I had the exact same problem, wow. I'm very happy to see this on hnews.
G Suite Doesn't Let You Contact Support Until Logged In. Locked Out = Stuck
121–130 of 138 posts
Re: G Suite Doesn't Let You Contact Support Until Logged In. Locked Out = Stuck
#122Google 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…
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/user...
It's still not well supported for "external" takeover but it's disappointing that your support queue didn't point you to the docs on this. Per below though, if someone made it "managed" through DNS verification, yeah, that's hard.
Keywords to search in this scenario "viral admin takeover AAD"
Re: G Suite Doesn't Let You Contact Support Until Logged In. Locked Out = Stuck
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 product user combinations (9 products have 1B+, most have significantly more) That is 2.5M tickets/support requests a quarter. ~28M t…
The context here is providing support to unlock accounts that have been wrongfully closed. The number of support incidents per user per year for this specific problem is likely to be at least one order of magnitude lower than one incident per year. Using your estimates as a base, the cost of this service would be no more than 250 million.
For Google, as a company that has recorded a yearly net profit of over $35 billion, this is chump change. The fact that they could afford to offer some customer service regarding such a critical issue as restoring access to lost accounts, yet choose not to, smacks of corporate entitlement.
Re: G Suite Doesn't Let You Contact Support Until Logged In. Locked Out = Stuck
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 product user combinations (9 products have 1B+, most have significantly more) That is 2.5M tickets/support requests a quarter. ~28M t…
Then maybe don’t build your business on a model that makes it impossible to do the right thing for your users.
I know its not a popular opinion but as someone who comes from a non-western-rich country Googles business model is amazing for what it offers. Do they mess up a lot, for sure. But overall the fact that they can use capital expenses from big markets to deliver things globally has been positive for most people I know.
That aside, the business model has established that you can get great service if you spend $xM+ or $xxM+ per month (whatever the number is) - its just that we expect the same for a much lower cost.
Re: G Suite Doesn't Let You Contact Support Until Logged In. Locked Out = Stuck
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 product user combinations (9 products have 1B+, most have significantly more) That is 2.5M tickets/support requests a quarter. ~28M t…
> I work in a similar space and it is significantly complex and expensive to do this. Hmmm. Could have sworn Google promotes itself as being "best in class" at solving complex problems. ;)
Haha.. that is true. Guess they are not "best in class" for this one. That being said, I do genuinely wonder if there are any companies which have managed to do customer service at such a scale. Amazon is probably the closest but that is different because the average revenue per user is >> that of Google.
Re: G Suite Doesn't Let You Contact Support Until Logged In. Locked Out = Stuck
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you cancelled your account and you were still being charged, did you reach out to your credit card company to let them know about the fradulent charges? They should be able to block billing on their end, once they contacted google's billing to verify you cancelled your account.
I'd consider this an absolute method of last resort for any of the large integrated providers like Amazon/Google/etc. There are reports where people have done seemingly legitimate chargebacks and while they get their money back, they also get all their myriad accounts closed that are associated with Amazon and new accounts made with work emails/etc also get closed. Chargebacks seem to be appropriate when you truly no…
This is a useful litmus test for "is it too big?" trust busting purposes, by the way: if the majority of customers aren't doing chargebacks for the fear of losing access to company's services, then yeah, it's too big.
Re: G Suite Doesn't Let You Contact Support Until Logged In. Locked Out = Stuck
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you not manually set the two tokens to the same "seed"?
That works for TOTP 2FA on your phone. But most hardware tokens have an internal seed that's immutable.
Isn't that just the enterprise ones? I've been using personal hardware TOTP tokens[1][2] like this for years, where you can set the seed yourself using NFC.
[1] https://www.token2.com/shop/category/programmable-tokens
Re: G Suite Doesn't Let You Contact Support Until Logged In. Locked Out = Stuck
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd consider this an absolute method of last resort for any of the large integrated providers like Amazon/Google/etc. There are reports where people have done seemingly legitimate chargebacks and while they get their money back, they also get all their myriad accounts closed that are associated with Amazon and new accounts made with work emails/etc also get closed. Chargebacks seem to be appropriate when you truly no…
This is a useful litmus test for "is it too big?" trust busting purposes, by the way: if the majority of customers aren't doing chargebacks for the fear of losing access to company's services, then yeah, it's too big.
Brilliant, yet simple.
Was I willing to cut off the New York Times like this when all other means of canceling my subscription failed? Sure! Result: powerful, but not in need of breaking up.
Would I be willing to do this with YouTube, for fear of what it might do to my Gmail account, a service that is seemingly completely unrelated? Good God no, which is one reason I never signed up for a subscription. Result: absolutely needs to be broken up.
Re: G Suite Doesn't Let You Contact Support Until Logged In. Locked Out = Stuck
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I work in a similar space and it is significantly complex and expensive to do this. Hmmm. Could have sworn Google promotes itself as being "best in class" at solving complex problems. ;)
Haha.. that is true. Guess they are not "best in class" for this one. That being said, I do genuinely wonder if there are any companies which have managed to do customer service at such a scale. Amazon is probably the closest but that is different because the average revenue per user is >> that of Google.
Along those lines, possibly the more constructive way to view it is:
Google has the scale of, and is acting like, a utility.
eg power, water, gas.
But without a legal obligation to fix problems for their
users, they don't even attempt to.
In it's position as a utility, some people have (perhaps unwisely) managed to lock themselves out of a (critical) personal account.
With the corresponding problems that then occur when any other utility stops working.
The suggestion to allow people to pay for support in some situations - eg like those locked out of a critical personal account - would be one approach to solve the problem.
Because at the moment, these people have no recourse. :(
Which when it happens with any other utility, becomes a legal problem. eg Customer contacts relevant Ombudsman / gov oversight body to get it rectified
Re: G Suite Doesn't Let You Contact Support Until Logged In. Locked Out = Stuck
#130Same with Paypal...if somebody used your credit card information to buy something via Paypal without creating a account - so credit card fraud - there is no way to contact their support without providing a valid Paypal account. If you don‘t have one, you first have to create one.