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G Suite Doesn't Let You Contact Support Until Logged In. Locked Out = Stuck

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Re: G Suite Doesn't Let You Contact Support Until Logged In. Locked Out = Stuck

#91

Post by bleepblorp »

thoraway1010 wrote: post #76
bleepblorp wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Allowing companies to charge their customers $50 to resolve account access issues would only give companies an incentive to make 'mistakes' so they can earn $50 by spending a few minutes 'fixing' the error. Customers shouldn't be billed to fix mistakes that aren't their fault. In a functioning market, money is supposed to flow away from faults, not towards them.

You miss the point entirely. Currently because the volume of bogus support requests is so enourmously high, and the fraud attempts also very high - the cost to properly do something like handle account lockout requests properly (on the scale of billions of users) would be EXTREMELY high. Google is actually pretty clear for consumer accounts, if you lock yourself out your content is lost and they suggest setting up a…

Access to online services, ranging from email to AWS, is now a vital component of contemporary life. Email is no longer a toy and losing access to a key email account can cause emotional hardship and severe financial losses. Access to paid online business services, such as Google advertising and cloud computing, is a vital component of modern business. Loss of access to these services will lead to severe financial losses and can lead to complete destruction of businesses.

It is unacceptable for service providers to damage peoples' livelihoods because the account in question is free or is used by a small business that doesn't spend >10k$ a month.

It is not reasonable to demand that customers pay $50 a month to protect themselves against capricious account closures. That is merely another way of a service provider saying 'nice email account you've got there, it would be a shame if something happened to it.' That's called extortion or even racketeering.

Alphabet's net profit for 2019 was $34 billion USD. The can afford to treat their customers financial interests with respect, and if Alphabet won't do that voluntarily, then it's time for governments to force them to.

Re: G Suite Doesn't Let You Contact Support Until Logged In. Locked Out = Stuck

#94

Post by MrsHippy »

smarnach wrote: post #75
gerbler wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to be clear, OP is factually incorrect. You can contact support using the above link if you are locked out. Source: worked on the G Suite Support team for several years.

It seems this link should be mentioned in the email the OP got.

If you cant find the link, you lose admin privileges. It's a test of merit.

Re: G Suite Doesn't Let You Contact Support Until Logged In. Locked Out = Stuck

#95

Post by askvictor »

rckoepke wrote: post #31

>What does Google expect customers to do here? https://support.google.com/a/contact/admin_no_access To the OP ( 'HelloThur ), this is the answer to your most immediate question. I found it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17120223 > Greetings. This is Alex Diacre here from G Suite Support. This has been flagged for my team and we’re looking into it. If any G Suite customer has trouble accessing their accoun…

Umm, this link seems to take you to an account recovery form (I haven't tried putting in my account details, but it straight up asks for a username/phone)

Re: G Suite Doesn't Let You Contact Support Until Logged In. Locked Out = Stuck

#96

Post by dctoedt »

acheron wrote: post #16

"Our technology is so sophisticated even we can't handle it. But that's your problem, isn't it?.. We don't care, we don't have to." https://vimeo.com/355556831

Haven't clicked the link (yet), but I'm pretty sure it's Lily Tomlin on Laugh-In as The Telephone Operator: "Is this the party to whom I am speaking? (Snort, snort.)"

Re: G Suite Doesn't Let You Contact Support Until Logged In. Locked Out = Stuck

#97

Post by megous »

thoraway1010 wrote: post #76
bleepblorp wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Allowing companies to charge their customers $50 to resolve account access issues would only give companies an incentive to make 'mistakes' so they can earn $50 by spending a few minutes 'fixing' the error. Customers shouldn't be billed to fix mistakes that aren't their fault. In a functioning market, money is supposed to flow away from faults, not towards them.

You miss the point entirely. Currently because the volume of bogus support requests is so enourmously high, and the fraud attempts also very high - the cost to properly do something like handle account lockout requests properly (on the scale of billions of users) would be EXTREMELY high. Google is actually pretty clear for consumer accounts, if you lock yourself out your content is lost and they suggest setting up a…

> Google is actually pretty clear for consumer accounts, if you lock yourself out your content is lost and they suggest setting up a new account.

