How can we get Google Support?
That happened a few weeks ago and thanks to some inside people at Google, the mailing-list reappeared. As the admin of the list, I received no email about the closing of the mailing-list, no explanations, and not even an email when the mailing-list reopened after a few days of black-out.
I was not happy with this situation but I thought it was just a glitch. But then, some days ago, they did it again. The mailing-list is not accessible anymore, not even by me (the admin).
There is no way to get support, no way to get in touch with someone at Google. This is really frustrating. Of course, this is a free service and Google can do whatever they want, but I would at least expect a way to get some kind of support (hell, I'm even ready to pay fot it)... or at least, some kind of email (even an automatic one) telling me what we did wrong (and I doubt that we did anything wrong as the mailing-list is moderated and we are only talking about yet another PHP framework).
HELP! How can I get in touch with someone at Google? How can we get by our mailing-list?
225 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 176 ms ] threadGoogleReader is best example, Google has actually become evil.
@fabpot Did you take a look at Discourse?
Most companies have "almost acceptable" support. You can talk to someone, they talk back, and most of the time (not always) they can solve your problem within 40 minutes of waiting on the phone and forwarding you to 6 others.
Then there are companies like Google and Microsoft. They deliver products, not support. Having trouble with Windows? Try talking to whoever delivered your pc. Not those who made the product and know everything about it, instead you talk to the person who sold you the system. That's like asking a 17-year-old working in a supermarket about why the doctor prescribed a product of theirs. Smart move by the doctor though, he makes way more money when you come in than when he explains his prescription to you on the phone.
Not only that, Office even works ENTIRELY offline.
And it opens all our documents absolutely perfectly EVERY TINE.
Yes this is facetious: Google have forced peoples standards down.
Especially when you don't have your own backups of the data, as usual with these kind of services. Outages, unexplained data loss, services being shut down, users being locked out for unrelated reasons (oh you didn't put your real name in G+?), unexpected changes to the interface and software, the list goes on.
The vendor lock-in is even worse than when using closed-source software with DRM. At least you can keep running those (if necessary in an emulator) when discontinued, or reverse engineer them...
Or cloud services are great, until it rains ;)
Despite the name, Office 365 isn't really about Office -- you already have it -- it's selling web-based SharePoint and other services.
Obviously switching to a self-hosted mailman is an option too. But having no access whatsoever to the group, migration is kind of a pain since you have no way of even contacting everyone that was subscribed.
[0] http://librelist.com/
We're going to be rolling this out with a number of Rails and Android open-source projects and if you'd be interested in speaking it would be great to include you guys. If would be of help please feel free to contact me directly: peter dot nixey at copyin dot com.
A better option would be to a) charge a price and compete fairly in the first place, or b) open source or sell off the product so it could live on.
In any case, "Starbucks" didn't prevent me from having some good homemade coffee for a few months now.
Look, just because you want something to happen doesn't make it viable in the long term, and someone who demonstrated it was not viable in the long term doesn't become evil because they sped that process up. If they actually burned down all the other coffee bars in the process, that's one thing, but they didn't. They convinced folks to be satisied with something else.
You have literally just said "What if the remaining users are not enough to support a viable product I liked".
Then there aren't enough to support a non-viable product you liked, and that wouldn't be any different no matter how it happened. The only difference is it happened in 5 years instead of 50. If the other way was still something that satisfied people, one would assume others would eventually revert to it.
All drugs have some set of side effects, and usually very badly effect some small percentage of the population that won't know until the take them. Does this alone make releasing any drug evil?
If not, can we please just move the discussion along into social utility territory, instead of the "well, it hurt someone somewhere, so it's evil" stuff?
Contrary the misquoting a few parents up, the statement was "don't be evil" not "do no evil". This is an attempt to be guided by doing the right thing, not an attempt to ever avoid harming anyone. Basically, whether someone is being evil or not is not about you, it's about them.
