WTF Google, you stole my $5

http://programmerstrouble.blogspot.com/2012/12/wtf-google.html

by jtwaleson • 14 years ago

210 114 14 years ago

programmerstrouble.blogspot.com

raverbashing• 14 years ago

Another example of how Google does not (or is not willing to) do customer support.

If it works: great, if there's a glitch, well, tough.

michaelhoffman• 14 years ago

Seems like an open-and-shut case for a chargeback.

josephagoss4• 14 years ago

The trouble is its only $5 and it's not even worth worrying about getting the money back, it's not going to hurt Google doing a chargeback anywhere near as much as this blog post will hopefully hurt them.

Unfortuanlty for Google, because they have essentially no human face, public shaming is our only option to open up a dialog with them.

Evbn7• 14 years ago

If Google merits enough charge backs, credit card companies will notice.

martin-adams• 14 years ago

Only downside of that is that it might flag the account as being fraudulent.

josephagoss4• 14 years ago

If the $5 is to keep out spam, doesn't the fact that he has already confirmed that he is not a spammer by paying the $25 from before for the android thing? Why keep asking for money and bounce him around like this? This is what you expect from a crappy company with outsourced customer support , not google.

white_devil3• 14 years ago

> This is what you expect from a crappy companies with outsourced customer support , not google.

I'd expect you to expect algorithmic customer support from Google.

josephagoss4• 14 years ago

True, but even Google need some real thinking people in customer support. Algorithms are not enough for all your customer interactions, at least not for now anyway.

polshaw2• 14 years ago

Sorry in advance for the rant but i think it is fucking stupid to charge developers at all. Yes, it is nothing, but the principal itself leaves a sour taste. I am improving your platform, you are going to take 30% of anything made, and you want me to pay you for that privilege.

I know this applies to others too (worse at times) and that there is some rationale behind this (reduce hoards of crap), but it just stinks, to me, in principle, and i'm sure there would be better ways of going about it.

jtwaleson4• 14 years ago

With the Chrome extensions you can't actually charge any money yet, so I'm just doing it pro bono to help the users of the crappy website.

polshaw2• 14 years ago

My flippant response would be to provide it to mozilla users where you are surely not charged. You didn't mention the site, so i don't know if you could just publish it there (surely that can be done with chrome extensions?) or just as a bookmarklet?

emp_• 14 years ago

Indeed, it sounds more like a way to verify an identity and having someone liable attached to the account.

hippich• 14 years ago

Just a thoughts - May be they charge these $5 just to make developers value their accounts and not register just for fun or when they forgot their email address. Also, to connect extension author to real credit card data. In case of malware extension - this might be very valuable for LEOs.

hosay123• 14 years ago

It's an incredibly effective antispam technique. Metafilter does something similar, charging a $5 lifetime fee at signup. Existing accounts were not charged when it was introduced.

nikcub• 14 years ago

I would like to hear if it is effective because a) the Chrome Webstore is full of spyware[0] and b) its not like spammers can't spend $5 to verify an account

[0] My example search is always 'youtube downloader': https://chrome.google.com/webstore/search/youtube%20download...

dugmartin• 14 years ago

I have no problem with the charging a nominal fee to keep out spammers. However, they should just donate the $5 to charity like Atlassian does for their $10 starter pack.

jggonz• 14 years ago

I've actually had the same issue with Google for over a year. I can't use Google Wallet to pay for anything (including Android apps on the phone)! I've tried removing and adding my card back. It gives me the same error. I've resorted to asking family members to use their accounts to purchase items on my devices. This error is really frustrating!

kenko• 14 years ago

Can't he (or couldn't he) dispute the charge with the credit card company?

jtwaleson4• 14 years ago

I could but I really can't be bothered. The fact that I can't publish my extension does bother me.

bryanl• 14 years ago

It could have taken less time to call your CC company than to write this blog post.

chimeracoder• 14 years ago

Isn't this what your credit card company is for?

I had an issue where Paypal never refunded the $2 fee for verifying my account and instead pocketed the cash instead. I got my bank to issue a chargeback over the phone - it took all of five minutes.

fsckin• 14 years ago

Then your GMail account is instantly locked for fraud activity, since you foolishly used the same account for everything. Good luck contacting them for support to fix it.

mrkmcknz• 14 years ago

Has this actually ever happened to anyone?

csense2• 14 years ago

This is why you should avoid Google when you can.

They're eating the Internet. The more you depend on them, the harder it'll be to cut ties when they give you crap.

gojomo• 14 years ago

That can only get the money back, while the author would clearly prefer he get the service he paid for months ago (and be able to deploy/promote his software).

