
Why Google can’t technically do customer support (2011) - ToFab123
https://www.seroundtable.com/google-support-staff-limits-13916.html
======
tschwimmer
20k support employees sound eminently reasonable for a billion users. If not a
bit low. Having worked a bit with support I think 10 minutes is a gross
overestimate for average issue resolution time, perhaps even an order of
magnitude off. However, an analysis like this is probably best served by a
probably distribution of solve times (50% of issues take 1 minute, 20% of
issues take 5 minutes...) instead of a point estimate, and that’s where things
have the potential to go off the rails. Your really gnarly support issues are
(a) where the customer can’t articulate the problem coherently, (b) where
there is undefined/unexpected product behavior or (c) both. A is astonishingly
common and unfortunately b isn’t too rare either (bugs, undocumented features,
ill communicated launches). A seems to be essentially intractable (teaching
your customers how to communicate better is probably the responsibility of the
public school system) but I’ve seen some novel attempts at solutions. I’ve
personally used a tool called FullStory to replay a customer session to
understand what’s going on but that solution probably doesn’t scale well and
there may be privacy concerns based on the product area. B isn’t a tech
problem at all. It is best solved by better internal processes around catching
bugs and communicating product changes to users.

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nokya
I think this article (and most comments below) failed to grasp a component
that is highly relevant to the discussion: Google doesn't have a billion
customers.

Google is a company that collects data from over a billion human beings, then
structures and organizes it in a profitable way for a very small group of
large corporations that want to spend millions$/year to reach their targeted
audience. To that matter specifically, and I speak from personal experience as
part of a digital marketing department at a retail group, Google offers not
very good, but quite "ok" support.

People complaining about Google offering them bad support for software (google
apps) or hardware (google phones and/or android in general) forget they are
not Google's customers. We are basically raw resources with purchasing power
and Google is trying to help its customers influence our purchasing decisions
in their interest. That's it.

To my opinion, a question worth much more of our attention is to discuss how
and why we, as human beings, have accepted becoming reduced to a simpleton
with a wallet by our own peers (other humans...).

~~~
blfr
I'm pretty tired of "you're the product" mantra, even when you dressed it much
more eloquently.

The brutal truth is that there is very little human support any company can
offer for a $5/mo product (like G Suite). From my experience, many customers
everywhere expect support far in excess of what they're worth and they're also
unwilling to pay more for support, and definitely unwilling to pay what it
actually costs, even with offshoring, to have a reasonably intelligent person
look deeply into their particular problem.

Uncustomized products and solutions usually cost 1/5th to 1/10th of their
custom counterparts (think shirts and suits which people still routinely order
custom so there is competition and reasonable market rates) with the ratio
easily going to 1000:1 and more for software or industrial products. How much
would I need to spend to get a customized email/drive/docs version of G Suite?
Would it be even close in quality and security? How much are CNC parts vs mass
produced ones?

So the reason human beings have accepted standardization or, as you call it,
becoming reduced to simpletons with a wallet is that it's vastly financially
preferable to bearing the cost of being treated differently.

~~~
altmind
Enterprise Google suite is $25/user/mo.

The one who ask gsuite support the most are domain administrators, not users.
Users cannot even reach the support page
[https://support.google.com/a/answer/1047213?hl=en](https://support.google.com/a/answer/1047213?hl=en)

the service cost is not $5, you should multiply that by avg number of users in
a domain.

------
eponeponepon
I risked reading below the line on the article, and among the frothing rants
is one very salient point - not that long ago, old-guard public utility
companies (the example in the comment is AT&T prior to the 1980s, but other
firms in other countries are also good examples) had _everyone_ as a customer,
and nothing seemed to stop them from providing at least a bit of personal
support. It may have been second-rate a lot of the time, but one could contact
them, and directly - in the case of the telephone network, one could speak to
an operator more or less immediately and more or less any time of day.