Consumer habits, laws and lots of other things can and are changed by businesses, and it's naive to think that all or even most of these changes are inevitable or for the better just because they happen.
I think it's to simplistic to ask whether a certain company is being evil or not. The discussion about what is evil and not isn't very relevant to someone who just lost their business because some algorithm tripped inside Google and nobody inside Google can help. It would be better if Google committed itself to more concrete promises about how to treat their customers and what not to do, and had independent audits to keep them honest. But as long as they are as dominant as they are, they'll never have to.
Are you saying that Google created Reader eight years ago, with the only purpose of now killing it to somehow feed Google+? If they actually did so, then I'm in impressed by their long-term thinking, but I don't see how you can derive that conclusion. (And I'm further not convinced at all that killing Reader suits their business goals in any way, except for not having to waste manpower maintaining it)
I don't think Google had any plans for Reader except that making Reader would be neat. And then they decided that killing it off would be a better idea. I'm certain that it's hurting their business long-term.
[1]: http://googleblog.blogspot.pt/2011/09/fall-spring-clean.html
That's why it is illegal (in some countries at least).
Anti-dumping laws make sense when you're talking about hard goods with a concrete marginal cost of goods sold (like coffee.) Theydon't make much sense for web sites and software.
A real-life example might be their 'free WiFi'. They are well within their rights to stop doing this tomorrow if they choose to. Good luck to anyone who complains because their business is affected because they chose to base themselves out of a Starbucks!
Here's the thing: Even paid-for services can end up being a nuisance that you want to divest.
I seriously wonder how long such a begging - please Google, good Google - will finally end.
Moreover, Google makes money from each mailing list (for example) by displaying ads. The revenue that they bring in from each list is pretty small; the key to their income is the huge number of lists that they support. So losing even 100 lists every week, I have to imagine, wouldn't put much of a dent in their income.
By contrast, the overhead and cost associated with hiring, training, paying (salary + benefits), and supporting an employee are pretty high, particularly when you're offering a commodity product competing with other commodity (and free) products.
From a user's perspective, it seems insane for Google to ignore the business opportunity associated with support. But I have to believe that they've run the math, and that ticking off a number of their customers is cheaper than charging them for decent support.
I would think that the lesson here isn't that Google should be supporting its products, but rather that people should think twice before using unsupported, free products.
I believe that it was Henry Luce, the founder of Time magazine, who said that if you aren't paying for a product, then you're the product. And indeed, that's what we see with Google: They give away their products in order to sell your eyeballs to advertisers.
This doesn't make them an evil company (although perhaps other things do). They have a legitimate business model that seems to work for many people.
Complaining that Google isn't willing to offer support, free or paid, is an indication that your interests and Google's aren't aligned. They're not about to change, so perhaps you shouldn't run your service on their system.
There is a LOT of well deserved space for stuff provided "as-is", with an explicit refusal to do any support at all, but still very useful for the 'customer'. For example, large part of free software.
In this case, it clearly does not. This type of (completely understandable) bitching has been going on for years, and Google is not changing a thing.
Its like healthcare. The system doesn't work if you don't pay when you're healthy and only decide to get coverage when you're sick.
You probably mean some kind of health insurance. In many countries, this insurance is actually a government tax, so you cannot opt out.
So the parallel here would be a mandatory "Google Support Tax" :-)
And you're ripping yourself off if you regard services from Google or Facebook as free. They're mining every piece of content and every message you send on their services, so they're making money off of you. You're helping them, so putting up with this kind of bullshit is selling yourself short.
Would paid support for the free stuff even be a rounding error's (on google scale) worth of revenue, much less profit?
There's no paid level of service for a non-Apps Google Group.
https://cloud.google.com/support/packages
http://fabien.potencier.org/about
http://www.sensiolabs.co.uk/contact/contact.html
I dont think it is a bot problem , there are a lot of unofficial symfony groups on ggroups.
My 2 cents :
- redirect people to stackoverflow in the mean time.
