Why is it that Google gets a free pass on customer support?
We somehow implicitly trust that they're doing good in all other areas, but there is absolutely no circumstance in the entire company where a customer can reach a person and receive true support.
Why do they get to do this, and no other company can?
Google gets a free pass on customer support? You can't go a day on HN and many other places without people bitching about Google customer support. Unless you want some sort of legally mandated level of support, I don't see what you would like to happen. If customer service is important to you (and Google is clearly betting it isn't that important), then don't use Google services.
> We somehow implicitly trust that they're doing good in all other areas, but there is absolutely no circumstance in the entire company where a customer can reach a person and receive true support.
That's not true. Their customer support will call you so frequently it's almost harassment if you're actually a customer to them; i.e., have an Adwords account. Now they've started selling consumer electronics, they should expand of course and I'm not giving any free passes. But don't pretend that they don't have a very, very large and extremely active and excellent customer support department. They do. They just choose not to use it with 99% of their customers.
The only customers Google has are the ones that pay it to place ads. Everyone else is the product.
Even Android and all these devices are probably not directly making them that much money, they just want you to use the web more and use Microsoft and Apple products less.
If you read the blog post, at the end he decides to call, and does reach a person, who helps by getting his purchase refunded. It is not clear why he waited so long to call Google Support.
I'm willing to put up with a certain amount of bullshit to save $150 on a phone (that's effectively the discount you get by ordering the Nexus 4 from the totally broken Play store).
I'm late to this thread but I do know Google has a very large technical support team for businesses using Google Docs.
Not only that but, don't forget Google does get audited annually, which their "customers" [businesses] do see, read, and determine whether or not they feel comfortable continuing to do business with Google.
Because a lot of their customer base are engineers who consistently get sold by the technology and not support in the larger sense. Technology myopia at its near worst.
This man has far more faith in Google than I do... I ordered on day one, and gave up after about 6 weeks. While the Note II isn't perfect, I could buy one in a store right away.
On the robot CSRs: it honestly seemed like they had been given about 4 hours of training, which consisted of madlibs-style repetition of whatever you said. I got a bit hyperbolic in a later support call, and one of them honestly said:
"I understand it can be a bit frustrating when, uhh, companies play with your emotions and lie about when your Nexus 4 device (tm) will arrive."
This wasn't a text chat. This was someone acting like a 80's AI over the phone. After they parroted my complaint, they would immediately escalate me to a specialist. Once I talked to a manager, who escalated me 'differently'. I have no idea if any specialist ever replied; I got a few follow up emails which basically said 'Thanks for calling! Keep on keeping on'.
Cancelling was actually the best, easiest thing I did with Google. Ordering was painful, waiting was aggravating, but telling them "I don't want the damn thing" went over surprisingly well.
Google is an engineering company, but one has to believe that they wouldn't purposefully engineer a robot to be this foolish. I have to believe it's actually people you're dealing with, people who have been programmed to behave like computers (YOU MUST PASTE THIS AT THE BEGINNING OF EACH EMAIL).
It's frankly too banal and too non-sensical to be a robot programmed by Google; but in a way, a programmed customer service employee in a call center is a bit of a robot.
We should consider the impact repeated nonsense has on a persons ability to deal with situations in a fashion beyond rote memorization. We should consider the impact of dehumanizing folks in call centers. Google should try to understand how unique human interactions can make a contact center/email experience that much easier, instead of dehumanizing these moments for the sake of expediency.
Indeed, dehumanization appears to be an important issue.
The most unusual occurence I had was with VFS Global (visa handling company) employees. Every one of them had a paper sticker with a number on their tie; and all refused to tell me their name (asked out of courtesy), insisting I refer to them by their number if I have the need.
Is that a common thing in the US/UK? All this looked distinctly dystopian, and mildly surreal, to me.
You could go the Zappos route of actually empower customer service reps. But at the very least, I would expect Google to build better in house CRM tools to feed helpful content to the support reps rather than making them repeat themselves.
From what I've heard from friends at Google, internal tools like this have a notoriously hard time getting engineering resources. I wish they could turn it into a sexy machine learning project and actually get some resources on fixing this issue.
