The timeline is 2 months long... over 1 month between the phone being lost and the new one being returned.
Packages get lost for all kinds of reasons. If you ship things regularly, it happens occasionally. You open a case with Fedex, the driver gets a week to find the package. If he can't, the package is declared lost, and the insurance on the package is paid out.
You're ridiculous if you think Google is calling the police for every lost package. What would they even base a case on? Fedex tracking of a package delivered without a signature? Geez. The cops would just ignore their calls.
That was my first thought too. It sucks and they're completely in the wrong, but this stone-walling sounds like he has triggered their (completely insane) internal fraud procedure.
My wife and I left fi for exactly the same reason as the blog post. My wife had a problem with her pixel 2, and she was pretty much without a phone for WEEKS. We absolutely adored fi for years before that. We were huge advocates. After we had such a horrible experience being gaslighted, promised, and let down we just fuck this and went to AT&T. It’s not like we love AT&T. In fact, we don’t. But you know what we can do? We can walk our asses in a store in pretty much any city in the country and leave with a phone.
If customer support is important to you, I heartily recommend giving Ting[1] a try. They're a T-Mobile and Sprint MVNO. Every interaction we've had with their customer service has been excellent. Last I called, there was no phone tree, just a person immediately picking up (hopefully it's still like this).
> ordering a frontline employee to commit a crime with a policy document is a crime for all who wrote and approved the document
In reality they never order crimes in writing, though. They say your metrics need to be above a certain level to keep your job, and the only way to boost your metrics is to commit a crime. See: Wells Fargo fake account scandal.
My mom spent the last half-decade of her career (at a hospital) working large amounts of unpaid overtime because her boss made it clear that was the only way to keep her pension.
I found your comment about higher metrics eye-opening. Your mom’s story is heartbreaking to hear. That was such a cruel thing for her boss to force it upon her like that.
Too many people have too much of Google as part of their lives to do more than the OP did and eat the $70 instead of dropping out of Android development.
And that's got to be how Google can, intentionally or not, get away with such blatant fraud, the pool of people able to escalate is kept very small.
Sounds like a very standard Google experience. To anyone stuck in a similar hell in the future - once the company has demonstrated that they aren't willing to help, there is no point continuing down that road. Escalate it to your credit card provider (with documentation) and they will clear it up pretty quick.
A credit card chargeback bans you from Google Pay/Wallet/Android Pay/Google merchant services/google shopping basket/gBilling/whatever it's called now and all services requiring payment. I think you can still use gmail/youtube/whatever.
There is no incentive for them to penalize anyone who generates lots of transaction fees. Especially as any I’ll will accrues to their customer (google) and not to them (visa et al)
Google is shit in meatspace. It has been demonstrated too many times. They'd better hope the day that they'll only need to interface with bots arrives soon.
As a former GCP support rep, this is actually true. Their strict hiring practices prevented them from scaling up support along with their platform, so they had to contract with other IT companies to provide the necessary manpower. Unfortunately, that also meant that Google's support was manned by people not up to Google's own standards. This started to change over the last year when they got sick of the lackluster support from their contractors, but I still doubt they are able to get enough Google qualified engineers willing to work in customer support. It's definitely not for a lack of trying, though. The problem is that if you're good enough to pass a Google whiteboard exam, wouldn't you rather build things, rather than coach other people building things? I sure did.
Evangelists and Teachers definitely exist in the tech space, however FAANG companies are usually headed up by people who marginalize them in my experience.
The enterprise support tier for GCP is as good as Azure and AWS top tier in my experience.
With regards to consumer products. It‘s probably not possible to support 2.5b+ users with humans. Voice assistants are getting there though. 5 to 7 years maybe?
I once was only able to quit my League of Legends video game addiction because I gave my account away that I had so much vested in (skins, all characters, rune pages) by basically messaging a random stranger, changing the account to their email, going to a random password generator site, changing the pw copy+pasting the password without me looking, and sending it off -- in effect "suspending myself".
I was unnerved for a couple of weeks, but eventually, the itch to play died off. I tried starting up a few times, but it wasn't worth it especially knowing how much time I sank into it previously.
I wonder if I got myself permanently suspended from Google, (I want to quit Google given how unethical they have become) would I rid myself from them for good?
He is an Android Developer. Getting banned could have career-disrupting or even career-ending repercussions for him. It is not exactly comparable to quitting a video game.
I'm sure the costs (both direct costs and the opportunity cost) of a career change is orders of magnitude higher than the $70 he is going to get back through the chargeback.
I'm sorry to hear that. Alcoholism or just an expensive habit?
If alcoholism, luckily it is taken "more seriously" than video game addiction. Although now as I get older I just realize addiction is a trait we all have the propensity for, and some people just manifest it in healthy ways where as some of us in not so healthy ways. I have people in my family that were compulsive gamblers, alcoholics, workaholics, and drug addicts, sometimes a combination of all four -- all different forms of addictions. Sometimes I view my video game addiction in that light: "well at least it wasn't drugs or alcohol" but, who knows, maybe in 50 years we will find out that it harmed me just as much.
Definitely some form of Alcoholism, but not crippling and not expensive since I can tolerate the $15 1.75l vodka, mixed with water. Never (mostly) during work or times I expect to drive. But most days, for the past 20 years, from 5PM to 11:30PM I have a strong drink on hand. The big bottle last only 3 days. I only get bad hangovers once in a while, though there's no doubt the habit slows me down during the day. And I'm a huggy drunk, not angry. In fact, people seem to prefer tipsy me over sober me. I'm sure it has damaged my body (but who goes to the doctor?) and I felt way better in general the week I was off it. I quit Ultima Online (decades ago), smoking (years ago), and caffeine (months ago) without assistance, I'm pretty sure I can get this figured out. Maybe abstaining from things can be my new addiction :)
Google has demonstrated enough times already that your account can be permanently suspended for any or no reason at all. While the services they offer are definitely useful, if people are relying on them in their personal or professional lives it's best to be ready in case they are taken away without notice.
Yeah, their propensity to random account shutdowns in lieu of resolving whatever issues got them worried is why I've started paying FastMail and am slowly migrating to mail at my own domain. I can live without any other Google service, but having been a heavy GMail user for the past decade, account shutdown is an existential threat.
So basically never get into a business relationship with Google because if they screw you over you have absolutely no recourse, unless you've managed to steer clear of using Gmail, etc.
Since I don’t know what your requirements are, I’m just going to list some “good alternatives” for email that are paid services and have a better focus on privacy/customers:
- Posteo.de
- Runbox
- Mailbox.org
- Mailfence
As a Gmail user, you’re probably not as concerned about five eyes surveillance as some others may be. If that’s true, then add Fastmail into the above mix.
You would think that if they weren't connected that Google wouldn't ban you across accounts, but I know a person who had their name banned from Uber, so if Google wanted they probably could deny services to you.
