Is there any hope of getting support from google if something goes wrong with your google voice number?
Google voice worked great for me for over a year but, now, there seems to be about a 1/20 chance that any particular text message will get dropped, and a 1/10 chance that any call will get a message that says "we're sorry, you've reached a number that's been disconnected or is no longer in service. . ." And if that weren't enough, voicemail stopped working for me a couple of weeks ago.
Cell phone companies are notorious for having poor customer service, but it's at least possible to navigate their phone tree to reach a human who can escalate things to another human, one who actually has the power to get things fixed. Now, I kinda regret giving out my google voice number, since I'm going to have to get everyone to switch to my 'real' cell number if google doesn't spontaneously decide to fix these bugs.
As a paying customer of Google Apps, I have an incredibly difficult time getting decent customer support for the paid services, so I wouldn't hold my breath. Also, in the past I have submitted tickets for other free service like Analytics and they have gone unanswered each and every time.
Google is great at innovating, but their support story is pathetic. It's the big reason we stopped a 1000-person migration and stuck withbExchange (except for a small group of techies).
I've never had a substantial delay in an "outage" situation when I call support, and I've never, except once, waited more than 2 days for a service / technical issue that's not resulting in an outage via email support. The one time the delay went longer, I called our account rep and had a response within a few hours. I've also seen changes to services based on suggestions we've made. I can't imagine the Education support is better than the Business support.
Google is great at innovating, but their support story is pathetic.
They should create a customer support "marketplace" for particular services where customer service is key, then outsource customer support. This should be structured so that Google could comparison shop different providers on a kind of "spot" market.
To give a counter-anecdote, the organization I work for bought several Google Search Appliances and we have had excellent support. Granted, GSAs are not cheap. However, I do think Google has the organizational capacity to provide good support when they want to.
As a sucker who bought a phone from google, i'd say Stay away from anything critical from them!
still finds it difficult to answer a simple phone call if the phone is charging for more then 10min. As i have to lock the screen, then unlock (to work around a software bug in the touch driver), enter the password (damn work email), and finally, slide to answer (or more likely, see who called and call them back)
You didn't buy a phone from Google, you bought it from HTC (I assume this is the Nexus One, the same as I have) with heavy Google branding on it. If you want to get hardware support, you'll go through HTC directly. Learn your lesson that HTC has shitty component quality and never buy from them again. Google just makes the software, which works fine. The hardware in the Nexus One is another story...
As soon as some good dual core phones ship this year, I'm jumping ship off the HTC boat.
google posted several videos bragging how they had control on the device creation. (ironically, there was even one devoted to quality control of the device)
And yes, the other reply is correct. most of them are software issues.
Google voice worked great for me for over a year but, now, there seems to be about a 1/20 chance that any particular text message will get dropped, and a 1/10 chance that any call will get a message that says "we're sorry, you've reached a number that's been disconnected or is no longer in service. . ." And if that weren't enough, voicemail stopped working for me a couple of weeks ago.
Cell phone companies are notorious for having poor customer service, but it's at least possible to navigate their phone tree to reach a human who can escalate things to another human, one who actually has the power to get things fixed. Now, I kinda regret giving out my google voice number, since I'm going to have to get everyone to switch to my 'real' cell number if google doesn't spontaneously decide to fix these bugs.