alt Hacker NewsCustomer support has gotten so terrible. Now that all big companies have terrible support, none of them are punished for it. You can still occasionally find people who give a shit in small business, but that is it. Google is probably one of the worst offenders of all. I don't know what the solution is, it seems like the only way to get any satisfaction on an issue at a big corp anymore is a social medial call-out like this one.
If you are here, thank you for Conversations, Daniel, it has been my go-to for years for communicating with friends and family.
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That's because you the user are not the customer of Google and such services. You are actually the product being sold to the customer, namely advertising companies, by Google.
The farmer take care of his pigs but only to the point they get slaughtered.
Some eight years ago I worked on a Chrome extension with monetization support. I could not get payment working using Google APIs, no matter what I tried it errored with obscure undocumented error messages. Finally I reached out to their customer support and got swift overly friendly response. Several messages later, I still got these overly friendly elaborated messages, but the issue did not proceed anywhere. I kept explaining my problem and they assured me that they are working on it. Eventually I got bounced to their Android support (my problem concerned Chrome store), which made me think either they were taking a piss or used this tactique on purpose. I eventually abandoned the whole idea. Nowadays I would attribute their response to chatbots considering how elaborated and friendly, but yet totally useless their messages were, but this was before LLMs
I remember that once my flight was cancelled and I figured out that if I buy a bus ticket "right now" I'd be able to reach my destination in a sensible time. I quickly bought the ticket... for the wrong day.
I called the bus company, a native speaker of my language immediately picked up, rescheduled the ticket, and told me to pay €2 extra to the bus driver.
I was shocked that customer support could be so simple.
BTW I spent 6 hours total spread along 12 months calling an Indian customer service before I got my money back for the cancelled flight.
Punish them. I'm leaving trustpilot because I realized I was talking to an LLM during renewal. Fuck em.