271–280 of 296 posts
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…
How on earth is google not being sued every day? It seems like once a week there's a new HN post about some kind of massive screwing they deliver to a customer.
I am former Fi user, started back when it was a "Project". My Nexus 5X's battery swelled but was still working and had a full charge, they wanted me to ship it back to them which I morally felt I couldn't do, and replace it with a generally low quality Lenovo Motorola phone that was reported to have serious WiFi problems, negating that major part of their business proposition where it uses any accessible WiFi for data and voice if possible. Felt stupid for having paid them $5/month for device replacement coverage.
The G+ real names debacle prompted me to remove as much exposure to Google as possible, now I'm down to Google Groups which can only be had from them. They're just too risky for individuals to depend on.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're lucky... Some collections agencies are far more rigorous... They'll come to your house every day at awkward times. They'll ring your grandma and try to tell all your friends you're in debt, etc. If they finally get paid, it won't be $600 - it'll be $600 + $1500 of interest at 55% APR and $1200 of fees for letters, visits, phone calls etc.
In my part of the USA, someone showing up to your door threatening you would likely result in the resident brandishing if not "defending" themselves. It's probably not a coincidence that I've never heard of this collection tactic in the Midwest.
But I was thinking somewhat along those lines, take a picture of the perp while keeping one hand close to my concealed gun. And you could well be generally right, I'm pretty sure from some of the snail mail I get or that shows up in USPS Informed Delivery that some of the past residents of my current location are dodging bills, but no one's every showed up to my house, nor have I ever heard of it happening around here.
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…
And that's got to be how Google can, intentionally or not, get away with such blatant fraud, the pool of people able to escalate is kept very small.
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…
I used to feel like, and talk about, Amazon as a great customer service-oriented company. There's a few reasons that ended, and I no longer believe it to be the case. - Prime Exclusive Items was the big one. Amazon arbitrarily selects everyday items that people regularly order like diapers and razors and Blu-ray movies and marks them "Prime Exclusive", meaning you can't order them without a Prime subscription at any…
My reason for leaving Prime was that I was buying more stuff from 3rd parties who had free shipping for all than from Amazon or Prime 3rd-party sellers.
Also it started costing me a lot to just click the default buy option and I was having to do CSI-level due diligence on every order if I didn't want to end up with a counterfeit and/or pure scam. Several items I ordered were just straight up fraud that required annoying customer service interactions.
Losing the 5% credit card discount seemed painful until I realized that I buy 30-50% less stuff I don't really need now. Or that buying elsewhere I save much more than 5%. I'm surprised to be saying it, but I've returned to eBay for a lot of purchases and been pleasantly surprised.
I got angry just reading that - Personally I would have started a claim back process from my card provider - you can guarantee that it would have caused something on Google's End once they started getting chargeback notices.
Some people point out that Google's usual response to chargebacks is to retaliate and ban the account from using their services. However, I think that if enough people fought, and the chargeback rate reached some critical level, they would have to answer to Visa and Mastercard and be forced to make a change.
But it's not going to help their brand or encourage others who are too tied to Google to sign on to services like Fi, and if not with this guy, in general it'll encourage people to find other lines of work.
I suspect so many people are sufficiently tied more or less to Google that the pool able to do chargebacks is small enough it won't prompt Visa/Mastercard on down to take action.
The author's experience mirrors my experience with Google Fi so much! Started with Project Fi, upgraded to a Pixel 3 recently. Putting up with poor service for a year and a half. They pretend to provide service and I pay the $35 every month. I receive all my calls at home using my computer. I called up customer service to complain about poor service twice. Nothing happened. I just don't have the patience or time to f…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The messages team doesn't want to talk to you. Their app is used by 1.5 Billion people. If just 0.1% of them had some issue with their app, that would be 1.5 million phone calls. There are ~3 people working on the messaging app usually. Thats half a million calls each. Thats 52 years to answer all those calls! The TL;DR is that you will never make a bugfree app, and the remaining bugs will always leave some unhappy c…
how did telcos manage to run a message product (SMS) for the 20 years before Google? The user-base is bigger than 1.5B too
Culture is also a large part of it, it's embedded in telcos to such a degree that I and my parents use rather expensive and fairly slow AT&T DSL because its rock solid, every one of my friends and family who use cablecos for Internet have a tremendously higher rate of problems. Cablecos come from a culture where a customer or neighborhood losing connectivity for hours or a day or two wasn't the "end of the world".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I used to feel like, and talk about, Amazon as a great customer service-oriented company. There's a few reasons that ended, and I no longer believe it to be the case. - Prime Exclusive Items was the big one. Amazon arbitrarily selects everyday items that people regularly order like diapers and razors and Blu-ray movies and marks them "Prime Exclusive", meaning you can't order them without a Prime subscription at any…
I let Prime expire a few months ago and, wow, was it shocking just how bad non-Prime customers are treated. Like you said, random items unavailable, constant nags to buy Prime and dark patterns during checkout trying to trick me into opting back in. My reason for leaving Prime was that I was buying more stuff from 3rd parties who had free shipping for all than from Amazon or Prime 3rd-party sellers. Also it started c…
I did accept the 30 days they just gave me, so I have Prime again for the moment, but will not let it renew/charge. I'm doing some household crud so having one day shipping on cheap crud for a month is probably going to be somewhat helpful as long as I didn't pay for it to begin with.
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…
Just as another datapoint; I have a radically different perspective on Amazon and customer service, that they have no incentive to care. Once not too long ago I came across this article: https://consumerist.com/2013/06/18/amazon-cancels-my-6000-or... I thought it was interesting and amusing, but filed it away in my head and forgot about it. Then, one day, I got an email something to the effect of "fax photocopies of…