Why is it that Google gets a free pass on customer support?
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 gets a free pass on customer support? You can't go a day on HN and many other places without people bitching about Google customer support. Unless you want some sort of legally mandated level of support, I don't see what you would like to happen. If customer service is important to you (and Google is clearly betting it isn't that important), then don't use Google services.
I apologize for posting "This.", but I must: Customer support is by far the most commonly criticized facet of Google. It is very widely known to be a debacle, and the truth is that many of us refuse to recommend that less tolerant people do anything with Google that demands customer service (I have never recommended anyone buy devices from the Google Play store after my own debacles with their system).
No it DOES NOT.
For example, delivery to our email is delayed by up to 48 hours and no help from them. The ticket is open for a month and each phone conversation starts from zero (disable filters, clear up cookies, bla bla). There is no follow up, progress, etc.
> 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.
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.
"If you're not paying money, you're the product being sold" is one of those cached phrases that looks insightful on first glance, but contains no actual substance.
Every human using Google is a customer. For most customers, the product is search results, and their payment is to let part of their screen be occupied by ads. For advertisers, the product is X pixels of advertising text, and the payment is dollars (or euros, or yen, etc).
Currently, the exchange rate between pixels and dollars is so extreme that it's not cost-effective to provide support to those customers who are only paying in pixels. Customers who pay in dollars (advertisers are one, but also people who have a paid Gmail account, or have bought more Drive storage, etc) do receive support.
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But that's all beside the point. The original story is about someone who paid hundreds of dollars for a phone, and received terrible support. Even if you hold the position that all free services are inherently exploitive, don't you think that someone who spent that much money should be receiving top-quality support?
On this view, you could argue that a dairy cow is a farmer's customer. The cow gets food and pays for it with milk. Or a fish is a fisherman's customer: the fish gets food, and pays for it with some pain and inconvenience (in the case of catch-and-release) or with its life.
It is useful to distinguish transactions that involve money from transactions that don't, and to restrict the word "customer" to apply only to those situations where money is exchanged, if for no other reason than that only in situations where money is exchanged is it clear who is the customer: it's the person who pays.
Google's advertisers are its customers. The (attention of the) people doing the searches are the product. Search results are the means by which the product is procured, not unlike the bait on the fisherman's hook.
The difference is consent, not the medium of exchange. A fish can't consent to be part of the dinner-diner relationship.
A doctor and an armed mugger are different because even though in both cases they are given money in exchange for life, the doctor's patient[1] consented to do so.
Also, restricting customers to people who pay with money excludes transactions based on bartering or favors. If I design a nice website for someone and they give me a bottle of wine, that's still a customer relationship even though no money has changed hands.
Exchange of money is a necessary but not sufficient condition to have a customer relationship.
As for voluntariness, it is arguable that the fish enters into the transaction voluntarily, if perhaps not fully informed. But here's a better example: my cat provides certain intangible benefits to me in exchange for food. I can assure you that my cat is entering into this exchange voluntarily. Who is the customer?
Still not satisfied? Fine. Two kids collect baseball cards. They agree to trade a Hank Aaron for a Babe Ruth. Who is the customer?
Unlike a barter relationship, a customer-provider relationship is necessarily asymmetric. The only way to reliably identify which way the asymmetry runs is to follow the money.
> As for voluntariness, it is arguable that the fish
> enters into the transaction voluntarily, if perhaps not
> fully informed.
> [...]
> my cat provides certain intangible benefits to me in
> exchange for food. I can assure you that my cat is
> entering into this exchange voluntarily. Who is the
> customer?
A fish or cat or any animal, cannot consent to anything due to lack of intelligence. Consent is only meaningful when all parties have roughly equal information about what's involved in the relationship, the consequences, and the alternatives.
> Fine. Two kids collect baseball cards. They agree to
> trade a Hank Aaron for a Babe Ruth. Who is the customer?
If only one kid knows that one card is much more valuable than the other, then it's not a customer relationship, it's a scam.
If both (or neither) know the value of the cards, and there's no coercion, then the customer is whoever initiated the trade. They understood what was involved just as well as the other kid, and made the informed decision that they wanted to exchange the cards.
> Unlike a barter relationship, a customer-provider
> relationship is necessarily asymmetric. The only way
> to reliably identify which way the asymmetry runs is
> to follow the money.
I don't buy into this idea that a customer relationship is inherently imbalanced. In fact, the ideal of such a relationship assumes perfect balance -- two people with things worthless to themselves, but valuable to the other.
>For most customers, the product is search results, and their payment is to let part of their screen be occupied by ads.
Would you say adblockers are theft?
Is every consenting value exchange a customer-provider relationship?
>the ideal of such a relationship assumes perfect balance -- two people with things worthless to themselves, but valuable to the other.
Not worthless, just worth less. If I buy a product/service, I felt my money had less worth than what I was buying and the provider held the opposite stance.