There is nothing of value on my google account. Everything that is, has backups on my own servers or mirrored to other services. I consume youtube only via rss-bridge, so my youtube account being banned means I only loose nothing at all.
I'd chargeback Google in a heartbeat if I had even minimal reason to do so.
Google has too many hobby products for me to trust them with an actually mission critical part of my life that is my only phone line.
I really need to be able to walk into a store or physical location to talk to an actual person. Plus the accounts of Fi customers getting locked out or if you can’t use Google Payments, you can’t pay for Google Fi.
How on earth is google not being sued every day? It seems like once a week there's a new HN post about some kind of massive screwing they deliver to a customer.
I don't want to click far enough into the signup to get to an actual contract, but I'd be extremely surprised if it
didn't have an arbitration clause as requirement.
For some things you can opt out of arbitration, but not for others.
It's high time that the arbitration act gets dramatically scaled back. I don't have problems with reasonably sized companies agreeing to arbitration in contracts with each other, but it doesn't work for end users and employees.
For lots of people, because that would cost them all their other Google accounts and services. The OP would have to give up on Android development.
I am former Fi user, started back when it was a "Project". My Nexus 5X's battery swelled but was still working and had a full charge, they wanted me to ship it back to them which I morally felt I couldn't do, and replace it with a generally low quality Lenovo Motorola phone that was reported to have serious WiFi problems, negating that major part of their business proposition where it uses any accessible WiFi for data and voice if possible. Felt stupid for having paid them $5/month for device replacement coverage.
The G+ real names debacle prompted me to remove as much exposure to Google as possible, now I'm down to Google Groups which can only be had from them. They're just too risky for individuals to depend on.
Google does not have the company culture or attention span to be an infrastructure provider. It never has and it never will. Google Fiber is dying on the vine as we speak. Google Fi will be dead long before they work out these problems.
OP should not have attempted to negotiate with the hostage taker. They should have instead reached out to their CC issuer and explained the situation. If the goods were not delivered most competent credit card companies will issue a chargeback.
"We're banning you for demanding a refund for items not delivered" seems like a great way to attract regulatory scrutiny:
>By law, a seller should ship your order within the time stated in its ads or over the phone. If the seller doesn’t promise a time, you can expect it to ship your order within 30 days... If the seller is unable to ship within the promised time, it must notify you, give a revised shipping date and give you the chance to cancel for a full refund or accept the new shipping date.
I’ve emailed HN support about comments that were showdead because they were new accounts or once a comment I made that was flagged, I felt, unfairly[1], and gotten actual support from real people who can make decisions and fix problems in under 12 hours.
HN does actually have better customer support than Google.
[1] If you find yourself doing this you are taking arguing on the internet entirely too seriously.
I have had exactly the same experience with the HN staff up to and including [1], and you are completely right about the comparison to Google. In Google‘s defense, I had a decent experience with support for my paid GSuite about 5 years ago.
I had one bad experience, and it was so bad I nearly stopped buying from Amazon.
Product did not arrive on time, spoke to support rep.
Rep said that it was delayed because it was coming from overseas, which the tracking information easily disproved - it was coming from Illinois. Illinois is not overseas. When told this, the rep accused me of making things up, despite having the link.
The rep then said that it had been delayed because of weather in my town. I live in this town. It was sunny the entire day in question, and the day before. When I pointed this out, he flat out called me a liar.
I then asked to speak to a supervisor, because I had been lied to twice at this point. The rep immediately began stonewalling me, and for the next 45 minutes, I became increasingly impatient with his behavior, and told him that if I did not have a supervisor in the next 5 minutes, I would be ending the chat and sending the transcripts to someone else at Amazon and following up.
At this point, he made a thinly veiled threat to ban me (I have thousands of dollars of digital content tied to my account), and I immediately ended the chat and sent the entire log to anyone and everyone associated with Amazon that I could think of.
I didn't downvote you, but as a small-scale seller on Amazon, I received absolutely terrible support when they froze my account over a 12-cent fee that was added retroactively and therefore "past due" before I ever heard about it. They were going to pretty much keep my money and my merchandise and ignore me until I got an AWS rep to get involved.
As a customer, on the other hand, Amazon has among the best service I've ever received.
I deal with such experiences by simply reversing the credit card charge. The issuer of my card has a solid process for handling such situations. They ask a series of questions: was the charge in exchange for goods or services? Did you receive what was promised? How was your experience different from what you expected? After about half an hour on the phone with an actual human, the charge is reversed, and all goes back to normal. I’m confident that not even google can fight bog standard chargebacks.
People have lots of criticism of Amazon, some I even agree with, but working here[0] one of my favorite little cultural things is that customers can and do email Jeff when stupid things happen. And Jeff reads them. Every now and then he'll forward one of them to a senior VP with a simple "?" added to it.[1]
That question mark indicates two things: that you have 24 hours to explain how this terrible customer experience happened, and that not long afterwards you'd better have a plan for how it isn't possible for this kind of problem to happen again. A lot of incredible changes have been made based on those question marks.
Google does not have such a customer-obsessed culture. So bad things like this happen and then nothing seems to change. Next week, it will happen again. Because (in my view) Google is an ideas-first culture, not a customer-first culture. Those ideas have rocketed them to success but I wonder if it can sustain them indefinitely.
[0](All my views are obviously my own and don't reflect speaking on behalf of the company)
Having been through several Jeff escalations on the seller side of things, the reality is very different from the romanticized version in the public mind.
Maybe it worked that way a decade ago when the volume was lower. Now sending a Jeff message just goes to a specialized team that's only slightly more competent than whoever would otherwise handle the issue. Have had several times where no resolution was given at all.
Amazon generally has always treated sellers/vendors like shit, but has always been good with consumers once you escalate it appropriately. I’ve had a lot of weird cross border Amazon problems and mail to Jeff resolved.
Look at their budget. Most of their revenue comes from AWS. So their large AWS clients are their customers. The margins on the retailing e-commerce customers is slim and wasn't profitable on a cashflow basis until recent years. From a financial perspective, they're the people who are going to stock the items and take the risk for products where demand is uncertain. Once more data is collected about their sales, Amazon will use their scale to undercut their e-commerce selling partners. So they are important to their company logistics, just not to the bottom line.
I just want to point out how ridiculous it is to think that AWS > Selling stuff out of a warehouse in terms of revenue.
Amazon does about $30B a year in selling goods, and about $7B a year in AWS.
AWS does deliver higher profit margins and more operating income than the tiny margins on selling and shipping goods, so perhaps that's what you meant to say.
Because I was using quarterly for both numbers, and their net sales of merchandise was over $200B (global) in 2018, meaning their net sales were almost 10X higher on products than AWS. Since it's a 10:1 margin, I continue to claim that it's ridiculous to think that AWS > selling physical products in terms of revenue.
