Leaving Google Fi

This is the difference between Google and Amazon.<p>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&#x27;ll forward one of them to a senior VP with a simple &quot;?&quot; added to it.[1]<p>That question mark indicates two things: that you have 24 hours to explain how this terrible customer experience happened, and that not long afterwards you&#x27;d better have a plan for how it isn&#x27;t possible for this kind of problem to happen again. A lot of incredible changes have been made based on those question marks.<p>Google does not have such a customer-obsessed culture. So bad things like this happen and then nothing seems to change. Next week, it will happen again. Because (in my view) Google is an ideas-first culture, not a customer-first culture. Those ideas have rocketed them to success but I wonder if it can sustain them indefinitely.<p>[0](All my views are obviously my own and don&#x27;t reflect speaking on behalf of the company)<p>[1]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.inc.com&#x2F;bill-murphy-jr&#x2F;customer-service-jeff-bezos-question-mark-rule.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.inc.com&#x2F;bill-murphy-jr&#x2F;customer-service-jeff-bez...</a>

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. &quot;The policy says I must break the law&quot; is not a defence. &quot;The fraud was opportunistic rather than pre-meditated&quot; is not a defence. You can&#x27;t break the law because of a company policy, you&#x27;re a human you have responsibilities.<p>Prosecutions need to happen for this kind of thing. They really do. Start with the frontline and work your way up the chain, ordering a frontline employee to commit a crime with a policy document is a crime for all who wrote and approved the document.<p>If a google customer engaged in fraud of a similar against google there&#x27;s no doubt google have the option of involving the police and getting a prosecution. A corporation <i>is</i> people who are all responsible for their actions.

Google Fi support went down the drain when they expanded. I had a recent experience with my mother&#x27;s phone being stolen while she was at a hospital, here&#x27;s the summary after it was confirmed missing and police contacted, with a lot of redundant messages removed.<p><pre><code> 1st chat with agent </code></pre> Me Hi, my mother&#x27;s phone was stolen, I&#x27;m tracking it on find my phone.<p>Them: Sorry to hear that, we can black list the phone but you must message us from the member&#x27;s account<p>(I am the sole payer on the group plan, paid for the phone, etc.)<p>Me: Okay, fine, I will contact you from chat on her google account<p><pre><code> 2nd chat with agent: </code></pre> Me: Hi, this is [mom]&#x27;s son, I am helping her report her phone stolen to blacklist it.<p>Them: Sorry, we cannot blacklist a phone on a group plan if you are not the primary account holder, please contact us on the primary account.<p><pre><code> 3rd chat with agent: </code></pre> Me: Hi, I&#x27;m trying to blacklist a stolen phone, please see [case numbers]<p>Them: The phone is registered under another Google account<p>Me: No, see these case numbers, I refuse to end this support until this is dealt with, I am the primary account holder. Let&#x27;s blacklist this phone so that it cannot be used by another carrier.<p>Them: Our specialist says the phone must be active on Google Fi to blacklist it.<p>(The phone&#x27;s battery has died at this point, 90 miles away from where it was last)<p>Me: Does that mean it has already been transferred to a different carrier, or is it offline?<p>Them: The specialist says that the phone must be active on Google Fi<p>Me: What does that mean? Can you ask the specialist if the battery is dead that means it&#x27;s not active?<p>Them: I cannot say.<p>Me: What is even the point of blacklisting a phone if it doesn&#x27;t work the moment someone pops the SIM card out or turns the phone off? Nevermind. I would like to escalate to a supervisor.<p>Them: Okay<p><pre><code> Escalation?? </code></pre> Still haven&#x27;t gotten anywhere since this Thursday, no one has reached out to me.

This isn&#x27;t just the case at Google Fi. Google&#x27;s support sucks for their developers too. The &#x2F;r&#x2F;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&#x27;s support side. They get canned responses from their bots.<p>I can&#x27;t wait and hope that one day Amazon takes over Google somehow. SO far, my experiences with Amazon support has been outstanding. If an item doesn&#x27;t arrive in the &quot;prime&quot; 1 day shipping window, they immediately ship a new item right away and gets delivered the next day and simply ask you to return the item if the first one shows up eventually. They have done this for a knife set which was over $300 in value and the first item never showed up, so they sent me another one the next day. Other times when I have contacted Amazon support, they have been amazing too. If a delivery is late by even a day, they offer me a month of free prime shipping. And this is simply via chat, not even phone support.<p>Google should take a few lessons from Amazon and at least offer decent support for their paying customers and developers who help flourish their play store considering they take 30% cut of the developer earnings.

&quot;At every turn the &lt;Google customer service&gt; team was presented with a chance to make things better and every time they blew it.&quot;<p>I mean, this is the history of Google in a nutshell. They deserve to be systematically dismantled by Amazon for this alone.

