Google Fails the Turing Test

Why is it that Google gets a free pass on customer support?<p>We somehow implicitly trust that they're doing good in all other areas, but there is absolutely no circumstance in the entire company where a customer can reach a <i>person</i> and receive true support.<p>Why do they get to do this, and no other company can?

This man has far more faith in Google than I do... I ordered on day one, and gave up after about 6 weeks. While the Note II isn't perfect, I could buy one in a store right away.<p>On the robot CSRs: it honestly seemed like they had been given about 4 hours of training, which consisted of madlibs-style repetition of whatever you said. I got a bit hyperbolic in a later support call, and one of them honestly said:<p>"I understand it can be a bit frustrating when, uhh, companies play with your emotions and lie about when your Nexus 4 device (tm) will arrive."<p>This wasn't a text chat. This was someone acting like a 80's AI over the phone. After they parroted my complaint, they would immediately escalate me to a specialist. Once I talked to a manager, who escalated me 'differently'. I have no idea if any specialist ever replied; I got a few follow up emails which basically said 'Thanks for calling! Keep on keeping on'.<p>Cancelling was actually the best, easiest thing I did with Google. Ordering was painful, waiting was aggravating, but telling them "I don't want the damn thing" went over surprisingly well.

This sucks.<p>Google is an engineering company, but one has to believe that they wouldn't purposefully engineer a robot to be this foolish. I have to believe it's actually people you're dealing with, people who have been programmed to behave like computers (YOU MUST PASTE THIS AT THE BEGINNING OF EACH EMAIL).<p>It's frankly too banal and too non-sensical to be a robot programmed by Google; but in a way, a programmed customer service employee in a call center is a bit of a robot.<p>We should consider the impact repeated nonsense has on a persons ability to deal with situations in a fashion beyond rote memorization. We should consider the impact of dehumanizing folks in call centers. Google should try to understand how unique human interactions can make a contact center/email experience that much easier, instead of dehumanizing these moments for the sake of expediency.

I ordered an item from Amazon with free 2 day shipping (prime). The tracking never said anything more than that the label had been created. I waited about a week and contacted Amazon. They immediately sent me a free replacement. Eventually the lost package came as well.<p>This is how customer support <i>should</i> handle this type of situation.

Google customer support is notoriously bad. Support for their flagship products, gmail, google docs, etc is non-existent. For example, gmail filtering + email forwarding have been broken for over a year, with no fix in sight. So I'm not surprised to see that support isn't good in other area's either. It's really a shame because Google is a great company, with great products and a great vision, and it hurts to see sloppy execution.

I've worked in customer service, and the reps use 'canned text' all the time for common issues. I assumed this was common knowledge. Not doing so would be a recipe for RSI within a couple weeks.<p>The problem with canned text is when it's reused on the same person, which leads to anger on the part of the recepient (or suspicions that they're being serviced by a robot).

One point I haven't seen anyone discuss yet in the comments below: the author mentions that, after seeing that the phone was sold out, he kept refreshing the browser till he got a copy of the webpage that allowed him to buy the phone.<p>I'm wondering if perhaps that copy of the webpage was an out-of-date cached page from a server that hadn't been updated recently enough (or that the page was created based on a copy of data in a cache that hadn't been updated recently enough) and that buying from such a page somehow led to a phantom purchase being created -- since there were no actual phones left to buy -- which got pushed through the system to the point of creating a UPS record for a non-existent phone.<p>Obviously, one would hope an ecommerce system would catch issues like that so spurious purchases would not be allowed through in the end, but -- in any case -- should the buyer perhaps have realized (in retrospect, at least, if not at the time) that there might be a problem if all his previous attempts to load the webpage were telling him the phone was sold out?

I was recently asked to fill in a 'customer experience report' for my Nexus 4 purchase by Google. Lets just say, that whilst the service I got wasn't quite the clown car special that this guy was given, it wasn't great either. Not that I expect them to take a blind bit of notice of my carefully worded response.<p>At this point, I wouldn't advise any of my friends or family to buy physical hardware from Google Play: the customer service is just atrocious &#38; if anything went wrong I'd feel responsible.

I know using a phone is so 20th century but Google Play actually has a dedicated call center for providing support. When I ordered a Nexus 7 back in July I was wondering when it would arrive so I called. Within 2 minutes of waiting I was talking to a friendly human.

&#62; 10 weeks of waiting<p>Absolutely unacceptable. I would have issued a chargeback immediately after three weeks of tardiness. At that point what Google has done is fraud, especially if you couldn't reach an actual person on the phone.

Cheap products, great products, and good support. Pick two.

