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Ask HN: I'm a small business and Google locked me out
31–40 of 91 posts
Re: Ask HN: I'm a small business and Google locked me out
#32Re: Ask HN: I'm a small business and Google locked me out
#33Relying on Google for any business seems like potential suicide. When they decide you violated whatever they come up with, you are basically fucked. That is the reason why I never used Google+ - they were deleting people's email accounts. I hope they won't delete my email because of this comment ;)
Re: Ask HN: I'm a small business and Google locked me out
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
As respectable as your involvement in the situation is, this is exactly how it's not supposed to work. It seems that the only way for a small business to get in contact with someone at Google is to raise hell on social media (or HN) and to wait for someone to take mercy on you.
> It seems that the only way for a small business to get in contact with someone at Google is to raise hell on social media (or HN) I'm intrigued by the implication that HN is not social media.
HN is the only very large, threaded comment forum I know of that is still (a) anonymous, and (b) actually has excellent content in the comments. In my own opinion, the signal/noise ratio is nearly 2 orders of magnitude greater than places like reddit (or perhaps the mathematically correct formulation is that the noise/signal ratio is nearly 2 orders of magnitude less at HN).
I credit the excellent, thoughtful moderators at HN for that.
Re: Ask HN: I'm a small business and Google locked me out
#35Why does everyone seem to be glossing over the fact they said 'suspended for nonpayment'? And it doesn't seem like they're trying to pay their bill, but just get that one email out of the account... Maybe google isn't in the wrong here.
Maybe that one email is the login info to their bank?
There are other avenues to deal with your bank.
Re: Ask HN: I'm a small business and Google locked me out
#36Please email me (email in profile) and I will try to get you support internally.
HN is the only place you can get Google support. Thanks for the effort, but you guys should seriously fix that, and not by shifting into your "let's automate this and do it smarter" mindset. It does not work.
I had an issue with GSuite for Education that I was able to get resolved by cavitching about it on Reddit (and someone gave me the email address of a high-level GSFE Program Manager), when, we had opened about 12 different tickets over the course of a month while waiting for our accreditation to post online.
The woman never responded, but, our issues were fixed the next day.
I needed support from Google Cloud, and the only way I was able to get meaningful support was to bother the Sales guy who started to bother me once he saw the news that we had our Round C go through.
When google punts their partner program at you, they openly say that they suck at support, use partners and get support better/faster. At least they're honest about it...
Re: Ask HN: I'm a small business and Google locked me out
#37A few years back, I got locked out of my primary gmail account due to a 2 factor authentication SNAFU. I was never able to recover it. I tried to go through the appropriate support channels more than once. Filled out extensive forms, even identified recent emails like they asked, to no avail. It was very disappointing, considering I had spent a good amount of money purchasing apps/ games etc. with that account. What…
2 factor authentication (w/ security tokens, mobile "apps" etc.) comes with an inherent risk of getting locked out of stuff. Most of the time you can mitigate that risk by generating "recovery" codes in advance, but it's still something to be aware of.
Re: Ask HN: I'm a small business and Google locked me out
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know why they can't just hire a bunch of people to take care of stuff like this, like this is so ridiculous that I'm pretty sure someone could make a successful start-up to pay Googlers to enter internal tickets on behalf of people having issues with Google accounts/services.
It’s obvious that Google doesn’t want to incur the cost of client support staff.
I'm sure that lots of people would be happy to pay good money for plenty of support issues if that meant not having to use the terrible Google help pages and issue forms, and not having to wait a week or ten for a response.
Re: Ask HN: I'm a small business and Google locked me out
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know why they can't just hire a bunch of people to take care of stuff like this, like this is so ridiculous that I'm pretty sure someone could make a successful start-up to pay Googlers to enter internal tickets on behalf of people having issues with Google accounts/services.
It’s obvious that Google doesn’t want to incur the cost of client support staff.
They're ruining so much goodwill that they've built up over the years by cheaping out on customer support that even customer hostile companies like Comcast do better.
Re: Ask HN: I'm a small business and Google locked me out
#40This. Unless you are big enough to have a customer engineer assigned to you, as good as their services are I see people having similar issues again and again with their lack of support