
Aussie ISV buys ads to wake up Google support - vlasky
https://www.crn.com.au/news/aussie-isv-buys-ads-to-wake-up-google-support-529698
======
throwamay1241
I helped my mother reformat her computer remotely. We successfully ported her
mail client but managed to lose her gmail password - meaning we had enough
access to send/receive emails but not create new sessions. The account was
created some time in 2006. A week prior to the reformat she had changed jobs,
and lost the mobile phone number associated with her account.

The second factor email was associated with my account, I could see reset
codes come through which were relayed to her but would result in an 'oops,
something went wrong'. My guess is a bug due to account age / whatever.

I figured we had enough evidence to obtain a password reset, so I googled for
gmail support contact details. There are none.

I then tried repeatedly to contact Google via twitter, all my tweets were
ignored - probably because I only have like 20 followers.

In the end, my mother ended up porting her old mobile number to a prepaid sim,
as $previouscompany had disconnected the number entirely, and used that as the
second factor to reset the account.

Pretty damn frustrating that Google doesn't have any unpaid inbound support
_AT ALL_.

Next time I'll consider paying a twitter influencer to impersonate me (or my
mother), or paying for adspace, or using a mail service that exposes at least
some form of support.

~~~
exDM69
> Pretty damn frustrating that Google doesn't have any unpaid inbound support
> _AT ALL_.

Frustrating? Yes. Surprising? No.

Afaik, there isn't even any paid support for individual customers unless you
have some sort of business account. I find this a bit unreasonable, but I
wouldn't expect any free service that involves a paid employee from any
service I don't pay for (with money, not privacy).

They can't be making many dollars per year per user. A single support call
answered by a human would take years' worth of income from said user. I'm
amazed at how many people do not realize this, and still rely on these "free"
services even for their jobs.

To give an example: recently, a popular blogger lost their Instagram account
and it was sold to a 3rd party (because they had lots of followers, I
suppose). Blogging is their day job and Instagram is a major source of readers
for them, so they depend on it for their living. The account was probably
stolen by using a reused password from some password dump and they didn't have
2FA enabled.

In the end, the blogger got back their account because they were a part of a
traditional media publishing organization which had a business account with
Facebook, Inc and were able to escalate it that way. Had they not had this
account, it would have been lost.

There are lots and lots of professions where social media presence is required
to bring in the customers (e.g. woodworkers these days depend on Instagram!)
or even monetization from their account directly.

If you depend on Google, Facebook, Youtube, etc to earn a living, you should
consider a business account or at least do your best to secure the account
(2FA, no password reuse, etc).

~~~
ethbro
They way I look at it, Google treats support in the same way that Amazon
treats APIs.

In that they know they're making a choice with consequences and pain. But they
see the _strategic_ value of that choice (never running a support org) as
outweighing the _tactical_ pain.

Additionally, I'd guess the internal opinion is "If users need support, then
something is broken and we should just fix it."

Where I think this falls down, which Microsoft learned 30 years ago, is that:

(a) Unless you're asking, you're not going to surface visibility of broken
things. Users will just find a way to deal, while being pissed off. And then
some product team finds out there's been a major issue for the last 5 years.

(b) Unless you're actively soliciting feedback from your customers and users,
you're at high risk of building the wrong thing. We see this with enterprise
GCP frequently. "Oh, you need Y feature? We never thought about that, because
{insert internal way that Google does things, but no one else does}."

~~~
benologist
If Google knows they're not legally compelled to provide support they just
don't. That's why their support can scale to Play Store's 2 billion users but
not Gmails.

If the EU ever gets around to forcing Google to support their users regardless
of how they are enriching Google the moral of the story will be they saved
billions by waiting until litigation. Just like taxes.