I believe that many of the customer service software solutions have what amount to pre-programmed macros. Eg they may have a 'greet' one saying "Hello ${NAME}, I will do everything I can to assist you." and another 'orderstatus' "I understand your message is about your order status."
The support rep can then chain together the macros for some or most of the response far quicker than they could ever type. And of course that increases their productivity (messages handled per hour) and possibly even has an effect on happy customers per hour although that is harder to measure and seems less of a interest.
The net result are email responses that are indistinguishable from robots, and I suspect the systems would take an initial stab at which macros should be used for a response.
The real problem is companies rarely seem to take the effort to work out why people used email or call centres instead of self service. For outsourced providers there is absolutely no incentive to do anything to reduce call volumes.
I ordered an item from Amazon with free 2 day shipping (prime). The tracking never said anything more than that the label had been created. I waited about a week and contacted Amazon. They immediately sent me a free replacement. Eventually the lost package came as well.
This is how customer support should handle this type of situation.
Amazon are amazing and have figured out how to scale customer service and satisfaction. Most large companies can take a note of out their notebook for handling customers
Google customer support is notoriously bad. Support for their flagship products, gmail, google docs, etc is non-existent. For example, gmail filtering + email forwarding have been broken for over a year, with no fix in sight. So I'm not surprised to see that support isn't good in other area's either. It's really a shame because Google is a great company, with great products and a great vision, and it hurts to see sloppy execution.
I agree, I'm rooting for Google and would just like them to fix their customer support.
I get that they can't profitably provide any kind of support for, say, Google Groups. As we like to say around here, if you don't pay them, then you're the product and you can't expect good service. But once they start moving into markets where you pay them money, the bar is higher. In this case, I'm the customer and their support is by far the worst customer experience of my life. Worse than the time a US Airways stewardess took my carry-on bag off the plane before take-off without telling me.
Any company the size of google can't provide support for their free products. It's not that it's too expensive, or that it's too hard, providing support for a product like gmail is simply impossible. If they opened up a support line for gmail they would simply become overwhelmed with requests like "help, i can't find the send button" or "somebody's spamming me, cna you tell them to stop". Real actual support queries would never get through the noise.
If you click on each sub-forum, you can see from the official response icon column, on the right. That most of the threads do get an answer. That's far from non-existent. I think their big failure here, has been to poorly communicate how people can get help, most don't know about the forums.
>Support for their flagship products, gmail, google docs, etc is non-existent
How are they flagship products? Their flagship profit maker is ads and I hear their support for advertizers is top notch.
I doubt Gmail makes enough off its ads to justify its costs, I think its value is more in getting people to sign in to Google so that if you search for something at work, ads related to it are shown at home etc.
I've worked in customer service, and the reps use 'canned text' all the time for common issues. I assumed this was common knowledge. Not doing so would be a recipe for RSI within a couple weeks.
The problem with canned text is when it's reused on the same person, which leads to anger on the part of the recepient (or suspicions that they're being serviced by a robot).
I've never seen the software on the other side of a tech support email, but I have trouble imagining that in practice. When I am trying to interact with a customer service rep that only communicates through canned responses, it will inevitably take me three times as long, with maybe five times more writing (both from me and from them) than was necessary. I can't be the only one who has this experience.
One point I haven't seen anyone discuss yet in the comments below: the author mentions that, after seeing that the phone was sold out, he kept refreshing the browser till he got a copy of the webpage that allowed him to buy the phone.
I'm wondering if perhaps that copy of the webpage was an out-of-date cached page from a server that hadn't been updated recently enough (or that the page was created based on a copy of data in a cache that hadn't been updated recently enough) and that buying from such a page somehow led to a phantom purchase being created -- since there were no actual phones left to buy -- which got pushed through the system to the point of creating a UPS record for a non-existent phone.
Obviously, one would hope an ecommerce system would catch issues like that so spurious purchases would not be allowed through in the end, but -- in any case -- should the buyer perhaps have realized (in retrospect, at least, if not at the time) that there might be a problem if all his previous attempts to load the webpage were telling him the phone was sold out?
There were thousands like him, and we were (within a day or two) told that our orders were actually pre-orders, and we were given specific delivery timeframes (2-4 weeks, 3-4 weeks... 8-9 weeks)
At any time after this point, one could simply cancel their orders. Many did so.