>If I design a nice website for someone and they give me a bottle of wine, that's still a customer relationship even though no money has changed hands.
>"If you're not paying money, you're the product being sold" is one of those cached phrases that looks insightful on first glance, but contains no actual substance.
And that summary judgement follows a familiar pattern: 'This is meant to be insightful, but actually... let me show how the prevailing wisdom is wrong, with my new improved analysis'
The problem here, is that you're trying to be too clever in order to stretch words beyond their common usage.
Some personal perspective: Myself and the rest of the EA (Enterprise Architecture) team at my prior company spent almost a month painfully debating the meaning of word "Customer". Yes, I know, crazy and yet we had good reason for the corporate dictionary to be accurate. Financial control systems and exec reporting relied on it. But I digress, and while I can't remember the exact definition we used, the essential fact is:
A customer pays for goods or services.
It doesn't matter if they use dollars, bitcoins, or bushels of corn. Nearly all users of Google are NOT customers, and indeed do form part of the product offering, as the OP stated.
Additional references:
"A customer (also known as a client, buyer, or purchaser) is the recipient of a good, service, product, or idea, obtained from a seller, vendor, or supplier for a monetary or other valuable consideration. [1][2]
In that definition, the surrender of part of the browser window to advertisement is the "valuable consideration". It's only worth tiny fractions of a cent, sure, but heap those fractions up high enough and it becomes worthwhile.
For your position (that ad-supported implies searcher is not the customer) to be correct, there would have to be some minimum amount of cost involved before a human can become a customer. Say the search engine charges one dollar per query. The searcher must be the customer, obviously. What if the search engine charges one a penny per query? Is the searcher still the customer? What about one thousandth? One millionth?
At what point does the searcher's expenditure fall so low that you consider them to be a product, rather than a human?
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Aside:
Apart from my day job, I write a lot of software. Some of it is made available for use for no monetary charge, and supported by ads. I do not consider the humans who use my software to be "products", nor the advertisement networks to be "customers". To say that someone is a product just because they don't want to pay money for something strikes me as borderline sociopathic.
"To say that someone is a product just because they don't want to pay money for something strikes me as borderline sociopathic."
Subjective feelings, while perfectly reasonable and acceptable in their own right, should maintain little bearing on the objective and consensually derived definitions of words, if one is being intellectually honest.
Simply put, it would be a stretch to convince us that your distaste for the concept (calling it 'borderline sociopathic') is not influencing your POV.
> It doesn't matter if they use dollars, bitcoins, or bushels of corn.
Or, say, personal information that can be used in targeting advertising.
> Nearly all users of Google are NOT customers
I'd describe them a suppliers, but unless you've suddenly decided that, contrary your early statement, it does matter what they provide in exchange for the services they receive, they can also, by your logic, be described accurately as "customers".
> and indeed do form part of the product offering, as the OP stated
No, the users do not form part of the product offering; the slave trade is not part of Google's business models.
They are suppliers of inputs (both information used in targeting advertising, and the advertising opportunities through which the actual advertising is delivered being the key pair of inputs) that are used in Google's product offerings; insofar as these inputs are exchanged for services Google provides rather than for cash payment, they are also customers purchasing those services in a non-cash exchange.
"Or, say, personal information that can be used in targeting advertising."
This time, it's the word 'pay' that is being shoehorned.
Let's assume I run a survey company, and I invite a bunch of people over for a BBQ. During lunch I passively monitor their interactions and sell that data. Did the guests pay for the BBQ?
">I'd describe them a suppliers,"
That is a bit more specific and possibly more accurate, but at least 67% less sexy ;).
However it does not invalidate the original product claim. Often suppliers are part of that chain. They supply raw goods (personal data in this case) that gets packaged as part of a product offering (aka adwords) or service, and then sold to the customer.
> Let's assume I run a survey company, and I invite a
> bunch of people over for a BBQ. I then monitor their
> interactions and sell that data. Did the guest pay for
> the BBQ?
If you told them ahead of time that you would do this, then yes, they paid for the food by giving you some information about who they like to talk to at lunch. They would be customers.
If you did not tell them, then you spied on them without consent, and they would be victims.
I actually find it very insightful, even if it has been repeated a number of times. And repetition hasn't eroded its truth.
At the end of the day, real estate on a screen is means to an end, not the ultimate end itself. The ultimate end is of course money, which is paid by advertisers. The means to an end is more properly viewed as a factor of Google's production than an end itself.
I would distinguish linguistically by saying that I am a user of google's products, but not a customer. A customer pays.
Google doesn't sell people to advertisers. For one thing, that would be illegal. For another, they don't have a delivery infrastructure that would support it. And, finally, advertisers aren't interested in buying people, they are interested in buying advertising impressions (particularly, ones that are targeted so as to be more likely to produce sales.)
What Google does is use information it receives from users to sell targeted advertising impressions in services that the users use. The users are suppliers -- both of the information and the advertising opportunities -- rather than either "customers" or "products".