- build your own Q&A. I know it's a bit of work , but why not build an open-source symfony Q&A project ? i'm sure you could get support from any PAAS provider for free to host the app. Make it accessible through RSS so people can suscribe it.
My guess is that symfony will get the same treatment
http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/38634/zend-framewo...
Besides, you can download your subscribers from Google Groups.
It boils down to the fact that even if every customer needed 1 minute of support every 2 years that would mean they'd have to employ 6 trillion people (or some rubbish).
As I said earlier this year, Google have total contempt for their customers - yes, even their paying customers. http://shkspr.mobi/blog/2013/02/googles-customer-contempt-co...
Self host. Don't rely on Google. Sadly, that's the only way to do it.
And Google could setup the fee for the support in such way that it is financially self-hosting.
The guy in the video acts as if hiring 40,000 people is ludicrous and unheard of. In reality, it's not even a large workforce compared to companies like Wal*Mart (2.1 million employees), Foxconn (1.2 employees) and Volkswagen (500k, employees).
Every decent company has customer support, Google couldn't care less. It doesn't even provide human support to advertisers, its source of income.
The companies you name generally have low-skilled workers. Google support would have to be high-skilled and expensive.
Also, this is not just greed vs empathy. Everything has an opportunity cost. Google can spend $X staffing support lines for Gmail, or it can spend that money on developing features and bugfixes. This is a strategic business decision; either answer may be better for Google and its users.
Of course, they can spend the support savings on Olympic-sized swimming pools full of pudding. But you seem to be assuming they're doing that.
Or it can do both, because its budget is basically unlimited. Besides, you can't create features or bugfixes simply by adding more developers to a project. If that were true, Apple would be hiring developers by the truck load. Instead, they work with small teams, even though the company is raking in cash.
“Google support would have to be high-skilled and expensive.”
Let's compare Google with IBM, which has 470,000 employees. I would say that many of those employees are highly skilled and expensive. IBM has twice as much revenue as Google, makes more profit than Google, while employing ten times as many people.
Each consultant employee that IBM hires adds to their revenue and profit.
Adding call center employees to google would not add to revenue or profit unless they had some method of allowing them to capture more rev. Adding purely customer support people would not benefit google.
If people's only loyalty to Google is that their service is free, they won't be hard to woo away.
People's other loyalty to google is that their service works pretty much perfectly. There is no free or even cost based product that I know of that beats gmail, google maps, google docs.
Before you list a bunch of startups no one outside of the tech community has heard of, remember that in order for the public to know about these products, those companies have to pay google to advertise. In addition to having to offer an insanely superior service, anyone entering the field must also know how to monetize which is challenging.
If a true competitor arises, they can be acquihired and integrated in to google which further limits google's need to spend millions of dollars a year on call centers.
Sure. But you can spin up new projects - Google Glass, Google Fiber, etc etc, by spending your money building new teams instead of supporting existing products.
Again, I'm not saying they're right, but there is certainly an opportunity cost to providing support.
>> its budget is basically unlimited
Nobody's budget is unlimited. If nothing else, Google answers to shareholders.
Not necessarily. Even if Google hired 100 for Gmail, 100 for Adsense, 100 for Adwords they'd probably solve 80% of the problems, given that they'd notice that the algo went nuts on something. Then, there are different levels of support, the expensive ones would be in the single digit %.
Even if Google pushed employees to use their 20% on providing support things would improve drastically. Or less defending of their employer on HN and more customer service :) . "How do I press send on Gmail" and "How do I search" are easily solved via tutorials, the real problem is when you are locked out of your account by an algo.
>> Also, this is not just greed vs empathy. Everything has an opportunity cost. Google can spend $X staffing support lines for Gmail, or it can spend that money on developing features and bugfixes. This is a strategic business decision; either answer may be better for Google and its users.