In terms of income, however, it's not, they make a lot more on services than physical goods (as everyone not named Apple does)
that 30B in sales is revenue and not a profit. You combine all stuff sales they do together in all their warehouses and logistics and they don't combine together enough to beat the money that their AWS brings in. That 30B revenue costs almost 30B in expenses as well. You take out revenue in the form of advertising and it's almost nothing or negative depending on the quarter. As impressive as the revenue is, it's nothing if you can't turn a profit as a business. Anybody can buy something at wholesale, ship it to your door , not make any money on it and then take it back if it the company is unsatisfied.
I emailed Jeff about two years ago about a repeated and annoying Kindle App (on Android) bug. Included the details I'd given to support a few attempts before this final straw. He didn't reply (of course) but a few days later a Kindle engineer helped me debug the issue (part Android setting, part Kindle app bug) via phone.
There is only one customer at Google, and it is the people buying ads.
Astonishingly enough, even at moderate ad volumes there's still no customer service. You have to start spending truly astronomical amounts of money before an actual rep will attempt to help you with essentially any problem.
So to Google, "actual customer" means "someone spending six figures per month on advertising on our platform". As far as I am aware, even similar spending on other areas (GCP) doesn't warrant "actual customer" status.
I have lots of criticisms of Google, but let's not spread misinformation. GCP does offer paid support options, depending on your business requirements. If it's critical for your business then you can afford to pay a few extra hundred dollars a month
They have it but it’s significantly worse than aws even at the enterprise tier. I don’t feel like I’m treated like a customer, just someone who should feel blessed to be allowed to use their systems. We’ve come across bugs that broke our entire system that they were paged about weeks prior but “nobody important was affected”
Nah, it's absolutely cultural, not about the money paid. Large accounts may make them more responsive quantitatively, but the qualitative lack of care is still there. Google is the opposite of Amazon, cares about its engineers, does not care about its customers. They operate on the model of letting a well engineered product (as determined by Google engineers alone) capture users, and this you can see through and through in the difference between GCP and AWS.
It has worked so far, but as soon as the day their technical quality starts to flag, they are probably as good as dead.
GCP support is not really good. If you need somebody to repeat support notes - they yes. Otherwise, it your business is down they will not help you with reasonable troubleshooting options or anything in that sort. I'm sorry but it is just not good.
In my experience, their lower, "extra hundred dollars a month" range support plan was a waste of time, patience and money. They didn't seem to have any means to help me.
Sure we pay for their support. In fact, we pay them quite alot of money, but this "support" is horrible frustrating nonsense of dealing with email after email with clueless reps. When we complained about this basically we were told we need a TAM to avoid this.
Or they're just plain incompetent. That's always an option too.
My story: I bought the first google tablet. One of the incentives for ordering early was a credit in the google store. I used it to buy books. It turns out that when you depleted the credit enough and wanted to buy something that cost more than the remaining credit, you couldn't apply the credit and pay the rest with your card.
In my case, I had like $11 left on the credit, wanted a $14 book, and couldn't pay the final $3 with my card. For reals.
Some product manager looked at this complete fucking dumpster fire and said ship it. If you can't get the simple things right, like fully spending down a credit, you're not gonna get much right at all.
I hate to sound like a jerk saying this but it feel like it is arrogance. It seethes in every product, communication, page, document, their approach to every new market. There is no choice, you do it their way.
You're not by far the first to say this. It's the technocratic equivalent of a benevolent dictatorship. The dictator is doing you a favor and you'd better follow for your own good. And maybe they are right for now, but the whole setup was never meant to be an equal relationship between Google engineers at the top and everyone else at their feet.
I understand the gripe about multiple payment options in Amazon.
I usually end up with a gift card from some promo and it always seems to end up with $3.XX left on it. I want to use it up, but hardly anyone supports multiple card payments. Including Amazon.
What they do support, though, is buying a Amazon gift card of custom value, and making multiple payments with that.
Every time I try to convert a prepaid card to a gift card on Amazon it gets declined because of the temporary $1 test charge they do when added as a payment method. Then I have to wait a few days for it to drop off and try again. If I wait too many days (?), they will run the test charge again and I'm back to where I was on day one.
I'm sure there is a "right" way to do it but I've never been able to make it work as I want on the first try.
That sucks! I use the "EGift" option, but I select the "reload your balance" (https://www.amazon.com/asv/reload/order?_encoding=UTF8&ref_=...) item/link and was able to do it two days ago with a $50 prepaid. No odd authorizations or anything, had the amount on my Amazon balance within 2 or 3 minutes.
That's most definitely is true if it's about one of their free services (gmail, youtube, etc), but I'm not sure why people expect free services to have the same quality of support as Amazon Prime where you're paying monthly fees + more for the products.
Become an actual paying Google customer[0] and you'll get a real person. Of course, the issue here is slightly different. The author clearly did get to talk to many real people (being a Fi customer), but they got stuck on some other problem.
It doesn’t matter. I’ve been a paying customer of Google (Apps / Mail / Gsuite) for my company. Good luck finding helpful support if you run into any situation slightly outside of the norm. I’ve had my entire company email domain down and was told by Google support to “wait.”
As the other commenter noted, Google does not have a customer-first or even customer-top-10 priority and it shows, again and again.
I often get these cheerful E-mails from other vendors. When I tell them what's not going alright they set up a series of meetings with clueless people and nothing happens usually. I would expect Google to be the same.
In my experience those meetings have the goal of explaining you how to use the product. If the issue really is that something doesn't work, it's not something sales people can do anything about.
That said after I started working at the place I work now I've actually experienced two Google engineers come out to us for a meeting to help us troubleshoot issues with Google Cloud.
Didn't help much but I was still really suprised so I feel I should mention it.
I also got some support on mail, IIRC once somewhat great, once clueless or downright actively trying to avoid helping.
And don't get your hopes too high, while we are small (<2000 employees) we are driving driving adoption of cloud for other companies.
It is possible to get in touch with a real person regarding their free services too. I recently had an issue with the Google Pay app and a pass which would not appear in the app. I contacted support through the support chat feature in the app and was talking to a real person in a minute. They led me through clearing the storage for the app which resolved the issue.
Perhaps true in general, but I had no trouble talking to a real person when I recently had a problem with Google Fi. They didn't even make me hold; they took my number and called me in a few minutes. I missed the call, and they automatically swapped to chat. The problem took a while to resolve, and while it wasn't exactly fun, I feel like they did as good a job as was possible. (Remote debugging is always a pain.)
Meanwhile I’ve worked at places with poor management that treats question marks like that as a one off problem. Teams scramble to fix that instance of the problem then return back to the way things were done before.
I had a similar experience with them. When the phone started rebooting constantly, they offered to send me a used phone as a replacement. While I balked, I had little choice. As I was on a business trip, I asked if they could overnight it to me, at my own expense.