~~~
lonelappde
What support do you get for free apps in Play Store?

~~~
benologist
Phone and email - the apps might be free but they still had to purchase a
Google-powered device to get free apps.

[https://support.google.com/googleplay/answer/7299936](https://support.google.com/googleplay/answer/7299936)

[https://support.google.com/googleplay/answer/7100415?hl=en](https://support.google.com/googleplay/answer/7100415?hl=en)

------
Animats
Back when there were telegrams, I once sent a telegram to Kentucky Fried
Chicken corporate HQ to complain about a franchisee that was leaving unsold
food under the heat lamps for so long it tasted awful. KFC happened to be one
of the few nearby eateries open late. Cost about $20 to send a telegram, which
was delivered by a Western Union messenger.

I was contacted by KFC corporate HQ and given lots of coupons. Then I was
contacted by regional HQ and given more coupons. Then by the franchisee. More
coupons and an apology. The food quality improved markedly. For a while.

~~~
nineteen999
> The food quality improved markedly. For a while.

Until you ran out of coupons?

~~~
dvdbloc
Free food always tastes better, right?

~~~
mayankkaizen
Not necessarily. Not always.

------
funkidredd
Wow!! My company made HackerNews! Yeah, what an arseache it's been - and just
checked and nothing has been actioned still despite the negative coverage.
Google truly don't give a shit I'm afraid.

~~~
schappim
Great work! Out of interest why does an Aussie company charge in GBP?

~~~
funkidredd
We're a GDPR solution smooshed in with the questionnaire builder mate.
Primarily aimed at the UK market, but with the California GDPR equivalent
kicking off Jan 1st..

------
repairisntcheap
I decided to escalate support with a major multi billion dollar tech company
in a unique way... I took a one-way plane ticket to the city of their HQ, went
to the front desk, then when I was rebuffed, i escalated my issues to a major
news outlet. .. I also considered Facebook live right in front of their
headquarters on public property, but fortunately didn't need to... I was very
polite about everything... Never demanding or angry- always expressing
gratitude for the incredible opportunity I had with this company! Amazingly,
my unorthodox escalation procedure worked-- I wasn't sure if it would.

My point in writing this is to say- great job thinking outside the box! Even
if you can't fly to Google HQ, continue to think outside the box. Some ideas
include Hire someone at taskrabbit or Craigslist, or a FB jobs page, to go to
their front desk, or if unsuccessful, to hold a sign on public property in
front of Google's HQ, you can get a banner or sign professionally made (online
process are pretty reasonably priced). You could Skype with your stand-in. It
would be really fun to get a Skype video call on a big iPad... or try
something else.

Everybody thought I was crazy. I was. Crazy people get noticed, and often get
results. Whatever the outcome, being able to tell an awesome story is always
fun! Good luck, mate!

~~~
ehnto
I had a PM who's support strategy was to complain directly to the company's
twitter handle. Apparently the people who run the social media accounts sit
higher in the org chart than support staff because it almost always got us a
faster response.

~~~
dawnerd
Also because companies are absolutely terrified of something negative going
viral. It's why they instantly ask you to DM them to take all discussion out
of public view. It's amazing what a simple tweet can get you when all else
fails (unless it's frontier com., then they straight up block you).

~~~
dzhiurgis
Didn’t work at all with Air NZ for me.

They had promotion on flights on their aussie website, but you can’t spend
airpoints on aussie site. Same flight on NZ website was nearly 2x.

Didn’t work with Wizzair when they changed my flight time, notified I don’t
need to do anything and then charged 30€ for check in.

Didn’t work with Air India - they don’t even have Twitter (just wanted to
change my flight date and you can just imagine how bad their call center is).

~~~
CaptainMarvel
I’ve never had any success either, presumably because I have no followers on
Twitter...

~~~
cosmie
Probably the first legitimate use case for those "buy a follower" services
I've heard of. $20 worth of followers and you'll suddenly get priority support
by their social media team.

If only those services weren't seeded with compromised accounts, I wouldn't
even feel bad about it.

------
marcus_holmes
I dismantled a business a couple of years ago. I let the domain lapse,
dismantled everything. Forgot to cancel Google Apps. I noticed the charge
still coming out of my bank account a while later, and tried to get it
canceled. Couldn't log in, wasn't given the option to use the backup account,
couldn't receive an email. Contacted google support. A few emails later they
accept that I'm the person who is paying the bill, but refuse to cancel the
account. Their last support message is "you'll have to dispute the charge with
your bank".

On to bank support, who don't have a category for "service is being provided
but refusing to cancel" _sigh_

Needless to say, never using a Google service again.