Sounds like a very standard Google experience. To anyone stuck in a similar hell in the future - once the company has demonstrated that they aren&#x27;t willing to help, there is no point continuing down that road. Escalate it to your credit card provider (with documentation) and they will clear it up pretty quick.

Sadly, the only worthwhile way to get help for Google Fi nightmares is through Ziggy. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;ProjectFi&#x2F;comments&#x2F;72dcgh&#x2F;reddit_request_20_a_better_way_to_escalate_issues&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;ProjectFi&#x2F;comments&#x2F;72dcgh&#x2F;reddit_re...</a><p>I had to pester him a couple of times, file a BBB complaint and finally ask Google for the registered officer of the company since I was literally going to sue. That&#x27;s when they filed a &quot;remorse exception&quot; that actually helped.<p>Also - ask for a &quot;Specialist&quot; - they&#x27;re the only ones who can help. Every other guy is a &quot;supervisor&quot; at Google Fi support and they can&#x27;t do anything. Had to call in more than 30 times and exchanged upwards of 60 emails. It&#x27;s a shame.

The author&#x27;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.<p>I called up customer service to complain about poor service twice. Nothing happened. I just don&#x27;t have the patience or time to follow up. Kudos to Jason for bringing up this issue. Also, here is a conversation between me and a friend in Mountain View who works for a large company there :D.<p>Me: I have Project Fi. Let me call you back using WhatsApp. Him: Oh I have Project Fi too and was going to tell you the same thing!<p>The call quality is absolutely terrible when both ends are using Project Fi!

Fi&#x27;s &quot;killer app&quot; is their seamless international experience for U.S. travelers. I travel outside of the U.S. at least twice a year and firing up my phone on the plane and being greeted with a &quot;welcome X country&quot; like I had just traveled between U.S. states is amazing.<p>Down the list is their relatively cheap service for undemanding users (people who use less than a couple GB of data per month). I&#x27;m pretty sure I could just go get a better unlimited plan for slightly more (with more phone choices) tomorrow. But I wouldn&#x27;t really use the extra service and so I&#x27;m happy to get the extra $100&#x2F;yr or whatever I&#x27;m saving.<p>That being said, I&#x27;ve had extremely mixed support from Fi. The support is responsive, human and polite. But for issues almost exactly like this one, Fi&#x27;s support staff is entirely unable to cope. In our case, Fedex had even taken a photo of the delivery (which was the wrong house). Fedex needed some kind of shipping code from google to release the photo so we could prove it&#x27;s not the same house (or at least figure out who had our new phone).<p>Not a single person at Fi could provide the code to Fedex.<p>We escalated 3 times and it took about a month to resolve, but in the meanwhile we were charged for a phone we didn&#x27;t receive, and the clue as to where it went was readily available.<p>Fi did eventually send us a new phone and everybody was terribly polite, but anybody else would have just noticed the phone hadn&#x27;t been activated, and sent a new phone immediately (and if the phone were to be activated contact local PD).<p>It took dozens of chats, emails, calls and so on, and each time the support person on the other end would lose the script and try to resolve our issue with some non-sequitur that wasn&#x27;t solving the problem.<p>It&#x27;s not the worst customer service experience we ever had, but it was down there. The <i>only</i> reason we didn&#x27;t pull the plug was we were about to travel outside of the U.S. and having service that just &quot;works&quot; was a big part of our planning.

Two stories spring to mind.<p>The first is I worked at Google when the whole &quot;real names&quot; saga of Google Plus was going on. The worst part about that was if some algorithm decided your name wasn&#x27;t real, it could block your entire Google account. You&#x27;d lose access to GMail, Drive, everything. I don&#x27;t know what bright spark PMs, lawyers and executives signed off on that one but it was insanity. As a result I would strongly recommend against any family or friends use any G+ features in case the Real Names bot zapped their accounts. This was ultimately fixed but it should never have shipped that way. Ever.<p>The fact that disputing a charge with you credit card provider like this could result in you losing your GMail, Drive, Android developer account, etc means you should absolutely under no circumstances use that service, ever, period, no exceptions.<p>Don&#x27;t get me wrong: I like GMail and Drive. I use them all the time. Thing is, I want to keep using them so they get firewalled from every other service that I use.<p>The second is something Eric Schmidt said a lot. He didn&#x27;t say it first but he&#x27;s well known for saying it, and that is that more revenue is the solution to every problem.<p>That&#x27;s both true and not true. It&#x27;s true in a high margin business (like search). If you look at Google financials 10+ years ago there was a point where the profit per employee was nearly $1m. It&#x27;s less now but it&#x27;s still pretty significant. Low margin businesses are not in its DNA.<p>Let me repeat that and make it clear: Google simply cannot compete in a low margin business.<p>Personally I learned this the hard way as I worked on Google Fiber until that was quietly shelved (by &quot;advancing our amazing bet&quot; no less). Fiber services are capital intensive. They require strict financial discipline and planning. There are far more moving parts to this kind of business than many people realize. Comcast, Verizon and AT&amp;T have gotten very good at this sort of business. Google didn&#x27;t (and IMHO never will).<p>I put Google Fi firmly in this camp. I also put making hardware at scale in this camp (compared to, say, Apple who is second to none when it comes to logistics, procurement, financing and supply chain management).<p>Google&#x27;s DNA is hard technical problems at scale with no UI like an almost blank page with a text box and a search button. The infrastructure behind that is unbelievably good.<p>But telecommunications? Tied to my Google account? Sorry but that&#x27;s a hard pass for me.