Obviously it isn't the case that Google's support operation is in the exact
same problem-space, but I was interested to realise that the pure statistical
"there are too many users" argument doesn't immediately excuse them.

~~~
dexen
>not that long ago, old-guard public utility companies [had reams of money]

Back then the phone service was rather expensive as compared to present day -
especially long distance calls.

Til very recent Google was free for most users; currently its taking a
sizeable cut from Android app sales and Youtube donations & subscriptions. Not
sure how that'll develop into the future.

~~~
aaaaaaaaaab
Google is definitely not free. Users pay with their data and their eyeballs.
Framing this as “free” is cynical at best.

------
roenxi
Who slipped the word 'technically' into the article? Obviously Google can
technically do tech support, and they explain how - hire ~20k people.

It is an economics problem - they don't think there is any marginal profit to
be made hiring a support person (and Google services are pretty
straightforward, they could easily have a clear read on the situation). That
has nothing to do with the number of users though.

~~~
hknd
Google has ten-thousands of people working on tech support, see gTech:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HcjR6ZngQcw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HcjR6ZngQcw)

------
fredsanford
Seems to me it's not that Google cannot do support, they're just not willing
to do so.

And they wonder why some people are unwilling to buy services from them...

------
Twisell
Apple now claimed 2 billions iOS devices activated, hence active users should
be over 1 Billion. Not only do they offer customers support, but they have
brick and mortar a customers support in every Apple Store.

So at least this article will put thing in perspective next time I’ll
internally rant on Apple because scheduling an appointment at a specific time
that suit me is hard. They offer human face to face support where Google
doesn’t even try online support because they think it’s not "scalable" for
them.

~~~
john_minsk
There are 7+ billion people on earth. No way every 6th of them has apple
device.

~~~
manigandham
It's not 1 per person. Many people and families have several devices, and I
think you'd be surprised at just how many people do have an iPhone.

------
FartyMcFarter
I seem to recall that my father once had trouble installing MS Windows due to
key validation. He was able to contact a MS representative who spoke his
language, and the issue was sorted out quickly.

If Microsoft can do it, why can't Google?

~~~
petepete
Because you're Microsoft's customer and Google's product?

------
hliyan
I have since stopped comparing Apples to Googles since the following
realization hit me: Apple is a tech company. Microsoft is a tech company. They
sell technology. Google and Facebook are not. They're _advertising_ companies.
This is not necessarily a bad thing. It's just that we can't expect the two
types of companies to behave the same way.

~~~
badestrand
So tv stations, radio stations and some newspapers are advertising companies
too?

And if Microsoft makes Windows free and displays Ads to makr revenue they are
suddenly an ad instead of tech company?

And what about Google (actually Alphabet?) having multiple products out of
which only a few make money by advertisement. Think of Android and Maps.

~~~
konschubert
To expand on that: when we say that "Y is an X-company" then what we mean is
that X is the thing that gives Y it's _main competitive advantage_.

The monetisation scheme of a company is of course relevant when trying to
understand the actions of the company, but I the English language, it we
usually don't call companies by their monetisation scheme.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Maybe we should, though? Because calling companies by "it's main competitive
advantage" leads to unending confusion.