As a seller at Amazon marketplace my wife goes through at least one situation similar this every month. 4 times of 5 Amazon "by mistake" is suddenly charging her for something (tiny amounts) only to refund it all later.
> Google is an ideas-first culture, not a customer-first culture
I don't think it's just that. I believe that Google is used to having captive faceless optionless voiceless customers, of it's search and ad platform from whom it derives most of us revenue, that most other kinds of customers don't matter.
They are so used to the principle that their users are not their customers, that they even imagine that people who paid for a product are still not their customers. Perhaps because those products are mostly a vehicle to sell more ads to their real customers.
1. emailing "Jeff" amounts to emailing a central triage team, which doesn't necessarily sound better than emailing, say, a well-organized, decentralized support team where the customer knows more immediately who is capable of addressing their particular problem.
2. everyone who works at Amazon is deeply scared of Jeff. fear is a motivator, but maybe it's not the best motivator.
3. sending someone in an organization a "?" is not actually very helpful. there's very little information there.
4. it sounds like people within Amazon are fighting fires and the guy at the top is the one with the torch. and that seems to work ok. but, that would seem likely to create a haphazard organization and products that are not insanely great. strong, insanely great design is not prioritized.
This Amazon approach reminds me of how Apple used to do it in the final years of Jobs' executive-ship at the company. He'd send terse replies to people who e-mailed and and for large problems he'd float it to his top lieutenants concerning why the experience sucks so much.
> This is the difference between Google and Amazon.
As an anecdote I had a good experience with Microsoft too.
Issue: standalone MS Office 2019 didn't show the update button, didn't find something online. Called support thinking, oh no, but it was pleasant:
- after quick waiting period contact with representative
- one or two min. standard talk then support concluded there was an issue indeed
- on hold for one or two minutes
- then problem was fixed via remote app, didn't take long
Left me with a very positive feeling for Microsoft.
When I reported a bug in a backend component of Power BI I was called by Microsoft to collect data about the problem and got updates from support until it was fixed over the next 3 weeks. That was very satisfying because I knew something was being done about it and it wasn't sitting in a bug tracker indefinitely.
The only thing I disliked was that support tried to call my office at 3 am and then was confused I wasn't there even though I had to enter my timezone in the support form.
I once reported a bug in Visual Studio community edition. One or two weeks later, a developer (I think) remote logged in to my PC to troubleshoot what was happening. The next update had a fix for the issue.
I'm currently dealing with a MS support case, and it's one of the most painful support cases I've ever opened. I'm going on (hour long) call #3 in a few minutes, and MS still won't even admit there's a problem.
This is interesting to me because amazon has a ton of anti-consumer practices right now- most importantly the large amount of incorrectly labeled knock off goods. But by doing this on the odd occasion he virtue signals that he is taking time from his day to solve the common man’s problem, evidently fostering a culture of leader worship.
That is not an active effort from Amazon to screw over customers while the article describes a somewhat active effort (when the escalation guy automatically orders a new phone on behalf of the customer). I hope Amazon fixes the rip off fake items problem before they lose customer trust.
As with things like "what else could Facebook do?" the answer is "make less money but not screw people". Or in the case of Facebook "stop operating", I guess. The problem is that they have been doing the 3rd party seller thing for-friggin'-ever at this point, and plainly do not give a damn about the many problems with it or they'd have either fixed it or stopped. They screw people daily and absolutely don't care. It is the only possible explanation. They've had a ton of time to realize they're doing it and stop. That regulators haven't slapped them down hard is a sign they have no power to enforce basic norms and standards in our markets anymore—this is as obvious an abuse as it gets.
Hope they'll fix it before they lose customer trust? Hasn't it been a decade or more now? They do. Not. Care. As long as the money keeps coming in. They are scum.
> This is the difference between Google and Amazon.
No it's not.
I've started to receive Spam & Phishing on the email alias I exclusively use for Amazon shopping. The emails include my full name as written in my Amazon account. I've informed Amazon support about this and asked them when, why and with whom they shared my account details. They replied, saying that they had their "specialists" look at the email I had forwarded, and that it was phishing (it wasn't, it was an "invitation" to join an amazon-review-for-free-product site) and that I should ignore it. I once again reached out to tell them that this wasn't what I asked, and that they apparently had/have a data leak. Guess what: no reply.
Amazon doesn't care either. Now, that might be different in the US, but Germany's Amazon support is terrible. I get that hiring people in Germany is expensive, but it's just annoying when you have to communicate with people that don't have a solid grasp of the language / use some low quality auto translate to handle your case.
I thought it was interesting and amusing, but filed it away in my head and forgot about it.
Then, one day, I got an email something to the effect of "fax photocopies of your drivers license and credit card or we, Amazon, will shut down your Amazon account permanently. Do not send emails, only fax, to X number."
At first I naturally thought it was spam. However, I kept getting systematic emails of this sort, with a date attached to them. It seemed weird for spam to be so deliberate, and as phishing attempts go, also sort of weird. There also seemed something strange about the content of the emails that made me think it might be serious.
So I called Amazon customer support (totally independently of anything in the email), and they said "Yes, that's a real email. You need to respond to it or they will shut down your account." I was puzzled by this, because nothing unusual had happened from my end. So, after talking to someone who made it clear they knew nothing about it other than that it was real, I asked to speak to a supervisor.
This supervisor sort of chuckled and said that the email was from the security division, that customer support knows nothing about them, that they cannot access anything about why I was getting the email, and that this division only communicates via fax, including with customer support. So basically I was being threatened to have my Amazon account shut down for a reason Amazon couldn't explain, because they themselves can only communicate with the people who know via fax, and I can only communicate with them via fax.
So I figure, ok, fine. I search out an office supply store (because I can't use work fax for personal business, and don't have a fax machine). I send them photocopies of my drivers license and credit card. I make sure it's completely visible, and include information on the cards in the fax, in text.
A few days later I get an email saying "we received your fax, but the photocopy wasn't legible enough." I was like WTF??? because it could not have been more legible. Also, any info not legible (even though it strains credulity to be considered illegible) was in the fax. So I tried again.
Again I receive a similar email saying "we received another fax but again it's illegible." I called customer support again, and again they threw up their hands and said they can't communicate with that division either.
At this point I gave up because what was I going to do? Amazon's own customer service can't even communicate with this shadowy fax-only communicating security division, I know nothing about why my account is being shut down, there's no recourse or appeal, and when I try to comply, I capriciously am told it's not sufficient.
About a week later my account gets shut down.
About that time I remembered the article, which was eerily similar to my experience. So nothing had changed in those years.
I kept my materials (email printouts, including the faxes); I think I still have them, but am not sure as we moved in the interim.
The whole experience convinced me Amazon simply has zero incentive to care about customer service after an experience like that (which apparently is not the first time this has happened).
Wow! Relying on FAX sounds so ridiculous, especially coming from a company that was supposed to have designed API for every internal operation -even for some that didn't make sense, long before APIs where even a thing.