Google Fi is a huge joke.<p>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.<p>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&#x27;m in the US.<p>GoogleFi is a good deal financially but if there is something I learned after years dealing with shady companies is that you don&#x27;t want any of those shady companies have any leverage by keeping something essential such as your phone number under control as a leverage.<p>Sadly I saw exactly the same type of issue with their Google Cloud customer service. I really think that Google employee still think they work for the best company in the world and that people cannot wait to do business with them. They need to get out of their little bubble.

I&#x27;ve used Google Fi for years, and I&#x27;ve heard stories like these for years. Despite comments in this thread, I don&#x27;t think these experiences are new; they&#x27;re just more common now because more people are on Fi.<p>I think there are two major issues: first, Google doesn&#x27;t really care all that much about Google Fi. It&#x27;s just them keeping their foot in the water for later, not a major focus right now, so it doesn&#x27;t get the attention and care it really needs. Second, Google Fi is honestly great, <i>right up until the point it isn&#x27;t</i>: if you ask around the community, there&#x27;s a strong split between people like me, who have had nothing but good experiences, and people like Jason, who have an amazingly awful experience. It&#x27;s basically that Google Fi is thoroughly buggy: you&#x27;re fine as long as you stay in the happy path, but the moment you get to something untested (stolen phone, FedEx loses shipment, the discount fiasco a couple weeks ago), everything goes to hell.<p>I&#x27;ve stuck with Fi so far because the pain I&#x27;ve hit has been negligible <i>for me</i> [1], but I currently assume that it&#x27;s just a matter of time before I get burned in some capacity. It&#x27;s a trade-off that makes sense, given how I use my phone, but it&#x27;s annoying having that in the back of my mind.<p>[1]: The one thing they did flub was the Pixel 3 discount a couple weeks ago, wherein they accidentally charged and then refunded the entire value of a Pixel 3. Because I pay my bill by credit card, and because that card is nowhere near its credit limit, this was just two lines on a bill for me that I never really have to think about. But for those who pay their bill by debit, or who were near a limit, or whose bill rolled over between the charge and the refund, that was also a horrible experience that angered them about Fi. Those kinds of stories have been par for the course.

Without going into specifics, and for what its worth, I&#x27;ve had some great experiences with their customer service and Its part of the reason I&#x27;ve stuck with them for so long. I doubt that&#x27;d be the case if I experience what this guy did though.<p>While dealing with a fairly technical sms issue, I was pleasantly surprised how far up the food chain I got when the first agents couldn&#x27;t help me. The biggest speed bump is usually getting through the first round of questions that filter out the kruft and grandma-issues, but I understand the necessity<p>edit: I realized after I wrote this that most of my experiences were during the Project Fi phase, before it went full Google, so theres that...

It&#x27;s weird -- I use Google Fi and loved it, and I got great customer service, up until the point I ordered a Pixel 3 through them back in November. I had to contact them so many times to find out why they hadn&#x27;t shipped yet, and the regular customer support people had no idea what was going on, and when it got escalated to shipping, they also seemed to have no idea but were much less apologetic about it. After a few weeks of not having my phone shipped, I ordered it through the Google Store (with 0% interest financing instead of paying it off through my bill, oh well) and I got it within a week. It&#x27;s ridiculous. I&#x27;d been a loyal customer of Fi for over two years, but that ordeal almost made me want to quit. If I had to go through what this author went through, I would have done the same.

How on earth is google not being sued every day? It seems like once a week there&#x27;s a new HN post about some kind of massive screwing they deliver to a customer.

At this point, I straight-up refuse to ever entertain giving Google a cent of actual money. It&#x27;s very obvious from the multitude of stories like this that no one can rely on them to provide a reasonable customer service experience unless you&#x27;re a big business with a large spend.<p>At least with data-funded services, I can choose to stop any time. I&#x27;m never on the hook via some form of contract.

I&#x27;ve had a similar problem with Google Fi customer support when my phone suddenly stopped charging while traveling abroad. Sparing the details, the lesson I learned is not to buy a phone from Google. As a customer you are at a severe disadvantage to Google, because Fi is not their bread &amp; butter and they don&#x27;t seem to mind if you cancel. Furthermore, in the event of a dispute, Google will turn off related services on your account, for example your associated Gmail account. After learning this lesson the hard way I wanted to stop my Fi service, but unfortunately I still found the Fi plan to be the best choice for my present situation: I am outside the U.S. for most of the year. I hope other carriers will improve their international plans.

