this post was submitted on 08 Dec 2023
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Google's customer service has become non-existent and unhuman. I would be leary of trusting their ability to sort out any issues in a fast or logical manner.
I say this as a paying customer of a few of their products. Despite this position with them I've been stiffed on Google Play gift cards in which there has been no human recourse within Google to deal with.
They just keep the money and there is no agency or person to investigate the 1000s of people with legitimate issues of redeeming the cards caught up in their AI flags. It's a nice way for Google to keep all of this money they have collected and never provide services for.
Slowly I've been removing their services from my life as I de-google where possible.
I was locked out of my account for a month and been in "customer support hell" with them. It was a nightmare, I would tell them it's not allowing me to log in because it claims ALL my devices are suspicious and blocks access, and they would reply with a bot-generated E-mail saying I should try going into my account and changing settings. I would reply saying "You moron, I can't access the settings, I can't log in" and they would reply with the same message again.
I don't understand how such a large company can have such abysmal customer support. I've had my account for maybe over 15 years now and they couldn't care less. In the end I fixed it by having a friend log in for me, but it was a wake-up call of how dependent I was on my email and how many services I used to login via Google. I would advise people not to be too attached to their account.
It doesn't matter how big the company, if the customers don't push for a thing, they won't provide it.
Google's primary income is advertising. Their users are not their customers, at least not most of them. They don't see a significant loss of revenue when users are just fucked over by their lack of support, so why bother?
Frankly, there needed to be a regulation here of some kind to force companies like Google that control user accounts like this to provide a minimum level of support when their accounts get locked. People's lives are tied to those accounts, being locked out of them for days can have serious negative effects.
Almost without exception the larger a company is the worse their support is. I think companies should not be allowed to acquire or merge if it takes more than 5 minutes to talk to a person, if you even can at all.
I actually deleted my Amazon account for this reason, not because I wanted to that day, but because it was easier than trying to recover it.
I had changed phone numbers and couldn't get my two factor authentication after forgetting my password. Well surprise surprise, when I called up their only solution was to delete my account.
I'm doing the same but for more reasons than that. I'm honestly just sick of them. And Apple and Microsoft, to be fair. I'm tired of them all and the last decade of increasingly mounting bullshit. I genuinely want to support smaller businesses and help build up alternatives, and I'm tired of feeling bound to the big boys and forced to swallow whatever garbage they'll push next.
Google's shit just isn't notably better than anyone else's at this point, either. Not in most cases. Maps is still king and likely will be for a long time, but other than that? Meh. Email is email, haven't lost anything by moving to Tutanota. Dropping Google Drive was easy when they killed the proper functionality of the desktop sync app a few years ago. Google Play Music got murdered and the only reason I kept that subscription was for YouTube, but the price increase next month is making me drop that too.
The real bitch is Android. It's becoming increasingly difficult to use it without Google Play Services.
My Google Pixel 5a died recently. To their credit, Google did extend the warranty on the 5a (probably would have been sued otherwise because these devices are dropping dead every day), but attempting to actually claim warranty was the most bizarre Kafkaesque process.
Ultimately it took me 6 weeks and at least 10 follow-ups with Google. They would forget things (like how to get information from their partner uBreakiFix) and would need me to do the legwork for them. Every time I called them I got the following impression:
Customer service agents at Google have NO power to do ANYTHING but read a script and follow policy. I know this is a common complaint with big companies, but I've been on this earth awhile and dealt with a lot of companies, and it honestly shocked me how little power the agents at Google had to actually help. Never seen anything like it before.
The agents similarly have no access to any information that might help you. In my case, once my RMA was delayed, every time I would call they would basically "check" on it, and the answer was basically: "well the replacement should have shipped by now, and I have no idea why it didn't, so I'm just going to add another 5 business days to the last estimate we gave you". No one was ever able to figure out the reason for the delay.
I was getting ready to file in small claims court against Google since it looked like they had no intention of honoring their warranty, but decided to give the old "get support via Tweet" method, which did actually get results. The funny thing was that Google scolded me for providing my RMA number via Twitter DMs since it's "private information" and I should have given them a case number that agents were supposed to provide me, but never did.