Google is insanely profitable, their margins can do down a bit. Obviously everything costs money but at some point you lose your reputation trying to pinch your pennies. I do not remember many negative Google posts a few years ago. Now they are everywhere, meaning that their reputation is no longer unquestionable.
I know you have to be a certain size to receive this though.
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math0ne’s comment, a response to my assertion that not even advertisers get support from Google: “I just wanted to chime in and say that this is not totally true, at my work we have a direct google support contact for our advertising system. I have requested and received in depth support many time. I know you have to be a certain size to receive this though.”
And on any given day hosting these things on your own is the best option out there but you might have to get your hands dirty or get it from a service provider who doesn't deny the existence of need for human interaction in customer service.
When they get some real competition they will be nicer to their users and consumers. If you want to advertise online in any meaningful way, you cannot ignore Google. They know that so they act as a monopolistic tyrant (also see At&T, Verizon, banks etc)
All of these companies still have a huge staff trying to give customer support. Google isn't even trying.
Altruistically for Google it's probably better to not have support for non-ads-monetization (as in, a product that isn't interfaced with buying advertisers) products.
edit: some clarification.
You've gone the completely other way: you're saying the service not being offered is evidence that it is cheap. This is the opposite of the typical argument. So I'm reducing your idea here to its simplest logical form, trying to make it super clear to readers (and hopefully you) how ass-backwards it is.
The Linode comparison doesn't hold at all. Linode have actual numbers to support their position. They are in a position to estimate the support costs, because they have other services they already have to support. Moreover, their product costs money and people expect that when they pay for something there will be support.
Google offers support for exactly one product (adwords). They have no basis for estimating the cost of support for a product like Google Groups. The argument that it will be expensive that you and others are putting forth is "Golly, support sure is expensive! You have to hire people and everything!" There's certainly reasons to expect that offering support might be expensive. But my entire point, which you seem intent on missing, is that they have been successful so far without offering any support at all, so why is it reasonable to expect that the demand for it will be so excessive that it would be financially untenable? Especially when people like the OP have suggested they would happily pay for it?
The other prong of your argument is that if it were tenable they would be doing it. I would argue that companies make good and bad decisions all the time. Looking to what they are currently doing with the assumption that it is the only right thing is a bit myopic. Companies miss opportunities and make mistakes all the time. That they're not doing it now is not evidence that it would be a mistake.
Since this a bald-faced lie, my unpleasantness is clearly warranted. You are clearly deriving arguments from a predetermined conclusion likely reached ages ago. At this point you apparently are trying to make inferences about demand without even trying to understand the existing supply, and the contortions you're going through to justify your existing beliefs are astonishing.
Being pleasant and gentle to everyone is not the most important part of discourse, not even on HN.
As to the accusation of ad hominem: every single point I made was directed at - and based solely on - the arguments made by the other user. Once these arguments were ultimately found to be made in bad faith, I ended the discussion. That's not an ad hominem argument, that's ending an argument because of a negative evaluation of the other person's state of mind. Two very different things - almost unrelated, honestly.
Which I don't necessarily agree with, but I think the point is worth considering and not "ass-backwards" or completely illogical.
Once there is a Google support people will contact google and ask for help about anything on the web.
For many people Google is the web!!! IThere are peopple calling the ISPs support because "this site on your internet is broken". rJust imagine what would happen to google.
When we released a DOS / Windows 3.x version of the product at the same price, our sales shot up 10x the mac version - but the support calls we started getting usually ended up being support for DOS or Windows, not related to our product. So, effectively we were spending twice as much on support.
Of course, since we were selling so many more copies of the software, we still made money.
As a side effect, the support calls for the OS led us to develop quick scripts to get people back on their feet once we recognized the smell of their problem, which meant that they were more likely to buy our other software.
Customer loyalty is an intangible, but valuable asset, and is usually borne from direct customer interaction. When things go wrong, how is it handled?
If google did employ people to "fix the interwebz", I bet they'd find more customers for their paid services.
