HN Explorer

Why is Google Workspace tech support so bad?

22 points by tepehuani ↗ HN
Sorry for the rant, I know "corporate SaaS support isn't built to actually help people, and their staff isn't set up to succeed" isn't super original, I'm just baffled about the obviousness of all.

Working in IT in a mid-sized company that mostly runs on Google Workspace. It seems very clear that due to either size and/or complexity of a Google sheet (some of our Ops people miss Excel too much), we managed to break a document that is fairly important for a business unit. It just doesn't open anymore, stuck in a loop. Can't download, create copies, look at history. So far, so normal - we have off-Google backups and so we can move along on the business side. And from the Google side, it seems like looking at internal logs to fix the error or saying "tough luck, here's an old backup" feels like an easy enough support job.

But for the last 6 weeks I've been stuck in Google Workspace support hell. They've asked me to record an empty tab until the request times out after 12 minutes so many times (including in a live Meet call), asked for HAR files and then dragged their feet on random nonsense so that the 2 weeks lifetime of their logs expire and they need to ask for a new file, and they've decided something must have gone wrong with me granting them access to the file when they cannot access the file themselves (i.e. the error occurs as described). And in between they've seem to have escalated this through three levels of support so that maybe now I'm only one level away from an actual Google engineer with the ability to investigate the actual error?

For some regulatory reasons our legal team even put us on the Workspace Enterprise (the most expensive one Google offers) tier some time ago, no impact here.

Why are things like this?

10 comments

[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 39.4 ms ] thread
blackeyeblitzar
Google does not care. They don't have to. They're a rich monopoly. Beyond that, they've always been bad at offering support and any kind of connection to users. It might be because they grew up serving free users of search and email. But that culture is how they run their services for businesses too.

Your other choice is to pay the other monopoly, Microsoft, who just recently revived their 90s strategy of bundling Internet Explorer with Windows, except with Teams and Office. They may have slightly better support than Google but it is built on products that get more expensive over time. Office does have offline clients that don't have these types of issues as often though.

I hope there is some kind of push towards alternatives from others but who could those even be? Proton? OnlyOffice? Libre Office? No one seems like a serious challenger in this space, because it would be so hard to compete against Office. There is little investment interest here and so there is little competition.

GianFabien
It's not just Google. In my experience support never lives up to the quality and responsiveness that the clients expect. The main reason being that to management support is a cost center and consequently off-shored to third party orgs. The OP's people making the purchasing decision were naive to believe they were going to get what they paid for.
more_corn
Google is particularly bad though.
nitwit005
I'd draw it out as long as possible. I guarantee they'll do something shady to make the case dissappear once they realizing it's ruining some internal metric, and you'll get a laugh out of it.
more_corn
I had the Google wallet people follow the sun route me around the world twice. I think they thought it was a game.
jeanlucas
I find almost all B2B SaaS solutions really bad to handle payments (even when they use Stripe).
solardev
Google doesn't care about you and your edge case. They've never been good at support (except with Fi, strangely).

Can you download it from Drive or Takeout or Vault (ask your admin) and just edit it in Excel or break it up into multiple documents?

Also, might be worth asking your account owner to reach out to your enterprise contact for help to see if they can escalate it internally.

hack_fraud13
Sadly there’s a bias against customer service as a functional group in most tech (and non-tech) companies. It’s a function that is normally offshored and/or outsourced, and it is extremely rare for leadership to be hired out of service orgs. This is a shame when you think of how natural a transition from service to an account manager role would be. Management doesn’t see service source of revenue.

This is different in other industries, like in the auto industry where service is a considerable source of revenue and where CEOs like Sloan started. Software service groups really don’t have organizational prestige or influence, in contrast.

This means service groups get the last pickings in budget and talent. Most software companies are trying to do the bare minimum with service, and anything of import (or revenue potential) gets escalated to the account manager or product manager.

Tl;dr you need to whine to your AM if you want anything done.

jseger
Escalate this to your account manager (who sold/renewed your licenses last time) and they can get Google CEs to review. If you're buying from a Workspace reseller, they can also loop in the right people.
jseger
Or, share the most recent support case number and I'll escalate it for you today. I'm a WS Googler so I'll find it