I used to feel like, and talk about, Amazon as a great customer service-oriented company. There's a few reasons that ended, and I no longer believe it to be the case.
- Prime Exclusive Items was the big one. Amazon arbitrarily selects everyday items that people regularly order like diapers and razors and Blu-ray movies and marks them "Prime Exclusive", meaning you can't order them without a Prime subscription at any price from Amazon. This isn't just Prime exclusive pricing, and it's usually not even being sold cheaper than other retailers. It's literally Amazon just saying "f--- you for not having Prime, shop elsewhere!" And often, I've done just that. This has been going on for years, Amazon has not so much as commented on the practice despite massive forum threads about how arbitrary and punitive it is.
- Annoyingly complicated return mechanics. Around Christmas I bought a thing, and then bought a better version of it, both on Amazon. This was a Blu-ray set, so a small item, and it was shipped and sold by Amazon. I was confident I could return it because I'd seen all the ads about free returns at Kohl's. But it turns out, only select items can be returned at Kohl's, even if they're, you know, small items sold by Amazon like a Blu-ray. I had to pitch a fit to get a return label to drop it off at a UPS store, because the Amazon guy couldn't do a return at the Amazon return desk at Kohl's, when the only reason I was returning it was because I bought an even more expensive version on Amazon. Amazon has half a dozen return options, and it's a toss up which one will be available for the given product ID you want to return and how much it will cost to do so. If I buy from Walmart, I can just take it to a Walmart store and it's done.
I let Prime expire a few months ago and, wow, was it shocking just how bad non-Prime customers are treated. Like you said, random items unavailable, constant nags to buy Prime and dark patterns during checkout trying to trick me into opting back in.
My reason for leaving Prime was that I was buying more stuff from 3rd parties who had free shipping for all than from Amazon or Prime 3rd-party sellers.
Also it started costing me a lot to just click the default buy option and I was having to do CSI-level due diligence on every order if I didn't want to end up with a counterfeit and/or pure scam. Several items I ordered were just straight up fraud that required annoying customer service interactions.
Losing the 5% credit card discount seemed painful until I realized that I buy 30-50% less stuff I don't really need now. Or that buying elsewhere I save much more than 5%. I'm surprised to be saying it, but I've returned to eBay for a lot of purchases and been pleasantly surprised.
Yeah, I will say my spending without Prime is drastically lower than my spending with. I use super saver shipping, so what not having Prime does is force me to wait until I have a few items to place an order, and often, that leads me to decide I really didn't need that item anyways. I used to pick up Prime around Black Friday for deals/Christmas shopping, but they made no minimum shipping free for everyone this past year during the season anyways, meaning there was no point in even doing that.
I did accept the 30 days they just gave me, so I have Prime again for the moment, but will not let it renew/charge. I'm doing some household crud so having one day shipping on cheap crud for a month is probably going to be somewhat helpful as long as I didn't pay for it to begin with.
I had a problem with messages app, not sending messages. 5 calls to support, and they couldn't fix it. They don't have a way to get a hold the messages team to fix it. Simply incredible.
The messages team doesn't want to talk to you. Their app is used by 1.5 Billion people.
If just 0.1% of them had some issue with their app, that would be 1.5 million phone calls.
There are ~3 people working on the messaging app usually. Thats half a million calls each. Thats 52 years to answer all those calls!
The TL;DR is that you will never make a bugfree app, and the remaining bugs will always leave some unhappy customers. At some point the team needs to decide that they need to move on to making new features rather than bugfixing, and that point is well before they start talking to random users on the phone about rare bugs. Sorry - the app isn't for you - go use another app or another phone.
Agree, 100%; silicon valley has 0 clue how to run support, and as a result their user experience is awful.
And what good are new features of you can't even send a message in the first place? The solution was disabling RCS completely or, hard resetting the phone (uninstalling and or wiping messages did not fix anything).
They used to charge serious money for it, that would have allowed them the budget to fix enough of the bugs that SMS is now pretty damned good.
Culture is also a large part of it, it's embedded in telcos to such a degree that I and my parents use rather expensive and fairly slow AT&T DSL because its rock solid, every one of my friends and family who use cablecos for Internet have a tremendously higher rate of problems. Cablecos come from a culture where a customer or neighborhood losing connectivity for hours or a day or two wasn't the "end of the world".
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 213 ms ] threadWhile dealing with a fairly technical sms issue, I was pleasantly surprised how far up the food chain I got when the first agents couldn't help me. The biggest speed bump is usually getting through the first round of questions that filter out the kruft and grandma-issues, but I understand the necessity
edit: I realized after I wrote this that most of my experiences were during the Project Fi phase, before it went full Google, so theres that...
Trusting your customer service teams to have a great degree of autonomy in solving issues can sometimes be really important.
It's a shame you never know whether a company has sucky customer service before you buy their services.
Good luck with T-Mobile though- I had the worst experience with them and am now a happy Fi customer...
That's why free markets are cool.
Sure, you'll have a great time in court (as the OP would in the states, Google is clearly in the wrong here), but that doesn't help you in the slightest, because it's a lot of hassle, time and effort, you'll have to pay your lawyer up front etc pp.
Them: Sorry to hear that, we can black list the phone but you must message us from the member's account
(I am the sole payer on the group plan, paid for the phone, etc.)
Me: Okay, fine, I will contact you from chat on her google account
Me: Hi, this is [mom]'s son, I am helping her report her phone stolen to blacklist it.Them: Sorry, we cannot blacklist a phone on a group plan if you are not the primary account holder, please contact us on the primary account.
Me: Hi, I'm trying to blacklist a stolen phone, please see [case numbers]Them: The phone is registered under another Google account
Me: No, see these case numbers, I refuse to end this support until this is dealt with, I am the primary account holder. Let's blacklist this phone so that it cannot be used by another carrier.
Them: Our specialist says the phone must be active on Google Fi to blacklist it.
(The phone's battery has died at this point, 90 miles away from where it was last)
Me: Does that mean it has already been transferred to a different carrier, or is it offline?
Them: The specialist says that the phone must be active on Google Fi
Me: What does that mean? Can you ask the specialist if the battery is dead that means it's not active?
Them: I cannot say.
Me: What is even the point of blacklisting a phone if it doesn't work the moment someone pops the SIM card out or turns the phone off? Nevermind. I would like to escalate to a supervisor.
Them: Okay
Still haven't gotten anywhere since this Thursday, no one has reached out to me.Still, I hate Verizon & AT&T so much, and I travel internationally to quite a few countries a year, so I'm sticking with them for service. But I'm far from a net promoter.
Maybe voice is a better option than chat, at least in my experience.
Phone calls I believe get a per minute charge, SMSs are free and data is exactly the same rate you pay in the U.S.
It's been flawless. Literally as easy as driving between states.
Now I'm dreading a support call...