What if they lock you out? You make it sound like it's some transparent and easy to understand process based on publicly available rules, and it's just user violating some obvious documented rule, therefore locking himself out.

But maybe you just travel to africa for the first time, and they just decide that now you can't login, because "suspicious activity". Bye.

If they wish to reduce support costs, one other way is to make the service better and more predictable. Maybe add a checkbox to opt out out of this "you're too stupid to keep your credentials safe" banning system, or something like that.

Re: G Suite Doesn't Let You Contact Support Until Logged In. Locked Out = Stuck

#98

Post by shiftpgdn »

ROFISH wrote: post #72

Google isn't the only one. Somebody must have used my domain to sign up for a Microsoft Teams something for some reason and NOBODY in my company can find out who or how. Microsoft is absolutely unhelpful in this regard, trying to activate our domain for Office Teams or whatever. Microsoft says it's for "security" reasons; but as CIO of a 50+ person org I should have some override on that in the event of erroneous sig…

We had this problem with O365 a few years ago. Someone had signed up using our company domain and it created a mountain of heart ache. If I recall correctly we had to make a second domain our primary and then setup aliases for everything.

Re: G Suite Doesn't Let You Contact Support Until Logged In. Locked Out = Stuck

#99

Post by throwaway_1299 »

bradly wrote: post #87
thoraway1010 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You miss the point entirely. Currently because the volume of bogus support requests is so enourmously high, and the fraud attempts also very high - the cost to properly do something like handle account lockout requests properly (on the scale of billions of users) would be EXTREMELY high. Google is actually pretty clear for consumer accounts, if you lock yourself out your content is lost and they suggest setting up a…

> Currently, with youtube / gmail etc, the revenue per user is so low it will NEVER make economic sense to have humans dealing with an account. Google made over $6 billion in profit in one quarter this year. YouTube had revenue over $5 billion in one quarter. They announced a $25 billion stock buyback. Google doesn't offer support because they choose not to.

I work in a similar space and it is significantly complex and expensive to do this.

Back of the napkin math - * Lets say on average customers contact Google support once a year for each product they use. That's 0.25 tickets per user per quarter. * Consider Google has ~10billion monthly productuser combinations (9 products have 1B+, most have significantly more) That is 2.5M tickets/support requests a quarter. ~28M tickets a day * If we consider an average ticket take ~3 mins to resolve, thats ~155k hours a day * If we take an employee being productive for 7 hours a day, that's 22k employees * If you take a 1:10 ratio, that is 2205,220 and 22 - 1st, 2nd and 3rd line managers. * Take the cost to be an average of 30k,60k,150k and 300k for each of those layers, thats ($661, $132M, $33M, $6.6M) which totals to ~$833M per quarter * The real world costs for this will probably be anywhere between 2X to 3X of this because all of these people come with other costs like infrastructure, tooling, space, etc. So we are looking at ~$1.7B to $2.5B.

One might be tempted to say that money can be saved vs my estimates but keep in mind the challenges of localization, time zones, compliance etc is also significant and will probably mean an even larger expense.

So yeah, it would be ~40% of the quarterly profit.

Sure this is an expense so tax etc can be changed but my argument would be that we are severely underestimating the complexity and challenge at each step.

So yes, I do think it will never make economic sense unless you are on the platform with sufficiently high spend. Just like every single other economic system we have out there.

Re: G Suite Doesn't Let You Contact Support Until Logged In. Locked Out = Stuck

#100

Post by throwaway_1299 »

TheChaplain wrote: post #81
cortesoft wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you be ok if this law allowed a company to charge for the support request? Like, $50 to have a human review your dispute?

Not sure that would solve it. Instead forcing companies to provide a free human based support channel for billing- and authentication issues related to paid services is a better option. I believe it would take most companies very short time to invent working solutions to problems.

Do you really want Google to have your real identity?
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