Here&#x27;s what I did in a similar situation, for those who may be interested.<p>Basically I signed up for AT&amp;T home internet, and it DID NOT WORK, period. It was unusably slow and cut out constantly. I couldn&#x27;t use it. I told them so within a week, they sent someone to fix it, they failed to fix it, I told them I&#x27;m canceling. I proceeded to return their router and switch to a different provider and immediately got fine service.<p>But AT&amp;T didn&#x27;t cancel my service. They said I couldn&#x27;t because I was locked in for a year or some arbitrary time period. It&#x27;s been five years now so some details escape me-- but the key thing is that after some months they claimed I owned them $600, and I said I wasn&#x27;t paying when I never got anything from them, end of story, goodbye.<p>My bank took their side on the part of the bill that had already been paid for that first month. I explained what had happened, and the bank &quot;talked to AT&amp;T&quot; who no doubt showed them a sheet of paper with the words &quot;He signed up for our internet and we installed it,&quot; and my bank said there was nothing to do. So that first month was a sunk cost.<p>But I never paid that $600. Simple as that. They forwarded it to a collections agency, I ignored it. I told them, &quot;don&#x27;t call me: I will never pay you.&quot;<p>It went on my credit report and my credit dropped about 40 points, making no appreciable difference to me. I ignored it. Over time the credit report recovered, and somehow after about four years AT&amp;T withdrew the whole thing without any further action from me. It&#x27;s no longer on my credit.<p>Moral of the story: if you can withstand a small dent in your credit, just tell MEGACORPXYZ to fuck off.<p>Sad that this is what you have to do these days, but it&#x27;s better than no options at all.

Google does not have the company culture or attention span to be an infrastructure provider. It never has and it never will. Google Fiber is dying on the vine as we speak. Google Fi will be dead long before they work out these problems.

This sounds very familiar to me. About two years ago I wanted to switch to google fi. Ordered a phone online, which I paid on full for, then waited. The phone never arrived, when talking to google it was very similar to the article&#x27;s situation. The only &quot;solution&quot; they offered was to (after a month!) refund me (which it would take 2 weeks to go through) when they could confirm with FedEx the package was not delivered (which I had already done, but it would take them days to do), and then I could buy a phone again. But they just wouldn&#x27;t send me another phone. So I would be forced to wait almost 2 months to get the product and service they had initially promised to deliver in 3 days.<p>I ended up having to call my bank to get a refund. It was a very frustrating experience and I really wanted to like Google fi.

I&#x27;m a long-time Google Fi customer and moderate another community about Google Fi. Some of the criticism about Google not being as customer focused is valid, but the two biggest problems with Google Fi are:<p>* The dependence on rigid processes. Customer support reps are cogs in a machine with no ability to override automated actions or to circumvent when processes go awry.<p>* Google does absolutely zero of the inventory or shipping. It&#x27;s contracted out to Ingram Micro. Anyone in the IT world who has dealt with them knows they screw up a lot. Not terribly, but unless you have a direct line to them, you&#x27;re hosed.<p>Combine these two factors and then add some typical call center metrics focus and nobody is empowered or interested in going to bat for you when the process falls apart.

Recently I switched from Google Fi to AT&amp;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.

I’ve been on T-Mobile for years when many friends went with Google Fi. Service on T-Mobile is spottier in CONUS, but internationally my experience has been far superior to that of my friends. Good choice.

This is exactly the reason why I do not trust Google with anything businesses critical. At this stage they trolling their most loyal user base.

I&#x27;m pretty happy with Ting. Been with them for several years. Their data isn&#x27;t cheap but their customer support more than makes up for it.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ting.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ting.com&#x2F;</a>

I&#x27;ve worked with google support before on multiple occasions. For their retail store, fi, and their cloud offering at the $400&#x2F;mo cloud support contract.<p>Their support is bad. I would not recommend using any of their products. I would not choose to work there because I cannot imagine it is any better internally.

I live in the U.S. and frequently travel internationally. In this capacity, Fi is the best service I&#x27;ve used by far. When I&#x27;m in the U.S., my monthly bill is quite inexpensive, too, rarely exceeding $27 (including taxes). No B.S. hotspot fee (or having to jump through hoops to circumvent one). And I use an additional SIM card Google provided free-of-charge with an LTE modem to reverse-tunnel to a low-bandwidth automation server in a remote location. All great stuff.<p>Unfortunately, my experience with Fi customer service has been no better than Atwood&#x27;s. Basically, if you can&#x27;t solve a problem on your own, you&#x27;re out of luck. To be fair, I&#x27;ve had terrible service with other providers, too (I haven&#x27;t tried Apple but for technical reasons the iPhone would not work for me).