Down the list is their relatively cheap service for undemanding users (people who use less than a couple GB of data per month). I'm pretty sure I could just go get a better unlimited plan for slightly more (with more phone choices) tomorrow. But I wouldn't really use the extra service and so I'm happy to get the extra $100/yr or whatever I'm saving.
That being said, I've had extremely mixed support from Fi. The support is responsive, human and polite. But for issues almost exactly like this one, Fi's support staff is entirely unable to cope. In our case, Fedex had even taken a photo of the delivery (which was the wrong house). Fedex needed some kind of shipping code from google to release the photo so we could prove it's not the same house (or at least figure out who had our new phone).
Not a single person at Fi could provide the code to Fedex.
We escalated 3 times and it took about a month to resolve, but in the meanwhile we were charged for a phone we didn't receive, and the clue as to where it went was readily available.
Fi did eventually send us a new phone and everybody was terribly polite, but anybody else would have just noticed the phone hadn't been activated, and sent a new phone immediately (and if the phone were to be activated contact local PD).
It took dozens of chats, emails, calls and so on, and each time the support person on the other end would lose the script and try to resolve our issue with some non-sequitur that wasn't solving the problem.
It's not the worst customer service experience we ever had, but it was down there. The only reason we didn't pull the plug was we were about to travel outside of the U.S. and having service that just "works" was a big part of our planning.
It’s not ideal, but its an alternative to Google Fi
I'm disappointed to hear that Google's customer service is bad, but when I signed up I wasn't even sure if they had a customer service department. T-Mo's support was OK, but for the past few months I've been living without it just fine.
When I moved to the US I agonised for months about getting a local number vs. just keep paying for a monthly UK Three sim forever.
T-Mobile One accounts get this in 120+ countries, works like a charm. But I've done the math and renting a USB hotspot or buying a 1-month SIM works out to be cheaper for my needs, and I can avoid having to confirm my phone has the correct network support in some countries.
Prosecutions need to happen for this kind of thing. They really do. Start with the frontline and work your way up the chain, ordering a frontline employee to commit a crime with a policy document is a crime for all who wrote and approved the document.
If a google customer engaged in fraud of a similar against google there's no doubt google have the option of involving the police and getting a prosecution. A corporation is people who are all responsible for their actions.
Their records show that first phone as delivered. They think their device has been stolen from them. Then the 'fraudster' tries to get another device sent to them - which is 'returned' under suspicious circumstances.
All the delays might be a police investigation they aren't allowed to talk about.
And finally now the 'fraudster' wants a refund of all moneys paid too! Who are they - they've stolen one phone, tampered with another, and want a full refund to boot!
Packages get lost for all kinds of reasons. If you ship things regularly, it happens occasionally. You open a case with Fedex, the driver gets a week to find the package. If he can't, the package is declared lost, and the insurance on the package is paid out.
You're ridiculous if you think Google is calling the police for every lost package. What would they even base a case on? Fedex tracking of a package delivered without a signature? Geez. The cops would just ignore their calls.
[1]https://ting.com/
In reality they never order crimes in writing, though. They say your metrics need to be above a certain level to keep your job, and the only way to boost your metrics is to commit a crime. See: Wells Fargo fake account scandal.
My mom spent the last half-decade of her career (at a hospital) working large amounts of unpaid overtime because her boss made it clear that was the only way to keep her pension.
And that's got to be how Google can, intentionally or not, get away with such blatant fraud, the pool of people able to escalate is kept very small.
A credit card chargeback bans you from Google Pay/Wallet/Android Pay/Google merchant services/google shopping basket/gBilling/whatever it's called now and all services requiring payment. I think you can still use gmail/youtube/whatever.
Something nice like $10k per violation.
The exception is if you pay good money to advertise with them.
With regards to consumer products. It‘s probably not possible to support 2.5b+ users with humans. Voice assistants are getting there though. 5 to 7 years maybe?
Really random aside incoming:
I once was only able to quit my League of Legends video game addiction because I gave my account away that I had so much vested in (skins, all characters, rune pages) by basically messaging a random stranger, changing the account to their email, going to a random password generator site, changing the pw copy+pasting the password without me looking, and sending it off -- in effect "suspending myself".
I was unnerved for a couple of weeks, but eventually, the itch to play died off. I tried starting up a few times, but it wasn't worth it especially knowing how much time I sank into it previously.
I wonder if I got myself permanently suspended from Google, (I want to quit Google given how unethical they have become) would I rid myself from them for good?
Stop being so helpless, "hacker" community...
If alcoholism, luckily it is taken "more seriously" than video game addiction. Although now as I get older I just realize addiction is a trait we all have the propensity for, and some people just manifest it in healthy ways where as some of us in not so healthy ways. I have people in my family that were compulsive gamblers, alcoholics, workaholics, and drug addicts, sometimes a combination of all four -- all different forms of addictions. Sometimes I view my video game addiction in that light: "well at least it wasn't drugs or alcohol" but, who knows, maybe in 50 years we will find out that it harmed me just as much.
- Posteo.de
- Runbox
- Mailbox.org
- Mailfence
As a Gmail user, you’re probably not as concerned about five eyes surveillance as some others may be. If that’s true, then add Fastmail into the above mix.
I'd chargeback Google in a heartbeat if I had even minimal reason to do so.
I really need to be able to walk into a store or physical location to talk to an actual person. Plus the accounts of Fi customers getting locked out or if you can’t use Google Payments, you can’t pay for Google Fi.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18886804
https://ting.com/
For some things you can opt out of arbitration, but not for others.
The online fi related contract (which I obviously not the actual carrier contract) I found is: https://fi.google.com/about/device-protection-terms/ which indeed has a mandatory arbitration clause.
It's high time that the arbitration act gets dramatically scaled back. I don't have problems with reasonably sized companies agreeing to arbitration in contracts with each other, but it doesn't work for end users and employees.
However, given that it takes years for any case to settle, if you could even find how to start the process in the first place, that ain't happening.
I am former Fi user, started back when it was a "Project". My Nexus 5X's battery swelled but was still working and had a full charge, they wanted me to ship it back to them which I morally felt I couldn't do, and replace it with a generally low quality Lenovo Motorola phone that was reported to have serious WiFi problems, negating that major part of their business proposition where it uses any accessible WiFi for data and voice if possible. Felt stupid for having paid them $5/month for device replacement coverage.
The G+ real names debacle prompted me to remove as much exposure to Google as possible, now I'm down to Google Groups which can only be had from them. They're just too risky for individuals to depend on.
>By law, a seller should ship your order within the time stated in its ads or over the phone. If the seller doesn’t promise a time, you can expect it to ship your order within 30 days... If the seller is unable to ship within the promised time, it must notify you, give a revised shipping date and give you the chance to cancel for a full refund or accept the new shipping date.
https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/0221-billed-merchandis...