It is possible however that what you're saying will open the door to charging for less niche services, but that's a whole 'nother can of worms.
This was the thread on Webmasterword, when Google closed Million USD Adwords advertiser accounts without warning, after changing their guidelines unannounced http://www.webmasterworld.com/google_adwords/4020049.htm
Google is completely automated, and individual customers don't exist, only statistically significant numbers.
> Self host. Don't rely on Google.
Or any other company if you don't have a contract that legally protects your data while it is on another company's server.
My company, and several of my customers with whom I've discussed this issue, spend a significant chunk of money on Google Apps and related Google services. We do get a customer support #, but all that means is someone answers the phone.
I'm not sure we've ever received actual support from them. We have trouble tickets for significant, documented issues that have been open for YEARS. The official answer is that someone from engineering will look into it and get back to us.
We're looking into ways to reduce our dependency on Google services, but of course it's a challenging and time-consuming endeavor to migrate away.
Weekly scheduled conference calls, and a specific agent assigned to our account with whom we had direct access.
We are not Google's customers, we are Google's product. Google is an advertising business and we are the eyeballs it seeks. Android is merely meant as a pathway for those eyeballs. Same with Gmail, Youtube, etc.
Google giving us support is akin to a beef farm offering massages and a counseling hotline to their cattle.
But when I'm paying Google several hundred pounds to buy a Nexus device, I think that I am a customer.
http://support.google.com/googleplay/bin/request.py?&p=p...
Finally I just had to be obstinate and say "I want to speak to your manager." over and over and over again until I got to someone who knew how to look up my support ticket and see that I had started the return process before the deadline. Eventually they sent me the info I needed to return the device, but by that time I was so scared I would send it to them and then not get a refund that I chose to sell it instead.
e.g. Google Apps for Business is a PAID product that is not advertising supported.
The sales literature says "Count on our 24/7 customer support" - http://www.google.com/intl/en/enterprise/apps/business/benef...
Unfortunately, per my post above, customer support is basically every bit as lousy for customers of paid products as it is for users of free ones.
LOL! :)
Setup a separate Customer Support organization for specific services. Staff with lower-skilled folks from cheaper locations (since cost seems to be such a huge concern). So a $X yearly plan entitles you to Y number of queries and gets you a response from customer support in N days.
For example a $20,000 per year engineer (very reasonable in lower cost locations) would require 2000 users paying 10 per year to breakeven.
The question is why would google even bother ?
I think Google devotes proportional resource to the products which give them value, and I think that's probably why Groups is being negelected. It is unfortunate for Groups users, but Google does have to make money.
If people are paying Google to be their ISP, I'd like an even higher level of customer support compared to the competition.
However, I'd expect it to be worse.
I prefer being a paying customer. If I should ever have a problem with Dropbox or Evernote I bet I get good support. And, I have my data backed up locally.
The support experience was outstanding. There was a smart, informed person handling the case. It was a tricky case, there were a number of emails exchanged and several lengthy phone calls, and it turned out not to be Google's fault at all (it was Rackspace's fault), and yet they were courteous, helpful, intelligent, informed, hands on.
One of the best support experiences I've had - but it only happened after we started paying for our email accounts.
Interestingly, it's been the sales interactions I've found most frustrating - once you're large enough to have outgrown the online purchasing mechanisms for Google Apps, for example, provisioning new accounts is a world of pain.
Interesting how the above responses all said they paid for Google Apps and then used the support, nothing wrong with that, but it seems as soon as you pay for something that offers support, people then feel like they need to use it just because they can, almost as a justification for paying for it.
I can't see why you would need support for a single personal GMail account? What problem could you possibly have that Google haven't spotted or the answer isn't available on the internet somewhere?!
when I got locked out of my account with 2-step auth (a specific set of coincidences led to it), seeking help took over a week, 3 or 4 threads on the group, almost stalking a moderator (they are the ones who handle the support, and then contact the real google) so I got attention, after which for a few days I was in a dance between questions of doubtful relevance and requests to repeat the recovery process for the n-th time, etc. in the end, the guy was very helpful, and you should keep in mind they are the only ones that can actually rush somehow your process and you are at their mercy. needless to say, the overall experience with google support is terrible, painful and very frustrating.