The fact that "cached phrase" has a similar pronunciation to "catchphrase" does not mean that they are related. In particular, this is not an instance of an eggcorn because substituting one for the other will result in a sentence that does not make sense. The quotes in the page you link to are instances of malapropism ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malapropism ).
They are neither "customer" nor "product", they are suppliers, both of information which Google uses to assemble their targeted advertising delivery product, and of the actual advertising page impression opportunities.
They get less individualized attention then either customers or many other kinds of suppliers because there are lots of suppliers of the same inputs and the marginal value of each one of them to Google's business is very, very low, such that spending significant resources on direct support would very quickly turn them into a net liability.
They are customers of google search in that they buy search results in exchange for screen real estate and suppliers for the reasons you stated above. Google cares deeply about satisfying their search customers because they are also the suppliers of page impressions and personal information.
In my experience they've taken a U turn in that area. I won't say they're good yet, but it's obvious they're trying to improve. It's a good market correction, they realized they couldn't just do nothing about their reputation.
What about Amazon? I've never talked to anyone on the phone, but I've had them take care of fucked up orders immediately with little question. Dented book? New one is on the way before I even drop the old one off at UPS.
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.
I think the point with Amazon is: if something goes wrong, they give you your money back. Once the post man wasn't able to deliver, before I even realized, I had the money I paid back on my bank account.
Negative example eBay: when something goes wrong, they take no responsibilty and ask you to take a lawyer if you are not satisfied with that. Even with pure humans this is fast enough.
American Express is so completely unlike the other providers when it comes to engendering customer loyalty (cardholder since the 80s), it makes me think there has to be room for a Visa/MasterCard provider to distinguish themselves through customer support.
And agreed for Amazon as well. Their support is good enough it changes my shopping choice. I'll choose Prime even if the item is a bit more to be sure to ship from their warehouse and have their service.
On the other hand, eBay insist you call them and won't rpovide an email address. So tough luck if you want to keep a written record of your communications.
The only customers Google has are the ones that pay it to place ads. Everyone else is the product.
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.
There's a sense in which this is true, but it's a really facile argument that doesn't get to the heart of the relationship between Google and the people who use it. "You're the product" implies that they're just using you, man, and that if people were more sophisticated they wouldn't put up with this treatment.
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.
If you read the blog post, at the end he decides to call, and does reach a person, who helps by getting his purchase refunded. It is not clear why he waited so long to call Google Support.
Not at all: it's you who don't seem to have read the post. He reaches a person, who completely fails to help in any way. Eventually after a further series of emails, someone cancels his order and fails to ship him the actual phone he'd been waiting for. I can't see how calling Support earlier would have helped.
You are right, I confused Saurabh and Æsa. However, 5 days after calling, he received an offer to cancel the purchase & disable the device, which may indicate that the phone call did help trigger something.
Which still wasn't what he actually asked for or wanted. "Please place your order again" was the wrong answer when he already placed an order and the system clearly had that order on file.
You are wrong. The right quote is "Your order will be cancelled and refunded within the next 3-5 business days. If you still want the device, please place a new order", which makes sense. IOW while the first order was being cancelled, the representative informed that if he still wanted the device, he should place a new order.
My point is that the order was not "on file" anymore as it was being cancelled/refunded.
I agree it is inconvenient to ask a customer to cancel and replace an order (the support rep could be doing that transparently for the customer), but it seems it was a very unusual case (theft or loss of the package) so it is reasonable to expect a somewhat unusual process to resolve the situation.
Not the same problem but my Nexus 4 stopped recognizing SIM cards. I do not have a landline. Only way to make first contact with Google Support is by phone. Therein lies the rub. Once I did get my friend to lend me their phone it was pretty painless but it was still silly that the only means of making contact is by phone and then every other bit of correspondence since there was by Email.
I've personally learned the hard reality that most people currently alive cannot use email correctly and therefore demand that everyone they do business with provide phone support. Because of this, the path of least resistance is to just be like them and get used to calling when you need something resolved. (And the reality is, it's faster for the people at the other end, which is why it persists.)
I wouldn't be surprised if some people inside Google think that way, but their margin is not my problem. I assume that anything that costs $300 comes with support. And anyone who accepts credit cards needs to provide enough support to avoid chargebacks from confused customers.
I assume that anything that includes "support" in its product description when I purchase it includes support exactly as described.
Assuming more than that is unwarranted, and assuming that free additional services not advertised are included with products because of high price is especially unwarranted.
I'm willing to put up with a certain amount of bullshit to save $150 on a phone (that's effectively the discount you get by ordering the Nexus 4 from the totally broken Play store).
I'm late to this thread but I do know Google has a very large technical support team for businesses using Google Docs.
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.
Because a lot of their customer base are engineers who consistently get sold by the technology and not support in the larger sense. Technology myopia at its near worst.
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?