I mean, this is the history of Google in a nutshell. They deserve to be systematically dismantled by Amazon for this alone.
Edit: Someone downvotes my experience? Wut?
I kid.
HN does actually have better customer support than Google.
[1] If you find yourself doing this you are taking arguing on the internet entirely too seriously.
> Edit: Someone downvotes my experience? Wut?
This conversation is about Google. That's like saying, "Costco has great customer support though," in a conversation about travel agents.
Product did not arrive on time, spoke to support rep.
Rep said that it was delayed because it was coming from overseas, which the tracking information easily disproved - it was coming from Illinois. Illinois is not overseas. When told this, the rep accused me of making things up, despite having the link.
The rep then said that it had been delayed because of weather in my town. I live in this town. It was sunny the entire day in question, and the day before. When I pointed this out, he flat out called me a liar.
I then asked to speak to a supervisor, because I had been lied to twice at this point. The rep immediately began stonewalling me, and for the next 45 minutes, I became increasingly impatient with his behavior, and told him that if I did not have a supervisor in the next 5 minutes, I would be ending the chat and sending the transcripts to someone else at Amazon and following up.
At this point, he made a thinly veiled threat to ban me (I have thousands of dollars of digital content tied to my account), and I immediately ended the chat and sent the entire log to anyone and everyone associated with Amazon that I could think of.
As a customer, on the other hand, Amazon has among the best service I've ever received.
People should stop being surprised that Google’s side projects that don’t even make a blip on the earnings report are not to be used.
Don’t build on google APIs unless it’s Android and don’t make them your phone carrier.
Mediocre quality phones - check
Company known for poor customer support - check
What did you expect? Get a better phone from a better company and move on. Edit: and some of their phones are made by Huawei - yuck.
People have lots of criticism of Amazon, some I even agree with, but working here[0] one of my favorite little cultural things is that customers can and do email Jeff when stupid things happen. And Jeff reads them. Every now and then he'll forward one of them to a senior VP with a simple "?" added to it.[1]
That question mark indicates two things: that you have 24 hours to explain how this terrible customer experience happened, and that not long afterwards you'd better have a plan for how it isn't possible for this kind of problem to happen again. A lot of incredible changes have been made based on those question marks.
Google does not have such a customer-obsessed culture. So bad things like this happen and then nothing seems to change. Next week, it will happen again. Because (in my view) Google is an ideas-first culture, not a customer-first culture. Those ideas have rocketed them to success but I wonder if it can sustain them indefinitely.
[0](All my views are obviously my own and don't reflect speaking on behalf of the company)
[1]https://www.inc.com/bill-murphy-jr/customer-service-jeff-bez...
Maybe it worked that way a decade ago when the volume was lower. Now sending a Jeff message just goes to a specialized team that's only slightly more competent than whoever would otherwise handle the issue. Have had several times where no resolution was given at all.
I think the digital/sharing/on demand/fulfillment economy needs new definitions for these concepts.
It's absurd to think $160 billion in GMV is not important to the bottom line.
Amazon does about $30B a year in selling goods, and about $7B a year in AWS.
AWS does deliver higher profit margins and more operating income than the tiny margins on selling and shipping goods, so perhaps that's what you meant to say.
Sources: https://qz.com/1539546/amazon-web-services-brought-in-more-m... https://www.zdnet.com/article/in-2018-aws-delivered-most-of-...
Because I was using quarterly for both numbers, and their net sales of merchandise was over $200B (global) in 2018, meaning their net sales were almost 10X higher on products than AWS. Since it's a 10:1 margin, I continue to claim that it's ridiculous to think that AWS > selling physical products in terms of revenue.
In terms of income, however, it's not, they make a lot more on services than physical goods (as everyone not named Apple does)
I've not tried emailing several times.
Simply because Google has never considered its users "customers" in the first place
Astonishingly enough, even at moderate ad volumes there's still no customer service. You have to start spending truly astronomical amounts of money before an actual rep will attempt to help you with essentially any problem.
So to Google, "actual customer" means "someone spending six figures per month on advertising on our platform". As far as I am aware, even similar spending on other areas (GCP) doesn't warrant "actual customer" status.
It has worked so far, but as soon as the day their technical quality starts to flag, they are probably as good as dead.
My story: I bought the first google tablet. One of the incentives for ordering early was a credit in the google store. I used it to buy books. It turns out that when you depleted the credit enough and wanted to buy something that cost more than the remaining credit, you couldn't apply the credit and pay the rest with your card.
In my case, I had like $11 left on the credit, wanted a $14 book, and couldn't pay the final $3 with my card. For reals.
Some product manager looked at this complete fucking dumpster fire and said ship it. If you can't get the simple things right, like fully spending down a credit, you're not gonna get much right at all.
I usually end up with a gift card from some promo and it always seems to end up with $3.XX left on it. I want to use it up, but hardly anyone supports multiple card payments. Including Amazon.
What they do support, though, is buying a Amazon gift card of custom value, and making multiple payments with that.
https://jillcataldo.com/use_old_visa_gift_cards_on_amazon
I'm sure there is a "right" way to do it but I've never been able to make it work as I want on the first try.
Become an actual paying Google customer[0] and you'll get a real person. Of course, the issue here is slightly different. The author clearly did get to talk to many real people (being a Fi customer), but they got stuck on some other problem.
[0] https://one.google.com
As the other commenter noted, Google does not have a customer-first or even customer-top-10 priority and it shows, again and again.
In my experience those meetings have the goal of explaining you how to use the product. If the issue really is that something doesn't work, it's not something sales people can do anything about.
That said after I started working at the place I work now I've actually experienced two Google engineers come out to us for a meeting to help us troubleshoot issues with Google Cloud.
Didn't help much but I was still really suprised so I feel I should mention it.
I also got some support on mail, IIRC once somewhat great, once clueless or downright actively trying to avoid helping.
And don't get your hopes too high, while we are small (<2000 employees) we are driving driving adoption of cloud for other companies.
The could not.
Never buying another Google product again.
I don't think it's just that. I believe that Google is used to having captive faceless optionless voiceless customers, of it's search and ad platform from whom it derives most of us revenue, that most other kinds of customers don't matter.
Monopolies don't care about anything except maintaining monopoly momentum.
The occasional complaint by a paying customer is barely a paint scratch on a business surface the size of a small planet.
1. emailing "Jeff" amounts to emailing a central triage team, which doesn't necessarily sound better than emailing, say, a well-organized, decentralized support team where the customer knows more immediately who is capable of addressing their particular problem.
2. everyone who works at Amazon is deeply scared of Jeff. fear is a motivator, but maybe it's not the best motivator.
3. sending someone in an organization a "?" is not actually very helpful. there's very little information there.
4. it sounds like people within Amazon are fighting fires and the guy at the top is the one with the torch. and that seems to work ok. but, that would seem likely to create a haphazard organization and products that are not insanely great. strong, insanely great design is not prioritized.