Complicating the transaction with a dispute/chargeback could make that real goal even harder to achieve, not just by making the previous purchase attempt appear 'unpaid', but also perhaps giving his account/card a 'uses chargebacks' flag within Google.

rauar2• 14 years ago

You get my upvote. It's long overdue that Google overhauls this.

homosaur3• 14 years ago

Google, for a company that reputes to perform services, is probably the single most consumer-unfriendly company on the planet. Their customer care dept. consists of one crazy cat lady in a cabin in the hills of California. They've sold enterprise services for years (or pretend enterprise services, at least), sold multiple phones and devices, have the largest ad network on the Internet and they STILL don't have anyone you can call if things go wrong. Unless you're Kevin Rose and Google will get bad pub, they absolutely do not care about your problem. Shut up slave, or go back to Hotmail.

Your experience is not even irregular. I'd say this is the typical experience for people dealing with Google when everything doesn't go 100% correct.

lovskogen• 14 years ago

To play devils advocate: Does this mean that customer care isn't necessary for big success?

g2e• 14 years ago

Apple prides itself on good customer care, so I wouldn't say so.

ceol2• 14 years ago

It means you can have big success in an industry (search results) that doesn't require customer care.

The problem is Google is trying to approach other industries the same way they have with Search: If it can't be solved by a group of engineers and a rack-full of servers, it shouldn't be solved.

thedrbrian• 14 years ago

I'd bet that the customer service for google's actual customers is top notch.

darkf• 14 years ago

Well, hey, look at Zynga. They even treated their employees terribly and got their success.

plg• 14 years ago

This kind of thing is one reason I trust others (eg Apple) more than Google with my computing services.

ljd2• 14 years ago

Apple is a retail business and they can deliver tech support at scale by doubling their retail locations into support centers.

It's unfair to compare a retail company's availability to a SaaS provider such as a Google. It would be wise for Google to start opening retail locations if it intends to get into the retail game for this very reason.

incomethax• 14 years ago

With the frequency that this comes up, I'm a little surprised that no one has tried to build a start-up around this. I'm sure there's enough latent demand for customer service for Google that you could probably charge a fee for it - not sure how much it would be but still something.

Also you've probably got a willing acquirer in Google, providing you can prove out the model.

Only thing is you would need to have plenty of connections into the inner workings of Google to actually be able to serve your customers.

jacquesm2• 14 years ago

You can't build a startup around this because:

1) it would instantly flounder due to an overload in requests

2) a service department only works when it can deliver customer satisfaction, and you couldn't

The only party that can fix this is google, and they'll only fix it under competitive pressure.

Tomdarkness• 14 years ago

At the risk of being slightly cynical I'd like to point out you can actually phone and talk to someone if you're having problems paying them (i.e payments via Google Wallet) just not after they've taken your money.

For example I was having problems with a payment in Google Wallet for something off the play store. I was able to ring them, speak to someone from America and get the problem resolved in under 5 minutes.

hahainternet• 14 years ago

> At the risk of being slightly cynical I'd like to point out you can actually phone and talk to someone if you're having problems paying them (i.e payments via Google Wallet) just not after they've taken your money.

Two Nexus 7s I ordered for Christmas were not delivered and then returned to sender without contacting me. Google not only sorted this out within a day or so, I spoke to people on the phone and by email with a quick turnaround.

I've heard many horror stories, but I just wanted to add that they're definitely not universal. The fault was not with Google but they still sorted it out to the best of their abilities within a day or two.

ljd2• 14 years ago

You can't have both free (or extremely cheap) services and have highly available tech support. I'm not sure if you've ever been part of a company building a call center for tech support in the US but it is a nightmare. It can easily be one of the most expensive elements of having a service-oriented business.

kenjackson• 14 years ago

IOW, you get what you pay for. That said, Google could do much better in customer service -- they indirectly make money on the backs of these customers. It seems deceitful to let people invest heavily in your ecosystem, knowing you won't help them when stuck (and they're so entrenched they just can't leave).

cturner2• 14 years ago

The chap in the post isn't seeking highly available tech support. And it's not a free service - he paid.

Customers/users should never be left guessing about whether they've been forgotten or not. If you have users, have some flow like this:

1) Receive the customer communication. If you can't fix it immediately, then you immediately respond to the customer to tell them what you're doing, and clearly indicate when they will receive their next communication from you. It might be "we can't even look at this for six weeks", but if you've taken their money you should give it back.

2) Set a calendar event for your team so that they know about this if you get hit by a bus.

3) On the date, you contact the customer. If you haven't fixed the issue, then you indicate what you're doing at the moment, and give a new date by which the customer will hear from you.

