>> you can actually contact real humans as a workspace customer easily.
I can barely get replies from my Google Cloud rep and we’re paying them a lot more than $10 per month. Having reps on staff doesn’t mean they have time until things are escalated. When Google threw captchas up on Workspace accounts with integrations (which our product is) for 20ish minutes on Friday and everything was a panic we got responses from a few reps all at once, but mostly to hand wave away the outage.
If you want a fun example there’s a LegalEagle video where he details the difficulty in getting imposter accounts taken down from YouTube through his contacts. He’s not just a random YouTube user, he makes them money.
And for what it’s worth, these experiences are what I have come to expect from everyone outside of the high tiers of AWS Premium Support and a couple other vendors where you pay what is essentially a timeshare agreement for a support team.
Ha, no way man. I've been trying to get YouTube/Google to reactivate my YouTube account for 14 years which has all my daughters baby videos (then a 2 year old). They shut it down due to some vague copyright violation which they still can't explain to me, and haven't activated it despite about 20 support tickets being filed. And I'm a paying customer.
BTW, if anyone works for Google here and can help me to get it back I'll pay you $100.
>> you can actually contact real humans as a workspace customer easily.
This is only relative to the experience when you're a free google account user. Compared to alternatives like Fastmail contacting support - and actually getting a successful resolution - is still very difficult. I finally switched our org after many years when Google announced yet another price increase (nominally for things I don't want or need) and I really wish we'd gone sooner.
yep I had an issue with an ownership change of a Google Workspace account recently and to their credit it was fairly easy (as a paying customer) to find a human to talk to who could escalate to someone who could fix the issue. It still was an annoying process that took a couple of hours instead of a couple of minutes, but they certainly didn't just ghost me or leave me out for dead.
I wonder why people come to conclusion like that to that specific problem.
surely the user may knows that there is probably zillions (by that i mean a lot) of users using gmail via IMAP (at least the enterprise accounts) don't you think it's maybe something else you are doing that flags your account
Raises hand for another n=1 that I'm currently going through. My point being, it doesn't matter than you can get hold of someone because the bureaucracy is kafkaesque.
WTF has happened to Google?
We're a supplier being onboarded. We've been in on-boarding hell for about 2 months now.
We've completed the job and are still being passed around teams in order to get paid.
As an aside, one of the scourges of modern business is Ariba. Google use Ariba along with many other large organisations and it SUCKS.
It feels like using Ariba forces big companies to map their bureaucracy around its structure rather than the other way around ... which means people getting bounced from team to team while different queries are raised and some random person somewhere raises another query, etc etc ... and even the internal staff struggle to make things happen.
Whatever happens, it feels like the bureaucratic structure and use of Ariba has imprisoned staff at Google. They can't get beyond their own system now.
The process was a real eye-opener as to what goes on when a firm becomes huge.
In my experience, once a company implements Ariba, it's over and they're just cash-cowing it.
The savings they make in automation are costs passed on to the consumer or supplier in the hassle factor of getting things done. I want to say "Never again", but that's not entirely my choice.
I don't think anything happened regarding customer support. Culturally, Google on the non-ads products was always "we have a billion users, it's free, we're super smart and invented SRE, so we don't care about support." Enterprise tries harder but has that baggage.
Off topic to the main point of this thread, but wanted to help you out. If there’s a PR submitted, tell your main stakeholder to go into Ariba into the PR and have them locate the approval flow with the corresponding approvers. Then they can easily individually target the approvers to accelerate your PO and get you paid.
They're a publicly traded company, so the shareholders are the primary customer.
They're an advertising and data harvesting company with significant investment in free-to-consumer services, so users are viewed as products. That means user support looks like overhead.
They're extremely large and extremely diverse, so losing business is not a significant concern.
The problem is that they have too many incentives to not care about you at all, even at the rates you're paying.
Most places I know of seem to use Microsoft 360 for "cloud office productivity apps" vs. Google Workspace. The exception being schools which tend to use Google (maybe because they often buy cheap Chromebooks for the kids?).
IDK if Microsoft is better with onboarding or support but I'd be inclined to assume that given their longer history with Office and business customers.
We (small tech company) migrated away from Microsoft 365 because it was extremely buggy and many supposedly simple things are so incredibly complicated and convoluted.
They have several overlapping admin sites for absolutely everything, plus some hidden old sites from the early 2000s that support will guide you to use for some archaic settings that still influence how more modern stuff works.
In my experience, Microsoft support is good in the sense that they are easy to contact and keen to help. But working with them just took too much of my time. Their approach is to schedule a call to guide you through layers and layers of legacy stuff just to try things that often end up not working.
With Google Workspace I don't actually know if support is good or bad because we never needed support in the first place. Google's software is far simpler and less buggy.
We also use Proton now, which has been working pretty well so far. Better than expected.
Microsoft 365 is for companies that can afford to employ a full-time, specialised Microsoft 365 admin.
If you don't get paid for a contract, either repossess the work output, and/or file suit. That's the way to get paid for a contract when someone doesn't pay you for a contract. That's just how business is. A lot of businesses are out to get ahead by any means necessary.
I don't know why you are downvoted or the parent is upvoted. Clearly the GP is not telling the details and it is highly doubtful that they freeze the workspace account ever without good reason. Unlike standard account, freezing worspace admin account for this definitely means huge customer loss.
Stop being misleading, this is your assumption.
And while I agree that Google support generally sucks, you can actually contact real humans as a workspace customer easily.