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Leaving Google Fi

jasonatwood.io

201–210 of 296 posts

Re: Leaving Google Fi

#201

Google Fi is a huge joke. I had the same type of shenanigans with their customer service. Eventually after calling every day for about two weeks I managed to find a competent supervisor that managed to follow up on what he said. Since then I moved my main number back to ATT and I keep a Google Fi account open for my international travels. I only ever use Fi outside the US and I pause the account whenever I'm in the U…

Google doesn't have customer service. They have instead built mechanisms to help them avoid any kind of meaningful interactions with their customers at all. If they've indeed built anything at all, it is customer neglect.

Re: Leaving Google Fi

#202
I had the same delivery and customer experience farce with Google many years ago on one of the early Nexus tablets.

The author is right that it damages their entire brand. I’m now involved in advising large enterprises on their cloud strategy, and I still feel a tinge of bitterness saying anything nice about GCP!

Re: Leaving Google Fi

#203

This isn't just the case at Google Fi. Google's support sucks for their developers too. The /r/androiddev sub has countless stories of developers getting account banned and apps removed for vague reasons and then unable to talk to a real human being on Google's support side. They get canned responses from their bots. I can't wait and hope that one day Amazon takes over Google somehow. SO far, my experiences with Amaz…

My app was removed without warning because I forgot to update privacy policy field when google decided to make it mandatory.

Re: Leaving Google Fi

#205
post #144
post #48

This is the difference between Google and Amazon. People have lots of criticism of Amazon, some I even agree with, but working here[0] one of my favorite little cultural things is that customers can and do email Jeff when stupid things happen. And Jeff reads them. Every now and then he'll forward one of them to a senior VP with a simple "?" added to it.[1] That question mark indicates two things: that you have 24 hou…

> Google is an ideas-first culture, not a customer-first culture I don't think it's just that. I believe that Google is used to having captive faceless optionless voiceless customers, of it's search and ad platform from whom it derives most of us revenue, that most other kinds of customers don't matter.

They are so used to the principle that their users are not their customers, that they even imagine that people who paid for a product are still not their customers. Perhaps because those products are mostly a vehicle to sell more ads to their real customers.

Re: Leaving Google Fi

#206

Google Fi support went down the drain when they expanded. I had a recent experience with my mother's phone being stolen while she was at a hospital, here's the summary after it was confirmed missing and police contacted, with a lot of redundant messages removed. 1st chat with agent Me Hi, my mother's phone was stolen, I'm tracking it on find my phone. Them: Sorry to hear that, we can black list the phone but you must…

it sounds awful but do you actually have any examples of them being up the drain before expansion? I ask because I'm one of these cynical about google support folks.

Re: Leaving Google Fi

#207
Recently I switched from Google Fi to AT&T for similar reasons. After I transferred my number out of Google Fi, there was a questionnaire from Google asking why I switched, and interestingly, among all the selections (coverage, price, etc.), there was not an option mentioning customer service.

Re: Leaving Google Fi

#208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems that anything that has any sort of customer service component is not Google's forte.

This has been known for awhile. The exception is if you pay good money to advertise with them.

The enterprise support tier for GCP is as good as Azure and AWS top tier in my experience.

With regards to consumer products. It‘s probably not possible to support 2.5b+ users with humans. Voice assistants are getting there though. 5 to 7 years maybe?

Re: Leaving Google Fi

#209
post #15

This is fraud. As soon as any rep sees the evidence of the fraud and stonewalls they are engaging in a conspiracy to commit fraud. At that point the law should take over. "The policy says I must break the law" is not a defence. "The fraud was opportunistic rather than pre-meditated" is not a defence. You can't break the law because of a company policy, you're a human you have responsibilities. Prosecutions need to ha…

There is a good chance that Google views the complainant as fraud too... And that's why they can't talk clearly about what's going on. Their records show that first phone as delivered. They think their device has been stolen from them. Then the 'fraudster' tries to get another device sent to them - which is 'returned' under suspicious circumstances. All the delays might be a police investigation they aren't allowed t…

That was my first thought too. It sucks and they're completely in the wrong, but this stone-walling sounds like he has triggered their (completely insane) internal fraud procedure.

Re: Leaving Google Fi

#210
post #144
post #48

This is the difference between Google and Amazon. People have lots of criticism of Amazon, some I even agree with, but working here[0] one of my favorite little cultural things is that customers can and do email Jeff when stupid things happen. And Jeff reads them. Every now and then he'll forward one of them to a senior VP with a simple "?" added to it.[1] That question mark indicates two things: that you have 24 hou…

> Google is an ideas-first culture, not a customer-first culture I don't think it's just that. I believe that Google is used to having captive faceless optionless voiceless customers, of it's search and ad platform from whom it derives most of us revenue, that most other kinds of customers don't matter.

Google is a monopoly-first culture.

Monopolies don't care about anything except maintaining monopoly momentum.

The occasional complaint by a paying customer is barely a paint scratch on a business surface the size of a small planet.

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