If the customer is unlikely to be happy with the resolution then you describe why and describe their options.

aqme28• 14 years ago

What about paid enterprise services with tech support?

homosaur3• 14 years ago

I work in a remote IT office and I would absolutely pay per incident for support as a user. I don't expect a free meal ticket.

rgbrenner• 14 years ago

Your post needs a giant asterisk. Everything you said is completely fair, excluding AdWords -- which is where Google actually makes its money. As an Adwords customer, I have absolutely no problem getting my account rep on the phone if I have a problem.

gabemart• 14 years ago

For Adsense, in contrast, the user is told:

>We offer email support for our higher-earning publishers. To find out if email support is available for your account, visit How can I contact AdSense support? [1] Publishers who have access to support via email will find a contact form where they can email our specialists.

It turns out I'm lucky enough to be "eligible for email support". How flattering!

[1] https://support.google.com/adsense/bin/request.py

dangrossman3• 14 years ago

Add devices to the list, too. If you have a hardware issue with a Nexus 4 / Nexus 7 / Nexus 10, clicking through the support center will eventually drop you at a phone number to call. Returns/exchanges and warranty repairs are handled by phone.

cturner2• 14 years ago

    Google, for a company that reputes to perform
    services, is probably the single most consumer-
    unfriendly company on the planet.

They're really not. This is overstated.

Try dealing with some kind of loss-making monopoly, where the people who work there don't care or may even have a perverse grudge against customers and want to cause them harm.

Look at the way united airlines treated a passenger whos guitar they busted up: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YGc4zOqozo

There are companies who wage campaigns against their customers. They have a policy of not paying credit notes except under extreme pressure. But they might also have call centre staff with no job tracking system call you to chase you for your bill, where the staff don't even know whether you've paid it or not. Why? Because some stats somewhere said that bullied customers are more likely to pay.

Google is flawed but has some endearing things going for it: the employees are intelligent people, they tend to be caring types.

rauar2• 14 years ago

Worse examples have never ever been a good excuse.

lubujackson• 14 years ago

Ah yes, the mythical intelligent and caring Google employee. At least United Airlines has a fucking phone number.

rickmb• 14 years ago

At least those bother to acknowledge their customers, even if their response is wrong. At least it gives you a chance to fight back.

Google simply utterly ignores any kind of complaint. There is no worse way to treat people than to completely deny their existence.

mehulkar2• 14 years ago

I think this is just a pattern with companies that have high numbers of employees. Facebook is just as inaccessible. Although I suspect that it's hard to troubleshoot Facebook to begin with since the particulars of their product changes so often.

biesnecker• 14 years ago

It's because once a company gets to be over a certain size, everything is part of a process, and processes tend not to care all that much about their participants. When you get really good service from a company, it's generally the individual service rep going above and beyond what the process calls for, rather than the process being one that delivers good service.

jakeonthemove• 14 years ago

I don't know, it seems to me they're focusing a lot on automation (to reduce costs, among other things).

bytefactory2• 14 years ago

Actually, their core enterprise services - Google Apps and AdWords do have phone support, which I have used extensively:

http://contact.googleapps.com/?&rd=1 and http://support.google.com/adwords/bin/answer.py?hl=en-GB&... for example.

AdWords support is outstanding. As a client getting started with Google advertising, I had a dedicated account manager who set up the entire campaign for me, who would call me back whenever I had any questions I'd email to him and was very intelligent and helpful.

I am not surprised that their free services don't have a phone number to call. Can you imagine providing call-centre support for 400 million Gmail users, or 1 Billion+ Google search users?

Of course, if they want to enter other customer facing businesses like selling hardware or broadband Internet, they will have no choice but to set up call-centres for those departments.

turing• 14 years ago

Echoing other posters' comments, I have received excellent Play Store support both by phone and email. In both cases I had no rouble reaching a real person and the issue was resolved within hours. So you might want to dial back the hyperbole. Or maybe not, since I'm guessing you knew your claims were outrageous to begin with.

batgaijin• 14 years ago

The point of whining is that it gets better. Nothing gets better when you making a pragmatic point.

As someone who used app engine a few years ago but also used the much better customer service recently, I still choose to whine. And I will for a long damn time considering the shit I put up with.

StylifyYourBlog• 14 years ago

Google is not anymore a company it used to be. They are now just in the process of streamlining their profits - closing down products that are not creating huge amounts of money , making free products into paid ones , over-promoting their social network and making lives of webmasters into roll-coaster rides by frantically updating their search algorithms .

I suppose Customer Support is the least of their concerns

But ironically enough as you have posted the problem on HN , it will surely be solved very swiftly less in the sense of customer goodwill but more of a PR move. This just reminds me of how are governments work - You have to know somebody from the inside to get the work done - and this is what Google is becoming.

driverdan2• 14 years ago

This is nothing new, Google customer support has always been terrible.

meaty2• 14 years ago

Google really need to sort their support out. When evaluating Google Apps for our organisation, we couldn't even get through to a human. This pretty much killed the evaluation up front.