Once it was realised that orders weren't being shipping in order of placement, many placed new orders (canceling the second once one was delivered).
Folks here are making this out to be par for the course, but this was a very specific messup, and shouldn't be taken as the usual Google Play purchase experience. Google and/or LG severely underestimated how popular the phone would be, and that was their biggest mistake.
Why should a user "know" they got a cached page and not that more phones came up for sale? How could you possibly spin this as somehow being the users fault for not "knowing"?
I was recently asked to fill in a 'customer experience report' for my Nexus 4 purchase by Google. Lets just say, that whilst the service I got wasn't quite the clown car special that this guy was given, it wasn't great either. Not that I expect them to take a blind bit of notice of my carefully worded response.
At this point, I wouldn't advise any of my friends or family to buy physical hardware from Google Play: the customer service is just atrocious & if anything went wrong I'd feel responsible.
I know using a phone is so 20th century but Google Play actually has a dedicated call center for providing support. When I ordered a Nexus 7 back in July I was wondering when it would arrive so I called. Within 2 minutes of waiting I was talking to a friendly human.
Really? When my nexus 7 had a broken screen I tried to phone them up but the only number was in the United States. That may be wonderful if you live in the United States, but it seems the rest of the world will just have to do without ...
Absolutely unacceptable. I would have issued a chargeback immediately after three weeks of tardiness. At that point what Google has done is fraud, especially if you couldn't reach an actual person on the phone.
Copy and pasting the same snippet of generic polite text is excusable, but what can possibly explain the lack of context? Surely you'd only need to glance at the past activity on the ticket (ie, your own emails that you just sent a couple days ago) to avoid giving the same stupid, useless response.
It's either a poorly-programmed robot, or a human acting very much like one.
I wonder how this fits into Australian Consumer Law (ACL) [0]. We have a relatively robust set of rules that govern how a business selling a product/service interacts with their customers.
For example, if you purchase something and it is not as described, or it is faulty, or certain other conditions then the business must be able to remedy the situation. I fail to see how you could satisfactorily comply with the ACL if you're only form of customer service is AI bots.
Not making a whole lot of sense. You gamed the system by having three different browsers place an order (imagine how it must have been like?) and then you complain? Where is ethics of placing an order online? Wouldn't you have been better off following what your single browser screen said the first time?
That's the problem with Google. There is NO customer support. I had a website back in the days that was bringing me good money. A spam alerts from google tells me that I have to delete some spam pages of my website (which is generated by user content) in the 3 next work days otherwise they'll ban my account. I look through the pages and CAN'T find anything spammy, I decide to mail them something along those lines "I'm sorry but I can see no reference of what you want me to erase, can you please provide more informations?". No answers and 3 days later I was banned from Google Ads.
Twist : My website was in multiple language and the page they sent me was in a different language, I had not think of that.
Google sucks on this support. This makes me shy away from their phones and buy Samsung's. Which is practically the same hardware anyway, but with a vaguely human company behind it.
Honestly reading this, nothing surprised me. We all know Google is incapable of decent customer support, and even if we do pay money for something like a phone, the very corporate nature that reigns in this company still sees us as products of free services. Here's a thought, instead of hiring outsourced help for their Nexus sales crew, why not use their AdWords support staff? Those people are obviously the only ones trained to deal with humans.
This post is scary. I have been operating under a new set of rules. I refuse to by goods/services from customer service deficient firms. It has been working great and dealing with small teams and companies that provide fantastic service makes your life easy and efficient. Not to mention building great relationships. I make sure to buy a service from a startup, e.g cloud storage rather than for instance Amazon.
[+] [-] calinet6|13 years ago|reply
We somehow implicitly trust that they're doing good in all other areas, but there is absolutely no circumstance in the entire company where a customer can reach a person and receive true support.
Why do they get to do this, and no other company can?
[+] [-] Kylekramer|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aditya|13 years ago|reply
Google Apps has great phone support if you're paying for it: http://contact.googleapps.com/?&rd=1
[+] [-] cryptoz|13 years ago|reply
That's not true. Their customer support will call you so frequently it's almost harassment if you're actually a customer to them; i.e., have an Adwords account. Now they've started selling consumer electronics, they should expand of course and I'm not giving any free passes. But don't pretend that they don't have a very, very large and extremely active and excellent customer support department. They do. They just choose not to use it with 99% of their customers.