I'd really pay a few bucks so I could message google directly explaining my specific problem and seek direct help instead of trying to convince a volunteer on a forum for a week, rewording the same problem for 10 times. and yes, my problem was specific enough so the automated process couldn't cover it and I actually needed a person, not a bot.
I get so tired of people who get "free" (yes, i know Google monetizes their use with ads) stuff wanting support. If you want support, you have to pay for it. The skilled person wearing the headset in the call center doesn't work for free.
1) For many products (like Groups), there is no paid tier, and thus no way to get support at all.
2) For paid products like Google Apps, it can still be very difficult to get support, even though you're paying (see other responses in this thread).
Disclosure: I work on Google Enterprise.
> Even for most non-apps services, the support people will attempt to figure out your problem, though it's best-effort.
Ah, but how can people get their problems in front of the support people for non-apps services? There is no obvious way to do so.
You are well advised to host your email elsewhere and have it relayed to your normal Google account (and add the email address as a Google identity and a send-as in gmail).
I'll tell you why:
+ Google Apps users are the LAST group of people to get access to new google products (Google+ for example) + You can NOT add new emails to your identity information + There is no appropriate way to transfer your identity
[1]: https://twitter.com/ianbarber/status/321942852823289856
[1]: https://twitter.com/ianbarber/status/321942852823289856
I see also positive side in Google not catering all possible needs. This leaves space for smaller companies to cover these needs and make some money while doing it.
(Yes, I realize Symfony is a software framework, but my hypothetical bot may be using name-matching alone.)
(Edit: not that I actually think the original comment was inane. Forgot context when I wrote this -- sorry!)
How do you know? I've been told on several occasions that rank is by vote difference (ie up - down).
Recently we had a problem concerning the Gmail IMAP API and the X-GM_RAW extension.
- https://developers.google.com/google-apps/gmail/imap_extensi...
Quoting from the docs: "Arguments passed along with the X-GM-RAW attribute when executing the SEARCH or UID SEARCH commands will be interpreted in the same manner as in the Gmail web interface"
But this is not true. For example, the in:anywhere filter will not work in the same manner as in the Gmail web interface. In fact, it is ignored. We opened a support ticket at the "enterprise support" portal (https://enterprise.google.com/supportcenter/), and after 2 weeks dealing with some entity that could very well be a chat bot, no solution.
By trial and error we discovered that in order to get the same result as "in:anywhere" you have to issue an IMAP select to the folder "[Gmail]/All Mail" - which has a different name depending on the user Gmail language settings - for example, its "[Gmail]/Todos" in Spanish (you have to list all folders and look for a folder with the "\All" flag).
The document is still incorrect today. Having a billion users is not an excuse for crappy support. Seems like the whole experience is designed to be opaque and frustrating, to make you feel like you were the character of "The Trial" from Kafka.
If you are gonna close a user's account, either by human or by a robot, you should notify the user before you do it, so that the user can fix the violation if there's any, or find/migrate to an alternative.
Mailing-lists might not be the worst. I mean if you have a backup list including every members email address, you can email them about switching to an alternative. But imagine your Google Apps free account is closed without any prior notification. You suddenly cannot use your email. You decide that you can't have your email address dead knowing that emails sent to it just sink, so you sign up another custom-domain email provider (or build your own on ec2), and tweak with the configurations, which takes an hour. Then you go to your DNS provider and update MX records. Oops, DNS updates can take several hours even one day to synchronize. That's up to a day that you are worrying about missing important emails.
And it did happen before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4825445
Google is not providing support to save costs. If Google implemented warning emails and some sort of compliance check or communication to indicate issues have been addressed, that would add costs as well.