Chargeback!

justincormack• 14 years ago

I had a friendly human call me shortly after I signed up for a trial for work, and had good impressions of the onboarding process. But they didnt give contact numbers before that initial contact...

PJones• 14 years ago

The problem here is that it's not just a Chrome Developer account, it's a Google account. There may well be an automated process to lockout users that owe them money.

Steam has a similar flaw. If you file a chargeback on any game you purchase then you'll be locked out of every game you ever 'bought' until you resolve the issue.

meaty2• 14 years ago

Why the hell would you invest in something so risky then?

I refuse to pay for anything which can be taken away at the whim, process or incompetence of another.

jacquesm2• 14 years ago

That's why google is working so hard on AI, that way they don't have to staff a proper customer service department.

Hopefully they'll get that done in time for them not to be out-competed by a company that actually cares about their audience / customers.

johne20• 14 years ago

I had a similar terrible experience spending $10 to transfer my number on google voice. Got the whole "Uh oh. There was a problem" error. Waiting for support like you, and then I found some obscure google group post that suggested my address on google wallet was wrong. After fixing that and waiting a day or so I finally made purchase successfully.

Google checkout/wallet is less than good, combined with virtually non-existent support is a terrible combination.

evmar• 14 years ago

I'm not excusing it, but it seems plausible to me that the Android charge is separate from the Chrome charge because they are different projects that probably have completely different systems. It's the same poor experience you sometimes have with tech support phone trees with e.g. a credit card company, where each time your call is redirected they ask you for your information again -- poor integration between different wings.

ippa• 14 years ago

I've been bitten by googles non-existent customer support too while dealing with my adword account(s). Somehow I had two accounts, but one of them was transferred to my friend by changing all the info + have him verify the new bank account. Sure, I probably messed up somehow.. but it should be easy to fix but it's impossible to get in contact with them. I mailed multiple times over 1-2 months.. with details what I had done. Never got a single reply. Extremely frustrating. I want to put their ads on multiple sites, but they wont let me :).

Kilimanjaro• 14 years ago

I've been a google supporter for years, until they do something ugly to you, and now that love is gone. Fuck you google, if you don't listen to your users you're doomed to extinction.

You stole my hard earned money in adsense for over a couple of years. All of a sudden you decided to close my account for activity fraud. I swear to god I never clicked a damn ad. My stats show no abnormal visits (analytics from google) just a steady flow of a hundred visitors a day, just ten cents a day in adsense.

But you stole it without any explanation, just that you can't give any info to protect your algorithms and your sponsors.

Well fuck you, then who protects the user?

You stole just $100 from me, but I hope you lose it all. I'll do all I can to see you on your knees.

Fuck you google.

Evbn7• 14 years ago

If that is stealing at all, it is on behalf of advertisers. Google doesn't get paid when you don't.

mrslx2• 14 years ago

Not true - inventory availability and user data are gathered. Google receives value from a publisher using Ad Sense tags, if they chose to use that value by returning ad (getting paid by an advertiser) then Google makes money. At the end of the day an unused impression opportunity by Google may cost a tiny bit of computing resources, but its an unused opportunity for revenue by the publisher.

jxi• 14 years ago

This isn't really related to this post. Also, this is just childish whining that your precious ad sense revenue account gets banned. Well, shit happens. 100$? That sounds like your first ad sense paycheck, so call me skeptical but you probably did click your ad, maybe without knowing or violated some other term of service.

Google can't answer the millions of cases like yours one by one specifically, nor should they since somebody who's trying to game the ad sense system shouldn't be told where they messed up anyway.

Why not start your own version of ad sense if you think you can do this better.

jason_slack• 14 years ago

Well, I was a Google Apps customer and paid my money for a year of paid GMail with my own domain. There was a technical error, my card was indeed charged and despite countless e-mails and trying to call anywhere for a resolution nothing. E-Mails just like this article had.

I wonder how many customers Google owes money to for things like this? Maybe we could tally this up and petition them to pay out.

mrslx2• 14 years ago

I would not be surprised if they get hit with a Class Action someday. For their long tail products, the impact to single users is small but across the board, i'm sure it adds up.. reminds me of that evil scheme to take .0005% of a penny from everyone.

Their B2B services is also lacking, turn over for their employees is high y/y.

..maybe this is the new of state internet services at scale?

edit: grammar

zaidf• 14 years ago

Google may actually penalize their phone support for being on the phone for over 3 minutes.

Story: An acquaintance got on the phone with support department to troubleshoot a problem. The support person was struggling to help. As the 3 minute mark approaches, the support person gets increasingly anxious. Finally, he straight up confesses that he has a 3 minute call limit beyond which he may get penalized.

And then hung up on my acquaintance seeking help.

WTF Google, you stole my $5

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