Let's talk about Google Support

jatkin · 08-30-2023 01:44 PM

Can we talk about the state of Google Support? It's really exhausting trying to communicate with them and receiving any substantial support or solutions.

There seems to be a language barrier that makes understanding the problems take 5x as long.
They ask for the same screenshots and information over and over again instead of referring to those already uploaded.
They have limited visibility into anything on the technical side.
There seems to be only 2 levels of support: Tier 1 and "product engineering". There is no escalation ability.
Their main solution is to put in a Feature Request over here!

I was told about Gmail's search suggestion, and I quote: "The suggestions you see in the quick drop-down are not meant to be accurate, simply suggestions." 🙊

I was told that to avoid having emails from our 2 domains with similar names (like abc.com, adc.com) being caught by the safety setting to quarantine similar domain names, we could disable that setting 🙈

They ask for work hours which I provide, confirm that they have received the hours, proceed to schedule calls not during those hours.

Apologies for venting in this forum, but am I the only one with this experience with them?

StephenHind

@jatkin yes that's what everyone experiences and recently has been made worse by Google pulling the rug from under our feet by changing the level of support offered in the packages and then outsourcing the support to new companies who don't have the slightest clue on how to provide support in general and then have no experience of anything Google.

The support offering now is almost worthless and actually doesn't fix any issues and only makes the unfortunate users of this service more frustrated.

I'll stop here before I get more upset and angry.

christiannewman

This is one of the many reasons 100% of Google Workspace clients should be working with a Google Cloud Partner for professional services and support. Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian often states this goal.

Only in very rare circumstances (low single-digit %s) do we need to contact Google support - and even when we do, we're able to better navigate the issue through Google's support infrastructure - we take on the stress so clients don't have to 😬

jatkin

When Google tried forcing us over to a Partner, we were in the middle of a ticket that lasted over 2 years. The Partner did not have answers and then ghosted us.

christiannewman

Partners aren't one-size-fits-all - they range from high-touch partners with deep client relationships and professionally-certified administrators - to partners who simply sell Google Workspace licenses because it compliments their core service offering, and have little-to-no relationship capacity or expertise.

You can search all Google Cloud Partners to find the one best-suited for you, here.

Zimmlaw1

I purchased a Google pixel 9 pro fold. I had problems immediately. This is after I had problems with my Google pixel fold when it was new as well. The online customer service is absolutely abysmal for them as it is for workspace. The store was wonderful.

Unfortunately, I'm not paying extra to work with third parties or going to the store every time. I need help with a product. The answer is a mass Exodus from Google products. I will be moving, God help me, to Microsoft. This will be a big pain in the behind to move my business there, but at least I know I can get support.

If anyone from Google reads this then feel free to contact me.

russ12

Microsoft fo not make phones anymore, windows phone got dumped years ago.

For email I switched to selling Fastmail instead of Workspace.

pwehner

yes- pretty horrible. We had an issue with multiple account restores and as you know the undelete user portion of admin has no filter ability at all. A search shows this fundamental service hole has been complained about for over 5 years.

I contacted support & "We don't support GAM".

I contacted our TAM & "Use GAM".

Sometimes I think workspace is supported by like 5 devs maintaining minimally changed code that is +-8 years old. Lots of time to bolt on or re-skin new features on old services, never enough time to improve basic services.

But I'm cranky today too..

russ12

yes the support is just a bunch of monkey's with computers, they are useless. back in the early days of gapps and even gsuite, support used to be good, but now it's essentially useless.
Partner support is even worse and always has been, they just ignore you completely and repuse to speak to you on the phone or other depts and other depts can only contact them via ticket.

they do not care about customers at all and will just screw you over.
I had my workspace account suspended accidentally. and this cause dme weeks of works and issues as it broke everything that was connected to my google account or authenticated via google. Dozens of sites, apps broke, emails from monitoring systems got blocked due to bounces and stopped sending.
They didn;t give a damb and refused to give me any compensation.
I have now signed up with fastmail as a reseller and will be offering this to clients instead.

DiesMan

Can certainly relate & confirm (I quite politely inquired about the same here).

By default, I only involve support (GW or other) when I believe I have exhausted all options within my reach, so usually the issue has already been troubleshooted & dug down to some extent.

I haven't opened that many ticket (from the very 1st one, I could feel it was only wasted time), but the pattern is as follows:

off-topic/useless feedback showing lack of understanding (or maybe even lack of reading) of the issue
deflection by pointing to (often contradictory) resource saying the problem is outside GW
Asking for logs that aren't investigated/leveraged
Asking for remote sesssions that only confirm the requester's initially stated issue
Pointing to other Google products/subscriptions/licenses that would hypothetically better solve GW issue than GW support itself.
returning to 1-5 in loops, carefully leaving things unsolved/unhandled/uninvestigated

On my latest interaction, I also encountered a rather "scammy" behavior, where the support person, after declining to help, nonetheless asked for a remote session to clarify how/where I had opened my ticket. I believe the goal was to identify how I was able to notice the ticket was marked as "Solved" despite it not being solved at all.

My only suggestion to anyone facing such denial of support: Do not leave any ticket as "Solved" or any other successful-looking status if the matter isn't. Just post a comment and close the ticket on your end, so that the status is "Closed" instead of anything more positive .

In the current state, if a partner is involved someday, it will be to extract ourselves from the situation.

russ12

Yep I can confirm all of that us the norm.

The complete inability to ever read the ticket and look at the questions already asked and answers already given, files anyway uploaded etc just boggles the mind. Every single ticket involves repeating everything many times.

They must have been told tens of thousands of times "we already went through this, read previous replies" and "I already sent you that screenshot, file whatever, read previous replies", yet they never learn.

I am often having to explain to them how email works, as they clearly have no idea.

I have an open issue right now with a domain transferred over to Google, they keep blocking and bouncing emails and suspending the account.

The person I spoke to on the phone kept telling me I need to check the spf and dkim records for the forms. I kept telling her that the forms do not need spf and dkim records as the site uses smtp to send emails and sends via Gmail, so Gmail is the source, so it's googled spf that is used and Google that signs the emails with its domain key.

She wouldn't listen and clearly has no idea how smtp, spf or dkim actually works.