The social media escalation team did manage to get Google to overnight me a replacement after I reached out. However, after this experience (as you say, unhuman), I see no moral issue with stuff like blocking ads on YouTube. I think Google have fully shown their cards, at least to me, that they don't really care about service.
I realize they can't run something like YouTube like a small community website, for example, and that they do have to make money as a business. I kind of get where some of their recent actions come from. But I feel similarly to how I feel about media companies whose content I pirate. It's really not my problem, and not my job to help them figure out how to compete with piracy. Valve got shit figured out with Steam, and I've spent hundreds of dollars buying games on there. Media companies seemed like they had things figured out at one point with Netflix, but it wasn't sustainable, plus they got way too greedy. Google used to have their shit together, but they are being too heavy handed and anti consumer now.
In my position now I have at least some influence on the products that my company uses, and I would never recommend that we buy anything from Google if we can help it since the risk of being stonewalled by their support seems so high, and I've experienced that personally. In my personal life, I have a goal to get off of Google's services when I can, and pull all my data out. I don't ever want to be in a position again where I'm thinking of suing a company, but worried that they'll use my data and my reliance on their services as leverage against me the way Google can.
Damn what a crap show that was! Sorry you went through that.
I never thought of twitter as I don't use it. I did start phoning other departments within Google including media relations but got nothing but the same thing of we have no power here and you need to go back into the automated system to try again.
I love android and have since the S2 came out. I never liked Apple phones despite their fantastic real people customer service that you can reach. I did lose a driver's phone that he forgot the password to but in the end I could reach a real person to deal with the issues and most of the time they could help guide me to the solution.
After 13 attempts of sending my gift card details and my store receipts to Google I gave up. They are losing a long time customer that didn't spend millions with the company over the years but the couple of thousand over the years for work and home I should have at least shown I wasn't some deadbeat anonymous person from the internet trying to scam them.
At the end of the day I'm left feeling like a sucker for trying to resolve the issue with Google and for continuing to be a customer when they treat me like a scammer.
My wife bought a new Pixel 8 recently from Google Fi. They sent a Pixel 6a for some reason. She attempted to work with their incompetent, powerless, disconnected and foreign support for a week to get something to happen, desperately reaching out every day for someone to just tell her what was happening. Then, she just purchased a new one because you can't go longer than that without a phone.
Then it was 2 more weeks of them failing to issue a refund for the original wrong phone, trying to ship another phone that she no longer needed, and simultaneously trying to bill her a penalty for not yet activating the phone that was originally shipped.
All it would take is one person who had information, authority, and a modicum of understanding. Nope. That is not a thing that can be achieved through any level of escalation at Google anymore.
Nokia had the same problem recently during a recent issue. They have intentionally made it impossible to solve issues. This is what some companies want. Don't buy from them.
That's what credit card chargebacks are for.
You’re not wrong, but doing a chargeback is a good way to get yourself yeeted off a service. I would not be surprised at all if Google suspends your account permanently if you chargeback, which is a huge issue if you rely on any of their services.
Update: yup, did some quick searching and found anecdotal reports of account suspension or deletion following a chargeback.
It's a wonderful way to be permanently locked out of your Google account, that's for sure.
I’m rooting for you. I went through a similar process awhile back. Feels good to be free.
The only two Google services I still use are YouTube and Google Maps.
I use Google Maps as a local guide of sorts, because restaurant information (and information on other places) is often better compared to Apple Maps and other services. I didn't use it for navigation for years and the app is a bloated mess nowadays.
I would recommend giving Apple Maps a try again if you’re amenable. I get the same exact information on both these days.
Larger towns and cities? Yes. For smaller towns though it's a bit of a hit and miss. At least here in Germany.
I do live in a major metropolitan area. Thanks for the insight!
The satellite office of the company I work for isn't even listed on Apple Maps at all. It's been there for over 10 years. Fuck Apple Maps.
Name checks out.
I've heard a news tech podcast earlier in the year say Apple Maps is now on par with Google and is perhaps exceeding it since its disastrous breakaway from Google app those years ago.