Copy and pasting the same snippet of generic polite text is excusable, but what can possibly explain the lack of context? Surely you'd only need to glance at the past activity on the ticket (ie, your own emails that you just sent a couple days ago) to avoid giving the same stupid, useless response.<p>It's either a poorly-programmed robot, or a human acting very much like one.

I wonder how this fits into Australian Consumer Law (ACL) [0]. We have a relatively robust set of rules that govern how a business selling a product/service interacts with their customers.<p>For example, if you purchase something and it is not as described, or it is faulty, or certain other conditions then the business must be able to remedy the situation. I fail to see how you could satisfactorily comply with the ACL if you're only form of customer service is AI bots.<p>[0] <a href="http://www.consumerlaw.gov.au/" rel="nofollow">http://www.consumerlaw.gov.au/</a> (overview at <a href="http://www.accc.gov.au/content/index.phtml/itemId/963190" rel="nofollow">http://www.accc.gov.au/content/index.phtml/itemId/963190</a>)

It's a cop-out to call Google an engineering company like they are still the small company that is just a search engine.<p>If they want to be a consumer electronics company, they should probably start acting like one and have actual humans deal with these problems.

Not making a whole lot of sense. You gamed the system by having three different browsers place an order (imagine how it must have been like?) and then you complain? Where is ethics of placing an order online? Wouldn't you have been better off following what your single browser screen said the first time?

That's the problem with Google. There is NO customer support. I had a website back in the days that was bringing me good money. A spam alerts from google tells me that I have to delete some spam pages of my website (which is generated by user content) in the 3 next work days otherwise they'll ban my account. I look through the pages and CAN'T find anything spammy, I decide to mail them something along those lines "I'm sorry but I can see no reference of what you want me to erase, can you please provide more informations?". No answers and 3 days later I was banned from Google Ads.<p>Twist : My website was in multiple language and the page they sent me was in a different language, I had not think of that.

Google sucks on this support. This makes me shy away from their phones and buy Samsung's. Which is practically the same hardware anyway, but with a vaguely human company behind it.

Google sucks at customer support, news at 11.<p>Honestly reading this, nothing surprised me. We all know Google is incapable of decent customer support, and even if we do pay money for something like a phone, the very corporate nature that reigns in this company still sees us as products of free services. Here's a thought, instead of hiring outsourced help for their Nexus sales crew, why not use their AdWords support staff? Those people are obviously the only ones trained to deal with humans.

This post is scary. I have been operating under a new set of rules. I refuse to by goods/services from customer service deficient firms. It has been working great and dealing with small teams and companies that provide fantastic service makes your life easy and efficient. Not to mention building great relationships. I make sure to buy a service from a startup, e.g cloud storage rather than for instance Amazon.

I've had my own horror stories with Adwords. Google has by far the worst support of any company I've ever had to deal with in my entire life.

What is UPS's response? Seems you should talk to the carrier if it's stated that it's "on truck for delivery" and ask for their explanation?

If you're parting with hard earned cash to buy something, there's no reason you can't expect good customer service from the seller, even if some of their service is automated. They really need to take some lessons from Amazon.

Daavid, I really enjoyed your writing! Near the end I laughed out loud. Although, thinking about your experience... I could see how frustrating that could be :)<p>I agree, with such an experience, Google cars don't seem like a good idea at all.

UPS has just delivered my Nexus 4 today here in BC, Canada. I shouldn't have rewarded Google with my business but there is really no competition for this product. If there was I would have taken my business there.

The last two paragraphs are hilarious, thanks for taking the time and writing this! Like anyone else I had my share of ridiculous shipment problems, but this guy remains playful (and cheerful!), wow :)

Can you imagine how much we would accept google into our lives if they had an equal amount of engineering, but awesome customer service?

Upvote because Google CS sucks, plain and simple. I've experienced similar troubles with AdSense.

Problem loading Google+<p>There was a problem loading the Google+ CSS. Please double check your network connection and try reloading in a few minutes.

Story is probably 100% true. Won't argue with any of the substance, which will likely be discussed in other threads.<p>But this writing reeks of Microsoft astroturfing. Especially the "I got #googleplayed" dig which sounds just like their "Don't get scroogled" campaign and failed #droidrage stunt. It's not like Mark Penn would have any trouble bringing back their famous astroturfing policies to earn his keep at MS.

A lot of responses here seem to say that support for cheap/free phones is not profitable. That's not a good excuse. Amazon doesn't really make much money on the Kindle hardware, but the support is amazing.<p>That raises the question, why didn't Google just let the factories ship to Amazon and let Amazon handle sales and customer service(related to shipping, not technical)? I guess the Play Store was an attempt at branding similar to Apple store, but the customer experience seems to be damaging the brand.