This week I had an epiphany when dealing with both Google and Microsoft on support issues. The issues are this: when you need an answer to a question about something from your bank, such as, say, a fee that suddenly appears on your statement, you can pick up the phone and find someone at the company who will at least give you slow service to answer your question.
But with Google and Microsoft, there is no support department. You need to know how a specific service is charged? Good luck. You need to know why a needed parameter is missing on their API documentation? Forget it.
Basically companies like Google and Microsoft want to toss their products out into the wild and then go back behind closed doors to noodle on something else. It baffles me as to why enterprise businesses are able to do this.
Microsoft has always provided amazing support for our Office 365 account (hosted Exchange, like Google Apps). Its a paid service though ($6/user/month), so perhaps that's the difference in our experiences.
Most recently, I filed a support ticket online and my phone rang a few minutes later. On the other end was an MS support rep who stayed on the phone with me for 40 minutes, including a screen share, until my issue was resolved. At the end of the call he left me with his direct # and email, and said that I could contact him directly with any future inquiries.
I just want to echo this to make sure that everyone understands Google and Microsoft are worlds apart on support.
We've all heard about the horror stories that it doesn't matter what you do with Google you cannot get human support unless you get to the top of HN or Reddit.
MS are totally different, they offer support for every service, you just have to pay for it. I think they also offer different levels of support, some of our programmers at a previous (small) company could talk to the Silverlight team over problems they were having after it just came out.
Funnily enough, when I google "google paid support" the top result is this little (frightening) gem:
This "Google has no support" is a myth that I see consistently repeated on Hacker News that I can't understand it's repeated. Google's support situation is actually the same as Microsoft's: if you pay (i.e. have a Google Apps for Business) account, you get 24/7 phone support. I'm pretty sure that it's for any service linked to your Google Apps for Business account (including Voice), but not completely sure since I've never had to use it.
I've used Google Apps paid support and had disappointing experiences. Apps is only one of many Google products, many of which have no paid support options. I've had mediocre support experiences with support for other (expensive) products, like DFP. Overall, whenever I hit a wall (bad/missing/unclear documentation, apparent bugs, etc) with a Google service, I wince because I've learned to expect some pain.
What are you talking about? I posted a link with their support options and your response is "No, you can't get support". Clearly, you can - I linked to it. If I go there with my free apps account it's crystal clear, in big letters: "Email and phone support: Not available for the free edition of Google Apps. Find out about upgrading to Google Apps for Business."
Microsoft is also pretty slow moving, because they worry about all this crap.
MS engineers complain about all the bureaucracy involved in change anything - check with legal, update user docs, update support docs, update the tests, check the internationalization and accessibility. But that's the cost of providing a solid product.
Google has two big products - ads and search. Search is more or less a single text box, and a list of results. There's some bells and whistles, but as long as you can type in a search box it's good enough. Ads are similarly bullet proof (though plenty of people get pissed off at being blacklisted).
Same here. I've had extremely good experiences with Microsoft support - a particularly difficult issue was escalated 3 times so we ended up in contact with one of the original developers.
I worked for a Gold partner at the time. Now I work for a company that buys hundreds of thousands of dollars of Microsoft software, and while I'm not in contact with support, I hear they've also done well by us. They even do special patches if needed.
OTOH one of the biggest retail companies here tried a companywide rollout of Google Apps for businesses and discarded it mainly because of the lack of support.
Let's be honest here. It's not that Google and Microsoft don't have support departments. It's that the price you're paying for the product is too low for them to provide general support on an individual basis.
Of course, that doesn't mean they shouldn't be working on ways to identify those very rare issues that need manual intervention and provide ways to get the support you need at that point, but that may only be 1 case in 100,000 or so.
If one out of 100,000 cases requires support staff, surely the $50 or so per year (for Google Apps business) should be enough to cover that?
Low price doesn't mean that you can never afford any service. I received a personal response/apology and vouchers from a marketing representative once after I complained by e-mail about a €2,99 food product (Iglo brand).
Google is either just greedy and reckless, or their prices are below the cost of the actual product (with no support costs factored in), but even then they could afford some level of support. But hey, if they get away with it, no big deal, right?
(Edit: another example, I have a €0,90 per month e-mail account from df.eu and receive personal, thoughtful reponses when I ask them about technical issues like TLS support - how is a much smaller company able to do that and Google isn't? It's obviously not the product price.)
Google has a fiduciary duty to shareholders, and supporting anything other than their ad products doesn't make sense from a cost-benefit perspective. I'd wager that most google products lose money, and I'm almost certain that GV is unprofitable.