~~~
checktheorder
>Needless to say, never using a Google service again.

The only Google services I bother with are search, maps, youtube (in a non-
logged-in viewing-only capacity, not a posting-my-own-videos capacity) and the
android play store (paying for apps via gift cards). I don't trust google not
to cancel new services on a metaphorical moment's notice, and I don't have any
faith in reaching a human being if I have a billing problem. So I make sure
not to tie my life in any way to my Google account.

It feels strange to say, as an old school Linux fanboy who vividly remembers
the Halloween document release, but I tend to point "I want to move my
business to the cloud" friends/acquaintances to Office 365 instead. Say what
one will about Microsoft's scummy behaviour over the years, but no-one can
claim they aren't into Office 365 for the long haul. And while it's not
exactly easy to get a human being at Microsoft to fix a problem, it's
certainly easier than Google.

~~~
godzillabrennus
I’m a Gsuite, maps and YouTube user. I want to move away from Gsuite and maps
but don’t think there are good alternatives.

CityMapper comes close but isn’t there.

FastMail support is worse than Google and has fewer features.

~~~
checktheorder
>FastMail support is worse than Google and has fewer features.

Actually I use Fastmail, and am a big fan. I've never had an issue reaching
support. Of course I've rarely had to, the service is pretty reliable.

As for features, I could flip that around on Gmail. Does Google _rigidly_
adhere to imap/carddav/caldav standards so that standards-compliant clients
have no problems whatsoever in connecting, or are there still cheerful little
"quirks" when trying to use non-official clients with Gmail?

~~~
godzillabrennus
I am weeks into trying to resolve a carddav issue with fastmail. Email support
from them is lousy at best.

------
jay_kyburz
Gotta post on Hacker News if you want some Google support!

~~~
LilBytes
Maybe OP is Google Support and he's found this is the best 'internal'
escalation point for the forms he's seen come in and not been actioned. ;-)

~~~
Scoundreller
Or OP is a Google shareholder and wants you to buy ads to solve all of your
Googly problems.

~~~
jackvalentine
It's not a great idea, but it's also not the worst idea - an adwords like bid
system for google to respond to your support ticket.

------
marsRoverDev
I feel lucky to personally know Google employees. The times when I've had an
issue and gone via the public channels there has been radio silence. Directly
report it via a google employee and it generally gets dealt with. It should
not be this way.

~~~
funkidredd
Mate, if you could possibly help me with this, is give a decent chunk to a
charity of your choice.

------
TekMol
As far as I know, Google Tag Manger is a tool to inject scripts into websites
via an interface. So you add the Tag Manager script to your page and then you
can tell Tag Manager via Google's interface to load additional scripts.

Why does anybody need Google's solution here so badly? It sounds pretty easy
to develop such a thing.

~~~
stubish
I'm also curious what it does or why it is so vital. I've never needed to
unblock it in NoScript, and as best I can tell nothing suffers. Does it do
something useful server side instead?

~~~
utf985
Really? In my experience, blocking GTM almost always breaks some core
functionality of the website I'm browsing.

~~~
stubish
Yes, completely serious. I've enabled it once or twice to see if a site was
acting wonky because it was blocked, but it was never the culprit.

------
funkidredd
__UPDATE __

THING FIXED!

Media release and some of you here helped bigly yuge with the getting of
Google to sort out.

Thanks to you all.

 _Bows_

------
Animats
If you want to put stuff on your own sites, what do you need Google Tag
Manager for? That's a thing for injecting semi-hostile code into other sites.

~~~
andybak
Because "your own site" might mean "email your freelance dev and wait 3 days",
"open a ticket with IT and wait a week" or "remind oneself how that js deploy
is meant to work even though working in js isn't my day job".

Not everyone is allowed, wants or is comfortable with direct access to their
website code.

------
ec109685
Google stinks at customer service. Compare this to Slack, which answers
everyone of their customer's /feedback's.