The rule of thumb seems to be: most companies don't give a shit about the
actual product or service they provide. It's only a means to an end (profit),
and if replacing their current product line with toilet paper would make them
more profitable, they'd do it in a heartbeat. This means you can't really look
at the product - or the promises made by sales&marketing about the value it
provides - as a way to understand what the company will do. Their monetization
scheme, however, makes it easier to predict future decision.

~~~
konschubert
But the fact that they are aiming for profit beyond everything else is already
implied by the word "company" I'd say.

------
int_19h
Arguments about who is actually Google's customer aside, the article doesn't
really make a coherent point even if you do assume that users of their
products are customers in a meaningful sense.

I mean, the entire argument is that Google's userbase is at "Internet scale"
\- one billion users. Okay, but each of those users enjoys many other products
and services, and _those_ usually come with support - maybe not good, but
generally better than what they get from Google. So, it is demonstrably
possible to provide support to one billion customers! Of course, that support
comes from thousands of different businesses, each of them effectively
carrying a part of the overall load. (Side note: isn't "Internet scale"
supposed to be all about decentralization? Ah, that was a beautiful dream
while it lasted...).

So, imagine if instead of Google, we had thousands of small companies, serving
different groups of customers. And all those companies could then provide
support, each one only to those customers they service - and would do so,
because competing in the market would require some basic level of it.

And if those mini-googles were to gradually merge, then we'd get Google,
except with support that actually scales to their number of users. But actual
Google does not, because actual Google is not just an aggregate. Evidently, it
can extract the same revenue from those customers as many small companies
would, but then it can drastically shrink its expenses compared to what those
companies would have. Why? Obviously, because it doesn't have meaningful
competition, and so it doesn't need to care about what the users think all
that much. It doesn't _have_ to spend resources on customer support - and so
it doesn't.

So this whole argument is basically a roundabout way to say that Google is a
monopolist that is abusing its dominant position in the market to the
detriment of the consumers. I'll take their word for it...

------
onetimemanytime
Some backround: Barry Schwartz is /was Danny Sullivan wannabe. A "Google
insider" that was fed rotten crumbs from Matt Cutts & Co. They used them to
satisfy the hand that fed them and to get clicks and business from desperate
webmasters as Google stopped sending clicks to non-Google sites.

As others have pointed out, Google doesn't have a billion customers. People
that complain were email users, adsense, adwords and website owners. If google
wanted to do the right thing, with some software magic they would have cut the
load by 95% and hired 500-1000 people to provide excellent support to the
rest. After software has gathered all the data it takes minutes to determine
guilt or innocence. But that's not Google.

------
dmortin
The problem is google apparently can't deal with reported issues either.

Check out this page of google map issues:

[https://issuetracker.google.com/issues?q=componentid:188814%...](https://issuetracker.google.com/issues?q=componentid:188814%2B%20status:open%20type:bug%20&terms=)

There are issues with NEW status going back to August which I guess means
nobody looked at them.

~~~
konschubert
It's really hard to get an appointment at the apple store though, I recently
had to stay awake until after midnight to catch one of the online
reservations.

------
Digit-Al
I'd have thought the real answer is that the people expecting customer support
are under the delusion they are the customer when in reality they are the
product.

~~~
vezycash
Delusion? Not everyone reads tech articles like you. Bugs & freak accidents
happen that aren't the fault of users. Without support, you'd frustrate, and
anger such users. Normally, angry users leave and never return. But monopolies
with considerable lock in like Google...?

On my first eBay purchase, I bought two quantities of a 3m usb cord. PayPal
deducted my money and my PayPal dashboard showed transaction successful. On
the other hand, my eBay dashboard was still nagging me to pay for what I'd
already paid for.

Both eBay and PayPal make it extremely difficult to reach support. After days
of search, I eventually found PayPal email (it isnt on my account). They
quickly responded and asked me to tell the seller to check their PayPal
account or message PayPal for assistance. Seller didn't. Insisted that I only
paid for a single item instead of two.

I tweeted to eBay, Facebook messaged em - no response. Wrote on their wall, it
was automatically deleted. Wrote on their wall again a few days later and got
a response. The support person was surprised by their error and fixed it.

Now tell me, which FAQ would have helped in this situation?

~~~
Digit-Al
Sounds like an awful experience. Glad you did get successful resolution
eventually.

I was really talking about the likes of Facebook, Google, etc... I would say
that you are a customer of eBay and PayPal (although the eBay case could be
arguable) and definitely PayPal should make resolution better as they are
actually handling people's money - which is a whole new ballgame.

But really, come on, if you are getting a whole lot of useful services for
free, expecting support when things go wrong is surely a bit greedy. In this
world you get what you pay for, and if you pay sweet FA you can surely expect
no more than sweet FA in return.

It would possibly be useful if they provided a paid tier that guaranteed swift
resolution if something goes wrong, but we've all been so conditioned to
expect everything for nothing now that they probably wouldn't get enough
takers to make it worthwhile offering it.

Anyway, the whole thing is a mess and a hugely complicated subject. I could
probably go on boring you with my thoughts on it for ages more, but I'll spare
you any more :-)