As an anecdote I had a good experience with Microsoft too.
Issue: standalone MS Office 2019 didn't show the update button, didn't find something online. Called support thinking, oh no, but it was pleasant:
Left me with a very positive feeling for Microsoft.The only thing I disliked was that support tried to call my office at 3 am and then was confused I wasn't there even though I had to enter my timezone in the support form.
Hope they'll fix it before they lose customer trust? Hasn't it been a decade or more now? They do. Not. Care. As long as the money keeps coming in. They are scum.
No it's not.
I've started to receive Spam & Phishing on the email alias I exclusively use for Amazon shopping. The emails include my full name as written in my Amazon account. I've informed Amazon support about this and asked them when, why and with whom they shared my account details. They replied, saying that they had their "specialists" look at the email I had forwarded, and that it was phishing (it wasn't, it was an "invitation" to join an amazon-review-for-free-product site) and that I should ignore it. I once again reached out to tell them that this wasn't what I asked, and that they apparently had/have a data leak. Guess what: no reply.
Amazon doesn't care either. Now, that might be different in the US, but Germany's Amazon support is terrible. I get that hiring people in Germany is expensive, but it's just annoying when you have to communicate with people that don't have a solid grasp of the language / use some low quality auto translate to handle your case.
Once not too long ago I came across this article: https://consumerist.com/2013/06/18/amazon-cancels-my-6000-or...
I thought it was interesting and amusing, but filed it away in my head and forgot about it.
Then, one day, I got an email something to the effect of "fax photocopies of your drivers license and credit card or we, Amazon, will shut down your Amazon account permanently. Do not send emails, only fax, to X number."
At first I naturally thought it was spam. However, I kept getting systematic emails of this sort, with a date attached to them. It seemed weird for spam to be so deliberate, and as phishing attempts go, also sort of weird. There also seemed something strange about the content of the emails that made me think it might be serious.
So I called Amazon customer support (totally independently of anything in the email), and they said "Yes, that's a real email. You need to respond to it or they will shut down your account." I was puzzled by this, because nothing unusual had happened from my end. So, after talking to someone who made it clear they knew nothing about it other than that it was real, I asked to speak to a supervisor.
This supervisor sort of chuckled and said that the email was from the security division, that customer support knows nothing about them, that they cannot access anything about why I was getting the email, and that this division only communicates via fax, including with customer support. So basically I was being threatened to have my Amazon account shut down for a reason Amazon couldn't explain, because they themselves can only communicate with the people who know via fax, and I can only communicate with them via fax.
So I figure, ok, fine. I search out an office supply store (because I can't use work fax for personal business, and don't have a fax machine). I send them photocopies of my drivers license and credit card. I make sure it's completely visible, and include information on the cards in the fax, in text.
A few days later I get an email saying "we received your fax, but the photocopy wasn't legible enough." I was like WTF??? because it could not have been more legible. Also, any info not legible (even though it strains credulity to be considered illegible) was in the fax. So I tried again.
Again I receive a similar email saying "we received another fax but again it's illegible." I called customer support again, and again they threw up their hands and said they can't communicate with that division either.
At this point I gave up because what was I going to do? Amazon's own customer service can't even communicate with this shadowy fax-only communicating security division, I know nothing about why my account is being shut down, there's no recourse or appeal, and when I try to comply, I capriciously am told it's not sufficient.
About a week later my account gets shut down.
About that time I remembered the article, which was eerily similar to my experience. So nothing had changed in those years.
I kept my materials (email printouts, including the faxes); I think I still have them, but am not sure as we moved in the interim.
The whole experience convinced me Amazon simply has zero incentive to care about customer service after an experience like that (which apparently is not the first time this has happened).
- Prime Exclusive Items was the big one. Amazon arbitrarily selects everyday items that people regularly order like diapers and razors and Blu-ray movies and marks them "Prime Exclusive", meaning you can't order them without a Prime subscription at any price from Amazon. This isn't just Prime exclusive pricing, and it's usually not even being sold cheaper than other retailers. It's literally Amazon just saying "f--- you for not having Prime, shop elsewhere!" And often, I've done just that. This has been going on for years, Amazon has not so much as commented on the practice despite massive forum threads about how arbitrary and punitive it is.
- Annoyingly complicated return mechanics. Around Christmas I bought a thing, and then bought a better version of it, both on Amazon. This was a Blu-ray set, so a small item, and it was shipped and sold by Amazon. I was confident I could return it because I'd seen all the ads about free returns at Kohl's. But it turns out, only select items can be returned at Kohl's, even if they're, you know, small items sold by Amazon like a Blu-ray. I had to pitch a fit to get a return label to drop it off at a UPS store, because the Amazon guy couldn't do a return at the Amazon return desk at Kohl's, when the only reason I was returning it was because I bought an even more expensive version on Amazon. Amazon has half a dozen return options, and it's a toss up which one will be available for the given product ID you want to return and how much it will cost to do so. If I buy from Walmart, I can just take it to a Walmart store and it's done.
My reason for leaving Prime was that I was buying more stuff from 3rd parties who had free shipping for all than from Amazon or Prime 3rd-party sellers.
Also it started costing me a lot to just click the default buy option and I was having to do CSI-level due diligence on every order if I didn't want to end up with a counterfeit and/or pure scam. Several items I ordered were just straight up fraud that required annoying customer service interactions.
Losing the 5% credit card discount seemed painful until I realized that I buy 30-50% less stuff I don't really need now. Or that buying elsewhere I save much more than 5%. I'm surprised to be saying it, but I've returned to eBay for a lot of purchases and been pleasantly surprised.
I did accept the 30 days they just gave me, so I have Prime again for the moment, but will not let it renew/charge. I'm doing some household crud so having one day shipping on cheap crud for a month is probably going to be somewhat helpful as long as I didn't pay for it to begin with.
If just 0.1% of them had some issue with their app, that would be 1.5 million phone calls.
There are ~3 people working on the messaging app usually. Thats half a million calls each. Thats 52 years to answer all those calls!
The TL;DR is that you will never make a bugfree app, and the remaining bugs will always leave some unhappy customers. At some point the team needs to decide that they need to move on to making new features rather than bugfixing, and that point is well before they start talking to random users on the phone about rare bugs. Sorry - the app isn't for you - go use another app or another phone.
And what good are new features of you can't even send a message in the first place? The solution was disabling RCS completely or, hard resetting the phone (uninstalling and or wiping messages did not fix anything).
It seems kind of systemic: defer support requests until exit/IPO, not your problem any more.
Culture is also a large part of it, it's embedded in telcos to such a degree that I and my parents use rather expensive and fairly slow AT&T DSL because its rock solid, every one of my friends and family who use cablecos for Internet have a tremendously higher rate of problems. Cablecos come from a culture where a customer or neighborhood losing connectivity for hours or a day or two wasn't the "end of the world".