The thing with Google is that things work well 99% of the time for 99% of the people, but if you hit that 1% of 1%, your life will become an absolute nightmare filled with support site loops, chatbots, automated email replies, and months of suffering. If you&#x27;re lucky, your story will make it to the front page of HN and somehow get resolved immediately.

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&#x27;s End once they started getting chargeback notices.

I had similar issues too. Awful customer service, more than a month shipping delay for the Pixel 3, &quot;Google Fi VPN&quot; does not work in China, only the mobile data, is better to buy a SIM over there, Wifi calling didn&#x27;t work either. Now here in the US, the signal is pretty bad too, sometimes while talking to someone the call just goes silent and the other person can&#x27;t hear you. My pixel 3 makes a weird noise ( like an insect trapped inside your phone) from time to time. and more... I switched to Verizon a month ago.

Wow! Good times. Almost tops my own worst experience which was with Avis car rentals. The author indicates that this kind of experience is probably due to systemic problems within Google&#x27;s customer support program and I&#x27;d guess that&#x27;s right.<p>I&#x27;ve noticed a pattern that many companies have adopted. First they silo the customer service division usually culminating in remotely locating the customer service frontline. They then cut ties between any part of the company and rank and file customer service workers, linking them only to their supervisors. In the final step the supervisors are prohibited from forwarding customers anywhere. Then customer service becomes like a separate company within the company. I&#x27;ve seen this structure over and over and the companies with the worst service always have this shape.<p>You call. You get a call center. They can&#x27;t transfer you anywhere. You ask for a supervisor. They try to tell why you don&#x27;t need one. You insist. You get one. The supervisor takes your call. You discover they can&#x27;t fix your problem. You ask who can. They can&#x27;t say. You ask if there&#x27;s anyone else you can talk to. They say no. You ask for their manager. They say you can&#x27;t talk to them. You ask for corporate level customer relations. They don&#x27;t have that number. On and on and on...<p>My theory is that structuring customer service into such a separate silo actually breeds a combative relationship between customer service and company leadership. Without more contact between the people building and servicing the products and frontline customer support people, customer service just looks like a big fat cost center. No useful information makes it out (by design) and year after year it&#x27;s just a big red line item for everyone else. Of course this leads to a perpetual push to decrease costs in customer service which leads to really regressive behavior. Too many customers are need free replacements tighten the grip on all comps. Too many high level customer support people are still giving things away. Get rid of any high level customer support personnel. Could we save money with less supervisors? Yes but the one&#x27;s we&#x27;ve got are already overworked. Well, track the number of times an employee allows customers to escalate and create disincentives.<p>In this way customer service actual becomes the opposite of what it&#x27;s meant to be. Instead of enabling customers or helping them it becomes a hindrance. It becomes a wall that protects the rest of the company especially the leadership from having to have any contact with the unwashed masses.

How can a remittance period begin if the customer never has possession of the goods? As far as I&#x27;m aware, the FOB is destination in all such consumer transactions. Only in commercial shipping is there such a thing as FOB shipping point where the buy takes legal possession of the goods the moment the goods leave shipper&#x27;s dock.<p>I think the remittance expiration is b.s. because the remittance period never began because the buyer never took possession of the goods.

It’s Google. I don’t know what was expected, but as soon as anything is Google, customer support is not one of them.

So, I&#x27;m a Fi customer and have a Pixel 2. I&#x27;m planning to upgrade on the next release but the rumblings from folks since the Project Fi to Google Fi transition have me concerned. Is there a rate-my-professor for phone plans?

I had a problem with messages app, not sending messages. 5 calls to support, and they couldn&#x27;t fix it. They don&#x27;t have a way to get a hold the messages team to fix it. Simply incredible.

Google&#x27;s &#x27;shipping &amp; receiving&quot; seems to have a logistics problem. Fi support shifted to s &amp; r, but they did nothing. The depts sound to be butting heads. Would love to know what&#x27;s going on internally there. The CEO should step in.

I was limping along on a fading Nexus 5X (goes to sleep for a night, then revives) and refusing to pay the outrageous prices for the Pixels. Huawei has a phone I was eyeing, and I would have dumped Google Fi. But the Pixel 3a came out at exactly the right time, so I am still in the Google fold for this product cycle. But this story cured me of ever buying a phone directly from Google. Just like one shouldn&#x27;t buy web hosting and domain registration from the same entity, the lesson here is never buy a device directly from Google. The risk is just too great.

Even companies that are great at building fantastic products and great technical solutions tends to struggle customer service organisations. It seems they always assume that everything fits in to neat little buckets, and require adherence to them. This is true for both Google and Valve (Steam).<p>Trusting your customer service teams to have a great degree of autonomy in solving issues can sometimes be really important.<p>It&#x27;s a shame you never know whether a company has sucky customer service before you buy their services.