Is this morally correct? That depends on ones value system. Google tells customers that they don't provide support and users continue to consume the service. If you want support, the price tag is higher than free.99.
Plenty of public companies have support departments. Support services hurt margins from a naive analysis of a business. Good support services can strengthen a brand, which can create loyal customers over time.
Amazon is a perfect example of this. Their site is convenient, Prime is handy (even though their streaming is useless), but it's their customer service which made me 'loyal.' Over the years, I've had a few items arrive damaged, including a few very expensive ones. The customer service calls seem to take at most 5 minutes. For instance, I had a computer arrive completely destroyed. I called them, explained what happened, and the rep asked whether I wanted a refund or replacement. I said "replacement," and she replied "I'll have it to you by tomorrow."
That level of service, as a consumer, means so much to me.
That doesn't make much sense. If the products are losing money and Google's fiduciary obligations to shareholders consist only of maximizing margins, Google should shut down those products. Not supporting paid products for businesses(!) will hurt more than just the reputation of those products, as a shareholder I would consider it irresponsible on behalf of Google (I'd assume that they're also pissing off some shareholders who use those products).
> It's that the price you're paying for the product is too low for them to provide general support on an individual basis.
Exactly. It's always puzzled me why they don't offer a higher tier of support for more money.
The only reason I've been able to come up with so far is that they want to keep the flexibility to rapidly evolve their services. Customers who pay more money tend to get bent out of shape when you do that. But I think there ought to be a happy medium where 1) it's understood that things can change, and 2) you have at least email support for the service you're buying, and maybe even phone support. Peace of mind is worth a lot of money for some things.
There's a real tension between stability and pace of change and finding that balance isn't easy.
That said, some Internet companies--I'd add eBay in my experience, Facebook also based on lots of stories--use huge amounts of automation and just don't seem to have the processes (and likely the staffing) to resolve problems with competent individual attention when a person has to intervene. It's partly a matter of scale but Amazon, for example, seems to do a much better job overall.
Retail, in general, is a low margin business. In any case, notwithstanding Amazon's current financials--it's been investing a lot in expansion--any retail business, even a large volume one, that can't do a reasonable job at customer service (a fair bit of which will inevitably involve talking to a human) is probably not going to be very successful.
After years of jealously/furtively reading HackerNews at my BigCo IT job, finally an advantage! I can get my account manager at MSFT and GOOG on the phone whenever I need something, and they make sure we get help quickly.
All it takes is spending a significant amount of money with them, year after year...
Microsoft has a number you can call for any problem with their paid products. Admittedly, it's not free, but the fee is refunded if the problem is found to be caused by Microsoft. Anyone can call and open a case, regardless of support contract.
Yes, I know. I called it. It's been a week and I have gotten one minor response to what should be a routine question about a setting on Azure blob storage.
110% agree. With 'enterprise agreements' though, which only the large companies can afford, you can get X support tickets, or call in numbers, etc.
I remember working one place that had that in place, and we hit an REALLY odd SQL Server bug (or, atleast it appeared to be a bug to us). We had top level support in place, but only had X per year, and no one would authorize us to use it just yet - "keep working on it for a bit, see if you can figure out a solution", because they didn't want to "waste" one of the calls if it turned out to be our mistake.
MS is in a weirder position, because offering direct support would cut out a lot of the consultants and ecosystem which they've trained/certified. You're expected to engage those people for support (although... they didn't write the software, so how they'd 'fix' something if it went wrong...?) Google has no such ecosystem to point to.
Yes, who would choose a bank for your critical banking needs (or a vehicle company for fleet management, etc) where your primary or only means of support was random forum postings that were staffed by volunteer workers who had no authority to fix things?
I tend to think this state of affairs evolved out of earlier beliefs that computers were "hard" and had some sort of black magic mystique around them.
I've heard the same thing about banking the support calls for an unknown future problem, and my reaction is always the same; "We have had 2 devs working on this problem for x hours, at $y per hour. MS support calls are purchasable in packs at $z each. We passed the point for calling (really hard math here) hours ago. By the way, remind me which business school did you get your degree from?"
"Hours?" In my case it was measured in days with weekends in between.
Overall, I've only worked at a few 'big' companies (more than 20 people) and was continually frustrated when requests of mine were framed as 'coming from a tech' or 'you don't understand business', which these sorts of requests tended to fall under.
