Ask HN: Google have lost one of my customers; potential legal trouble
Over the years, after becoming a reseller of Google's services, I resell Google Workplace for a slight profit margin, as I've found that my customers often have a real requirement of what Gmail for work can offer, so it's always been a good fit.
Three months ago, a customer asked me how to add a user to their organisation, so I sent them a link to the documentation (https://support.google.com/a/answer/33310).
They continued to email back, claiming they couldn't do it. After a few back and forth emails, I logged into my reseller console, which allows me to administer my customers' domains... but the customer's domain was not in the list.
The customer was getting a generic error when trying to access admin.google.com - please contact your domain administrator (me). When I tried to log in, their domain was simply not in the list of customers.
Since then, I've been on countless live chats, phone calls and email threads with Google support, but nobody's listening. Every time I get passed to another person, I have to explain everything from the start again, and I'm pointed to a Google Forms page to submit my "I can't access my account" request. Submitting the form doesn't do anything.
In fact, the support feels like I'm being trialled on teaching some kind of defective AI how to discuss problems with my Google account, or maybe I'm communicating via Google Translate to a non-English speaking sweatshop?
Anyway, my customer has been waiting to add a user for 3 months now, and they're getting shirty - possible legal issues are coming my way because of my incompetance.
I honestly don't know what to do. Google have just pulled the plug on a customer, and now I'm in hot water with nobody to talk to.
Has anyone got any advice?
25 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 59.4 ms ] threadGoogle doesn't seem to care about their users-- This is a common problem with Google: There's no way to get in contact with a human-- unless you create a viral twitter post about the problem.
Just keep the whole thing in a FAQ text/md document and give them that instead of spending time explaining it? Then you can respond with 'I've explained that, please consult item 5 in the document'. If they say 'you need to talk to X' then respond with 'sounds like you need talk to them for me, I have no insight into your corporate structure.'
As with many other issues of this type, if you are running a business then at some point you should delegate the issue to an attorney because it will be cheaper than spending more of your own time on it, and writing the issue up on paper makes it real in a way that open support tickets are not.
They forgot to pay the fn domain fees and their domain got hijacked and then accused me of stealing their shit -- but everything was logged in slack - but they chose to tell me "we dont slack bro" (literal comment -- and they never checked slack, and then deactivated their slack and lost all the logging of where their accounts were and such... TWO FN YEARS LATER they called me for help....
I told them that because I was admin, I deactivated myself from their systems and because they didnt read their shit, lost all access to their shit -
Personally, I would never trust a company with critical things where it is impossible to talk to a human who is in a position to understand and own a problem.
There are literally zero people who work at Google who 1) talk with end users, and 2) can understand and own a problem until it is fixed.
This is BS. I recently had an interaction with Grab and was surprised how responsive they were in support. Here is the situation: I ordered a Pizza from a store that had its own delivery, so the delivery was not handled by Grab itself. For some (or whatever) reason, the delivery guy never showed up but he marked the transaction as "delivered" and my card got charged accordingly.
So I tried to contact Grab for support. I was told by support that since this was delivered by the Store itself, I have to go to some web form from the store to fill for a refund request.
I simply answered the support that this is ridiculous and that unless Grab was to issue a refund, I'd force a chargeback from my card. What happened is that the support guy escalated the ticket, and another higher up issued a refund. All of this happened in the same day.
So stuff can move through in big companies if you give the employees enough authority.
User as a product: Create free services/products (search, Gmail, android, chrome etc) These are sometimes bad, but they use brand name and reach to become popular. Users of these services are a product that is sold to advertisers.
Obviously, there is no need to provide human support for free product. Since users are dumb enough to become a product, there is even less need to care.
Software as a Service. Create a bunch of products/services and sell these to companies (GCP, Adds, Google for business) These are sometimes built on top of free services/products. Companies that use these because these are way cheaper than alternatives. Google and MS would use market position to bundle these products into attractive lock-in.
Obviously, there is no need to provide human support because there are too many clients and profit would suffer compared to the first business model. Google has so many clients that it would require multi-million people to provide support.