Sorry to see your unhappy with Google Fi - I switched from previously having Verizon, Sprint, and AT&amp;T - and what a difference.<p>Now that said, the one major observation I see about Google, Apple, Amazon, Yahoo, etc. is that Google does not have a lead Architect for Google products and services. The company is certainly leading the charge with technology - yet there is no one taking the charge of bringing everything together.<p>This reminds me of the early days of Apple - remember the Newton? Wow a computer you could hold in your hand - and the tech community were all wowed - yet the consumer didn&#x27;t understand what to do with it - they were not coders and until it did something it was just another piece of tech. Then 3Com came along and created the Palm Pilot - and the handheld computer took off.<p>That said - I believe this is why Google like Microsoft and Apple have such a customer service problem - they have simply become tech company - customers are just a part of their products and don&#x27;t receive the attention of an advocate within the company&#x27;s product development team.

My first thought is that by 4&#x2F;22, I would have been issuing a chargeback with my CC company and getting them to handle it

Seen another story on HN a while back where someone also had trouble with Google Fi... Stories like this make me feel like Google doesn&#x27;t have the customer service part down, and I&#x27;m not sure if I&#x27;d want to rely on them with anything that deals with money. However I&#x27;m sure people at Google read HN, so probably an issue they are working to improve internally I hope. I know technical wise they are ahead of their game though, but feel like the human touch side needs to be worked on especially for paying services or earning money from Google products as a partner. For example, I&#x27;m not sure if Youtube Partners who have any issues can talk to an actual person.<p>Also, he mentioned he kept having to re-explain his situation to several representatives when calling them. I don&#x27;t get why companies can&#x27;t transfer the call and leave a note for the next agent...<p>Sometimes I feel like at some companies agents in general that just don&#x27;t know, press a button to transfer you to a random agent in the queue (with some priority to skip over everyone else) instead of transferring to someone more specific or higher level. One reason that gives me this feel for sure is when they ask your name and details even though you already told someone else before being transferred.<p>I think a key thing that would make me happy with support is when transferring over to someone else they already have a description of your problem, account information so you don&#x27;t have to explain over and over.<p>I had an issue with another provider (not Google) where you could text but couldn&#x27;t make calls and got transferred to like 6 different agents then decided to give up and porting away as I felt like just a number to them. As a tech geek, I feel like something probably screwed up porting in the first place but I doubt a support rep on a phone would even have the tools to investigate a problem with like. I hate talking on the phone unless I have to. I rather try to figure it out myself or use online chat first.

Great article!<p>Excerpt:<p>&quot;Document everything. Write down dates, times, conversation points, who will do what and when. Get peoples’ names. Then if support drags on you can maintain some sanity and hold people accountable.&quot;<p>That&#x27;s a gem of advice for anyone who needs to deal with an unresponsive customer service department in any nameless, faceless, and&#x2F;or bureaucratic organization.<p>But, that being said, I wouldn&#x27;t hold the lower-level people to be ultimately accountable... That&#x27;s because they are usually not empowered to act by corporate policy, the proper infrastructure for action, internal politics, or any number of other company-imposed barriers...<p>Ultimately, what holds these companies to account, over time, is dwindling sales, the loss of profitability, and the migration of their customer bases to other companies...<p>Customers are always voting with their feet...

I had the same delivery and customer experience farce with Google many years ago on one of the early Nexus tablets.<p>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!

Google Fi on iPhone is pretty meh (if you travel a lot internationally), but there is one reasonable advantage of google fi over a lot of other operators: reasonably secure against malicious number porting. There are better options to protect a number, but nothing as accessible.

OP should not have attempted to negotiate with the hostage taker. They should have instead reached out to their CC issuer and explained the situation. If the goods were not delivered most competent credit card companies will issue a chargeback.

One of his topics really hit home for me:<p><i>Customers don’t differentiate branches of a company when thinking about brand identity.</i><p>Google Fi was running a special, buy the phone from Google Fi and you get $800 off of your bill. I bought the phone from Google. Not Google Fi. It took 3 months for them to figure out that I was never going to get that $800. Every rep that I spoke with except for the last one said, &quot;it looks like you should get this money, we don&#x27;t know why you aren&#x27;t.&quot;<p>The benefits of Fi out weigh the shittiness of their customer support, or lack thereof. And none of the other carriers are any better. That&#x27;s the only reason I am still a subscriber.

The writer has more patience than I would, today. Halfway through, I would&#x27;ve switched to talking with communications&#x2F;utility and consumer regulatory authorities, state attorney general&#x27;s office, credit card company, etc.