[+] [-] tlogan|13 years ago|reply
BTW, Comcast brand has been damaged by their bad customer service (and bad service in general). So they just renamed their service to Xfinity.
[+] [-] ceejayoz|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cowsaysoink|13 years ago|reply
And those that do pay do get support http://support.google.com/adwords/answer/1385067?hl=en
And I believe there is some support for apps for business.
[+] [-] rdtsc|13 years ago|reply
Even Android and all these devices are probably not directly making them that much money, they just want you to use the web more and use Microsoft and Apple products less.
[+] [-] mrb|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tichy|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wmf|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] allsystemsgo|13 years ago|reply
Not only that but, don't forget Google does get audited annually, which their "customers" [businesses] do see, read, and determine whether or not they feel comfortable continuing to do business with Google.
[I'm an IT auditor]
[+] [-] smrtinsert|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] OGinparadise|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alanctgardner2|13 years ago|reply
On the robot CSRs: it honestly seemed like they had been given about 4 hours of training, which consisted of madlibs-style repetition of whatever you said. I got a bit hyperbolic in a later support call, and one of them honestly said:
"I understand it can be a bit frustrating when, uhh, companies play with your emotions and lie about when your Nexus 4 device (tm) will arrive."
This wasn't a text chat. This was someone acting like a 80's AI over the phone. After they parroted my complaint, they would immediately escalate me to a specialist. Once I talked to a manager, who escalated me 'differently'. I have no idea if any specialist ever replied; I got a few follow up emails which basically said 'Thanks for calling! Keep on keeping on'.
Cancelling was actually the best, easiest thing I did with Google. Ordering was painful, waiting was aggravating, but telling them "I don't want the damn thing" went over surprisingly well.
[+] [-] josh2600|13 years ago|reply
Google is an engineering company, but one has to believe that they wouldn't purposefully engineer a robot to be this foolish. I have to believe it's actually people you're dealing with, people who have been programmed to behave like computers (YOU MUST PASTE THIS AT THE BEGINNING OF EACH EMAIL).
It's frankly too banal and too non-sensical to be a robot programmed by Google; but in a way, a programmed customer service employee in a call center is a bit of a robot.
We should consider the impact repeated nonsense has on a persons ability to deal with situations in a fashion beyond rote memorization. We should consider the impact of dehumanizing folks in call centers. Google should try to understand how unique human interactions can make a contact center/email experience that much easier, instead of dehumanizing these moments for the sake of expediency.
[+] [-] acc00|13 years ago|reply
The most unusual occurence I had was with VFS Global (visa handling company) employees. Every one of them had a paper sticker with a number on their tie; and all refused to tell me their name (asked out of courtesy), insisting I refer to them by their number if I have the need.
Is that a common thing in the US/UK? All this looked distinctly dystopian, and mildly surreal, to me.
[+] [-] d2vid|13 years ago|reply
From what I've heard from friends at Google, internal tools like this have a notoriously hard time getting engineering resources. I wish they could turn it into a sexy machine learning project and actually get some resources on fixing this issue.
[+] [-] rogerbinns|13 years ago|reply
The support rep can then chain together the macros for some or most of the response far quicker than they could ever type. And of course that increases their productivity (messages handled per hour) and possibly even has an effect on happy customers per hour although that is harder to measure and seems less of a interest.
The net result are email responses that are indistinguishable from robots, and I suspect the systems would take an initial stab at which macros should be used for a response.
The real problem is companies rarely seem to take the effort to work out why people used email or call centres instead of self service. For outsourced providers there is absolutely no incentive to do anything to reduce call volumes.
Joel also has a good article http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/customerservice.html
[+] [-] driverdan|13 years ago|reply
This is how customer support should handle this type of situation.
[+] [-] pytrin|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Afforess|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] d2vid|13 years ago|reply
I get that they can't profitably provide any kind of support for, say, Google Groups. As we like to say around here, if you don't pay them, then you're the product and you can't expect good service. But once they start moving into markets where you pay them money, the bar is higher. In this case, I'm the customer and their support is by far the worst customer experience of my life. Worse than the time a US Airways stewardess took my carry-on bag off the plane before take-off without telling me.