In a nutshell, someone else got to choose tech XYZ, but didn't have to work with it. The people charged with using it are not given any authority to actually contact the vendor to fix the problem (or, in some cases, buy proper training or even get reimbursed for books on the subject). And somehow this is "good business"?
Few other departments in a large company would put up with this BS. Imagine the following scenario:
"Hey legal department, you're not allowed to buy a subscription to LexisNexis - just dig around on a forum for 8 weeks piecing together a defense. Oh, and by the way, we already set up the subsidiary in Brazil - forgot to tell you earlier. Just learn Spanish - I found this website where you can download Rosetta Stone for free. Anyway, Spanish is pretty easy - my son's already taken two classes in high school and took at trip to Mexico!"
The one time we hit a problem with SQL Server and needed a solution, a MS tech support guy did daily teleconferences with us for 10 days after opening a case. I don't know what level of support plan our company had but was amazed by the responsiveness.
There is a difference between Google and Microsoft - Microsoft does list phone numbers for support and you can call them up and actually speak to someone at the other end - and they do provide a paid option for support for many of their products. They also sell many of their products through VARs (value-added resellers), who are generally quite helpful if you get stuck or need help.
If you can afford it or stomach it, directly providing support is a great way to manage your product design. Get enough calls where you have to explain that same thing over and over again and your developer brain will be in overdrive with ways to make that call stop. In a big company bad design doesn't directly cause pain for the developers, but if you're a small company you can practically let your customers condition you into building the best product.
There is one call you can mostly disregard: the smart guy with too much time on his hands who wants your product to be his custom design for free.
You're correct that MS has a large support organisation. But your message is pretty aggressive. That kind of tone isn't liked here, and you're probably going to get down voted for it.
The guy decided to interject Microsoft into Google's fiasco. I don't know if he had some experience that he felt represented the rule and not the exception, or if he just wanted to rub shit on them (MS). Either way, that was completely uncalled for; especially considering Microsoft does and can provide support, and even very good support at that; and especially considering that you could mention at least a dozen major corps that provide much worse support on their best day then MS does on its worst day.
"I'm surprised to hear you mention MS in the same sentence as Google. In my experience MS has a big, well run, very good, support department. There are many other big companies you could have used as examples of poor customer service"
Cut the 'in my experience'. MS objectively has a large support infrastructure that goes through to the engineers. Also 'should' fits better than 'could' when that is a sentence by itself. You don't need to neuter the message to be polite.
Tell you what, call up your MSFT rep and ask them to set the Smooth Streaming flag on an Azure CDN blob and see how you feel how good their support is.
Then you'd have to pay for the services they provide. The reason banks can afford to have support staff is because they're paid (quite a lot) for the services they provide (directly or indirectly.) Not so for Google or Microsoft (Google's profit/person << banks' profit/person)
Right. But the problem with Google and most other cloud service providers is that they provide services to a large number of "customers," many of whom don't pay a dime. So, their entire corporate structure is set up with that in mind and there are few, if any customer service reps. Developers and designers are expected to create "self service" products and since they work for the majority, it's expected that it'll work even for their paying customers.
This is a great thing for startups to exploit who really care deeply about all of their customers. They can easily take business away from large, monolithic companies that don't really care about losing one measly person.
Many of our big wins come from doing something better that Microsoft or Google already might do, but doing it 10x better AND offering great customer support.
I'm still looking for a great alternative to Gmail/Google apps for my business email. Something that supports IMAP and has a reasonable webmail front end. Fastmail is the closest thing i've found but this could be a perfectly fine startup which probably simply isn't sexy enough for anything to actually go and do.
Gmail's IMAP implementation is really buggy. No distinction between tags and folders, non sorting done at the server level, etc. Frustrated, I also moved to fastmail two years ago; it is slightly expensive, but is standard's compliant and works flawlessly.
I should have maybe clarified that i too have moved to Fastmail (about a year ago) and am a happy customer. But both the price and the UI leave a lot of room for improvement, i.e. competitors.
And yes moving mail out of Gmail was a pain because of the weird IMAP structure they use.
IMAP has tags (rather keywords), that you can assign to multiple posts. Just because you assign a keyword to an email, doesn't mean that it should be moved to a new folder. Gmail does that, and therefore breaks IMAP.
But with Google and Microsoft, there is no support department. You need to know how a specific service is charged? Good luck. You need to know why a needed parameter is missing on their API documentation? Forget it.
Basically companies like Google and Microsoft want to toss their products out into the wild and then go back behind closed doors to noodle on something else. It baffles me as to why enterprise businesses are able to do this.