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 Apps has great phone support if you're paying for it: http://contact.googleapps.com/?&rd=1
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.
BTW, Comcast brand has been damaged by their bad customer service (and bad service in general). So they just renamed their service to Xfinity.
http://consumerist.com/2007/10/19/legend-of-comcast-office-s...
American Express? Quick call and fraudulent charges are immediately removed.
As such, I spend millions of dollars through American Express and virtually all of my retail shopping through Amazon. I've dumped service providers who don't accept American Express and avoid purchasing countless products not offered for sale through Amazon.
My response to inadequate customer service is as follows. In the name of efficiency I'd recommend the following:
1 - Answer about problem being resolved 2 - Problem not resolved (24 hours) 3 - Inadequate answer 4 - I am sorry I will have to issue a charge back for your failure to deliver on services as represented. 5 - Problem solved, either by me or them.
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.
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.
In practice I find that the most sophisticated internet users are among the heaviest users of Google products, which implies that the value proposition that Google provides is good even if you understand how their business works. The product doesn't generally extract value from the producer when it's sold to the consumer, but I get an enormous amount of value from using Google.
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]
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.
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.
Could you elaborate on this please?
Also: http://productforums.google.com/forum/m/#!topic/gmail/jCukq7...
It's pretty easy to reproduce. Create a filter for your emails, any filter at all. In the rules section, have the filter forward to a forwarding address. Now receive an email that matches the filter, and watch the forwarding not work.
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.
But this writing reeks of Microsoft astroturfing. Especially the "I got #googleplayed" dig which sounds just like their "Don't get scroogled" campaign and failed #droidrage stunt. It's not like Mark Penn would have any trouble bringing back their famous astroturfing policies to earn his keep at MS.
My goal in this is to get some kind of human being at Google to respond. #googleplayed - what do you think? Could it catch on?
Wow. Google really can do no wrong.
As someone who carries an Android, Google really screwed this up, and deserves all of the hammering they can get in this. They will be forgiven if the next launch goes much better than this, though.
It is a systemic customer support issue that, while perhaps understandable for a free product, is horrendous for a merchant or paid product. I don't think people would care nearly so much about launch hiccups, even major, if there was customer support to help resolve the issue. But as it is, whenever you order something it can feel a bit like Russian Roulette with Google. I hope this changes soon, because otherwise they are doing awesome stuff.
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.
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.
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.
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
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).
Click canned response one
Switch to conv 2
Click canned response 5
Switch to conv 3
Click canned response 1
See there is a response from conv 1
Switch to conv 1
The systems (especially for tier one support) have complete conversation templates. The people supporting the products at tier one often have no clue beyond trying to search for keywords in the knowledge base. Turn over is high enough that training is too expensive (of course, turn over is high due to lack of training).
In short, it's a complete joke.
The bigger problem is that customer service is a McJob, and pays like one, and the staff only deliver service on par with the salary they're given. Generally the people serving you could be getting paid multiples of their current salary if they could find a pizza delivery gig (no joke, pizza delivery can pay up to $30 an hour counting tips).
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.
For example, in my experience, online inventory doesn't typically get updated very quickly. So, seeing inventory suddenly show up for a sold-out item as I was rapidly refreshing, I think, might trigger my spidey-sense but perhaps other people might not think this way.
In any case, my comments aren't meant to excuse any poor customer service, or any other issues, on the vendor's end and I hope the author's case is resolved to his satisfaction.
UPS support will generally only parrot the same information you can get through tracking it on their website.
I conveyed that information to Google, and Google strung me along giving me the impression that they were doing something about it, albeit slowly.
Ok ... 2nd idea ... charge-back the order on your credit card with the already. Claim fraud whatever...at least you'll have your money.
That raises the question, why didn't Google just let the factories ship to Amazon and let Amazon handle sales and customer service(related to shipping, not technical)? I guess the Play Store was an attempt at branding similar to Apple store, but the customer experience seems to be damaging the brand.
This is how customer support should handle this type of situation.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
It's either a poorly-programmed robot, or a human acting very much like one.
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)
If they want to be a consumer electronics company, they should probably start acting like one and have actual humans deal with these problems.
Twist : My website was in multiple language and the page they sent me was in a different language, I had not think of that.
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.
I agree, with such an experience, Google cars don't seem like a good idea at all.