I had almost the exact same experience. Google Fi has the worst customer service of any online company I have ever interacted with. It&#x27;s a strong statement, which I&#x27;ve reflected on here for a moment, but I believe it&#x27;s accurate.<p>I ordered a new Pixel 3 as part of the Cyber Monday promotion, which was $600 for the phone with $200 in Fi credits. When ordering the phone, I accidentally used the pre-filled shipping address on Google&#x27;s order form. This my mistake, but I noticed it quickly when I got the order confirmation email. The default shipping address went to my office address. My company had moved officers the month prior. The office was empty and unoccupied. I couldn&#x27;t receive the phone there.<p>Before calling Google Fi, I called FedEx. FedEx quickly answered my call and pulled up my order. Typically, FedEx is able to re-route a package that is still in shipment. However, Google Fi has placed restrictions on the shipment which prevent recipients from changing the address. Only Google can update the address.<p>I called Google Fi and waited on hold for over two hours. This was around the holiday season, and Fi is a newish service, so I wasn&#x27;t particularly annoyed by this. When I finally got ahold of someone and explained my mistake, they said they&#x27;d open a case with their shipping team, who would be in touch with me.<p>Two days later, no one had contacted me, so I used Google Fi&#x27;s online chat feature. After waiting in line for an hour and a half, I was connected to someone. I explained the problem again, asked if there was any ETA. They said the problem was already escalated, nothing to do but wait.<p>Another two days later, no contact was made. I contacted Google again. I got the same answer. The ticket has been escalated to their shipping specialists, they will be contacting me.<p>At this point, FedEx attempted delivery of the package, which was rejected, since no company exists at the address. I contacted Google again. They said the shipping specialists would be getting in touch with me.<p>One week after this, FedEx noted a delivery exception, and that the package would be returned the sender. I contacted Google again. Now that the package is being returned to Google, could they cross-ship me a replacement phone to the correct address? No - I would need to contact their shipping specialists, who would be contacting me.<p>Several days later, I finally received email contact from the shipping specialists. This team immediately cancelled my order, without ever talking to me. They noted that the shipper had been unable to deliver the package, so they would refund me the cost of the phone.<p>Unfortunately, at this point, the Cyber Monday promotion had ended. The phone now cost $200 more, and the Google Fi credits had been reduced to $100. I asked Google if they would honor their previous pricing, since I had been trying to change the shipping address for several weeks. My message:<p>&gt; Thanks for getting back to me. When I purchased the phone on Cyber Monday, there was a promotion, with the phone costing $599 and $200 in Google Fi Credits. Today, the price of the phone on the Fi shopping site is $799 with $100 in Fi Credits.<p>&gt; The package with the phone waited in XXXXXXXXXX at FedEx&#x27;s facility for a week, and I contacted Fi support several times to try and get the shipping address updated. Each time, I was told that the issue had been escalated to the Shipping Specialist team, but a week later, the package was returned by FedEx. If the address had been updated when I first contacted Fi support, then FedEx would have simply delivered the package the next day.<p>&gt; Will Google Fi still honor the original price I paid for the phone?<p>Google&#x27;s Response:<p>&gt; Thank you for the response. If you happen to process another order, please let me know. I can escalate your case to my higher level of Support for approval for the promotion. I cannot guarantee that the request will be approved, but I will explain the why you did not receive the initial order in full detail. Please let me know if you have further questions.<p>So I did that. Ten days later, and fully one month after I ordered the phone, I finally heard back from Google:<p>&gt; My name is Lee and I&#x27;m a higher level Specialist here with Google Fi. I&#x27;m working directly with our Promotions Team to determine your eligibility for our &quot;Pixel 3 &#x2F; 3 XL $400 Back&quot; promotion that was ongoing from November 22nd @ 11:00 PM PT - November 27th @ 11:59 PM PT.<p>&gt; After thoroughly reviewing your account, we have determined you are ineligible for an exception to this promotion.<p>&gt; Per the promotion terms: &quot;Limited time offer available from 11&#x2F;22&#x2F;18 11:00 PM PT through 11&#x2F;27&#x2F;18 11:59 PM PT, or while supplies last&quot;<p>&gt; Since your original order GS.XXXX-XXXX-XXXX was returned to shipper due to an incorrect shipping address, we are unable to provide an exception.<p>&gt; We apologize for any inconvenience. If you have any questions, you can always reach us by replying directly to this email.<p>Every interaction with Google Fi took hours of time. None of them ever resulted in a positive experience. Google Fi was never able to do anything to help the situation. They could not update the address. They couldn&#x27;t cancel the order and ship a new phone. They couldn&#x27;t honor the original pricing. There was literally nothing there were ever able to do to help me recover from my mistake using an incorrect shipping address defaulted on the order phone.

I&#x27;ve wanted to pay for Google Fi because their offering is compelling, especially for people who travel internationally a lot but this is a great reminder of why I won&#x27;t pay for a crappy customer service experience.

International roaming at no extra cost is great, but if you leave Google Fi you can pay for that when you needed it.<p>The real reason to stick with Google Fi is: it&#x27;s the only carrier (ok, MNVO) that requires 2FA for a SIM swap.

I deal with such experiences by simply reversing the credit card charge. The issuer of my card has a solid process for handling such situations. They ask a series of questions: was the charge in exchange for goods or services? Did you receive what was promised? How was your experience different from what you expected? After about half an hour on the phone with an actual human, the charge is reversed, and all goes back to normal. I’m confident that not even google can fight bog standard chargebacks.