[+] [-] notatoad|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vibrunazo|13 years ago|reply
If you click on each sub-forum, you can see from the official response icon column, on the right. That most of the threads do get an answer. That's far from non-existent. I think their big failure here, has been to poorly communicate how people can get help, most don't know about the forums.
[+] [-] quasque|13 years ago|reply
Could you elaborate on this please?
[+] [-] cooldeal|13 years ago|reply
How are they flagship products? Their flagship profit maker is ads and I hear their support for advertizers is top notch.
I doubt Gmail makes enough off its ads to justify its costs, I think its value is more in getting people to sign in to Google so that if you search for something at work, ads related to it are shown at home etc.
[+] [-] mullingitover|13 years ago|reply
The problem with canned text is when it's reused on the same person, which leads to anger on the part of the recepient (or suspicions that they're being serviced by a robot).
[+] [-] bcoates|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dylan-m|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] qohen|13 years ago|reply
I'm wondering if perhaps that copy of the webpage was an out-of-date cached page from a server that hadn't been updated recently enough (or that the page was created based on a copy of data in a cache that hadn't been updated recently enough) and that buying from such a page somehow led to a phantom purchase being created -- since there were no actual phones left to buy -- which got pushed through the system to the point of creating a UPS record for a non-existent phone.
Obviously, one would hope an ecommerce system would catch issues like that so spurious purchases would not be allowed through in the end, but -- in any case -- should the buyer perhaps have realized (in retrospect, at least, if not at the time) that there might be a problem if all his previous attempts to load the webpage were telling him the phone was sold out?
[+] [-] markdown|13 years ago|reply
There were thousands like him, and we were (within a day or two) told that our orders were actually pre-orders, and we were given specific delivery timeframes (2-4 weeks, 3-4 weeks... 8-9 weeks)
At any time after this point, one could simply cancel their orders. Many did so.
Once it was realised that orders weren't being shipping in order of placement, many placed new orders (canceling the second once one was delivered).
Folks here are making this out to be par for the course, but this was a very specific messup, and shouldn't be taken as the usual Google Play purchase experience. Google and/or LG severely underestimated how popular the phone would be, and that was their biggest mistake.
[+] [-] theevocater|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pja|13 years ago|reply
At this point, I wouldn't advise any of my friends or family to buy physical hardware from Google Play: the customer service is just atrocious & if anything went wrong I'd feel responsible.
[+] [-] rryan|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] luke_s|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sergiotapia|13 years ago|reply
Absolutely unacceptable. I would have issued a chargeback immediately after three weeks of tardiness. At that point what Google has done is fraud, especially if you couldn't reach an actual person on the phone.
[+] [-] markdown|13 years ago|reply
Google were out of stock, but their massive load broke their system.
The OP knew this within 2 or 3 days and could have had his money immediately refunded if he wanted to, but most of us were willing to wait.
I for one was on the 8-9 week schedule, and got my phone in week 7, so I was very happy with my purchase.
[+] [-] patejam|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Dylan16807|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TillE|13 years ago|reply
It's either a poorly-programmed robot, or a human acting very much like one.
[+] [-] pserwylo|13 years ago|reply
For example, if you purchase something and it is not as described, or it is faulty, or certain other conditions then the business must be able to remedy the situation. I fail to see how you could satisfactorily comply with the ACL if you're only form of customer service is AI bots.
[0] http://www.consumerlaw.gov.au/ (overview at http://www.accc.gov.au/content/index.phtml/itemId/963190)
[+] [-] mmuro|13 years ago|reply
If they want to be a consumer electronics company, they should probably start acting like one and have actual humans deal with these problems.
[+] [-] webwanderings|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] baby|13 years ago|reply
Twist : My website was in multiple language and the page they sent me was in a different language, I had not think of that.
[+] [-] triplesec|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dendory|13 years ago|reply
Honestly reading this, nothing surprised me. We all know Google is incapable of decent customer support, and even if we do pay money for something like a phone, the very corporate nature that reigns in this company still sees us as products of free services. Here's a thought, instead of hiring outsourced help for their Nexus sales crew, why not use their AdWords support staff? Those people are obviously the only ones trained to deal with humans.
[+] [-] 3327|13 years ago|reply