&gt; I then realized that I couldn’t cancel my account because I’d be on the hook for the whole $600 for the phone.<p>Should have just done a credit card charge back at this point.

This reminds me of a similar experience with the Nexus tablet. I&#x27;m not sure whether the blame lies with Google or HTC, but it sounds all too familiar with what the author described.<p>TLDR: because the credit card billing address did not match the shipping address, the customer service representative refused to accept payment for a defective tablet which needed to be repaired. They insisted on mailing the tablet all the way back, and requiring that the tablet be mailed back again with a different shipping address.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;outlookzen.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;07&#x2F;24&#x2F;why-im-never-buying-htc-again&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;outlookzen.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;07&#x2F;24&#x2F;why-im-never-buying-htc-ag...</a>

I admire this man&#x27;s patience and I would have lost my shi* way earlier. I&#x27;d probably have them reported to VISA for charging my card.

As a counterpoint I have contacted Google Fi support four times and was very happy with the level of service. Though it&#x27;s possible that all the issues I had was within the scope of the first line of defence, and if you outside of that you get OP&#x27;s experience.<p>Disclosure: I work for Google, but honestly I don&#x27;t think it has particularly biased me to say nice things about Google Fi.

I can&#x27;t understand why would somebody order something from Google and then use the chat &quot;support&quot; app to ask where their package is. All packages have tracking numbers and as soon as they are &quot;on their way&quot; you just contact the Courier or use their site to track it precisely. Why escalate it to the seller who has no idea where the package actually is?

I literally just left Fi last week and got an iPhone XS Max and god do I feel justified. Been a Fi user for about as long, if not longer, than the author and I can affirm the fears of having to deal with customer service and the shakiness of the trade-ins, getting account credits, and poor communication overall.<p>What happened to the Google that made things that Just Work™?

This story reminds me the time when I bought a Google Chromecast. It lasted 2 weeks and the device went completely dead. Chat with support:<p>- which light is on?<p>- none, device does not power on<p>- do you understand that is dead and wont power on?<p>- yeah but which led is blinking?<p>At this stage i hung up and went over to Amazon, luckily i have ordered the device through them, and after few clicks the replacement device was on its way.

I&#x27;ve come very close to canceling Fi due to awful customer support experiences, but each time they&#x27;ve just narrowly, barely salvaged things before I hit the point and wanted to deal with the headache of transitioning to another phone provider.

About to leave for Paris on google fi for the first time from the US and praying that it works well. Supposedly I don’t have to notify them and it should be the same price for data and just a little more for old-fashioned sms and phone calls.

What a world it will be where one-by-one the things that make Google Google are slowly picked off, not by startups, but by other hungrier and ever-expanding firms.<p>There are no sacred cows.<p>I repeat, there are no sacred cows.<p>I am waiting for the day when we will have Amzn Mail, Amzn Phones (I think they already tried this), some type of social media shopping clone hybrid thing that takes on Insta. And for the final nail in the coffin, Amzn Search.<p>What&#x27;s shocking is that these companies are the ones with the capital to hire the best and the brightest (alongside say GS and other IBs as well as MBB etc., say what you will, but the folks that work there are actually smart even though they&#x27;re not engineers). What does this say about future prospects for growth and share prices?<p>In any case, it&#x27;s becoming more and more apparent, that no matter how big and bad you are, there&#x27;s someone as big or as threatening that can come and eat your pie.

This nicely illustrates my experience with Google fiber. Even though I happily use some of their nest products I’d hesitate purchasing anything from Google I couldn’t just walk away from.<p>They don’t even attempt to be competent at customer service.

Would love to get that script to track which Mobile Network Code I’m connected to. As soon as the Librem 5 comes out, I&#x27;m leaving Fi. I&#x27;d like to use which ever network that script indicates, if it supports the phone.

I feel like this is a case of fool me once same on you, fool me twice shame on me.

It’s very likely that the rep you were communicating with was some flunky from Ingram Micro, who handle fulfillment for Fi. Not that it makes you any happier but this is just something Google can’t do in-house.

Potential moral of the story: use an iPhone and major cellular provider or else you&#x27;ll pay for the savings by having terrible customer support and experience

&quot;... leaving Google Fi [for Tesla&#x27;s modern, re-imagined Wardenclyffe Tower global Internet service].&quot;

Google as best as I can tell just doesn&#x27;t do customer support. At least not the human interaction kind

Seems like a good solution would be to file against them in small claims for the $70 plus time investment.

And that’s why European consumer rights are cool.

Sucks, but almost expected from Google.<p>Good luck with T-Mobile though- I had the worst experience with them and am now a happy Fi customer...

Interesting. I&#x27;ve been a project fi user for a few years now and have had nothing but great customer service everytime. I loved leaving the Verizon bullshit and appreciate the straightforward pricing and customer website.