Comment by thebruce87m

I feel Google, Facebook, etc. all need to setup actual phone numbers and chat rooms, and make them rank highly on searches for "Google support phone number", "Google fraud department", "Google account recovery department", "Google Live Support Chat" etc.

Then those numbers should simply play a message that this is the only official phone number, and no human will ever call from or answer this number, and the company does not offer customer support or appeals to account problems.

They also need to make searching for fraud phone numbers return anti-fraud messaging rather than what it currently does. Seems like the entire 844-906 exchange is fraudulent [1].

I had a family member that just got scammed because they panicked after their Facebook account got banned, basically exactly like [2].

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=844-906

[2] https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2017/01/31/51...

In case you would like a concrete example to ground the cynicism about corporate trade offs around customer support, I recommend watching Jill Bearup's 10 minute video [0] about this week's demonetization. For example, she has to deal with some form that she "can't submit", a customer service contact 12 time zones away (so email replies are 12 hours delayed), and an account manager who is non-responsive. In her court, are some unaffiliated google employees giving guidance, but only because they were already part of her youtube watching audience.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RZHajVV9PA

If it weren't for the routine ex-Googler postmortem blog post shared on HN I'd think Google doesn't even have human employees.

The greatest mystery of my life is what is a "Google Product Expert" on their community forums whom I assume:

1. isn't an employee speaking as the company.

2. is someone given the title by the company.

3. spends a lot of time answering questions despite not being paid for it.

4. can contact Google employees somehow.

The only perks for this that Google lists is that you can join a secret club of Google Product Experts. It feels like gig economy applied to customer support.

I had Google call me once :) It was when I was riding in a Waymo and one of the screens in the vehicle was lagging a little bit. They made the surprising choice of calling my phone, rather than ringing the car itself, and I didn't pick up because... who picks up when your phone says, "Call from Google" :) They called the car shortly afterward to reassure me that the lagging screen wasn't an indicator that the car would underperform.

Being guaranteed to be able to talk to a human would be great, but I just don't see how it can possibly scale to over 1 billion users that aren't paying like gmail has.

Years ago, my brother used to work for XBox Live Tech Support, and he said that easily over half the calls he got were for things that customers could easily self-service, like a password reset. Many tech issues were fixed by the most basic troubleshooting step: Power cycling.

Meanwhile, my uncle works XFinity tech support, and he'll frequently get calls when a website has an outage, not to mention how many non-technical people think any internet-related issue, such as a forgotten Google password, means calling your ISP.

This doesn't even begin to talk about bad actors calling tech support to try to break into someone else's account. Google accounts are high-value targets. Once you've gotten in, there's a really good chance you could easily pivot to all of that person's other accounts.

To handle the call volume that a service like Google would have, if they offered phone tech support, the amount of staff they would need would be in the hundreds of thousands, and so many of the calls they take would be wastes of time. There are a lot of non-technical people that have no idea how things work and basically think that Google IS the Internet.

I had a weird security alert on my Google account the other night after trying to do a "Sign in with Google" to a service I've used for years. Trying to view my account/security info kept redirecting me to a page instructing me on how to clear cookies.

I clicked support and was able to get a call right away. But I pay $20/year for Google One.

They will reach put to try and help sell you more ad spend. If that was a scam its very good cause they set up my adwords campaign for me.

Somehow Google and other tech companies are not required to have a customer service that actually solves the legitimate problems customers have with their services. I wonder how they are allowed to do this not just in the US but across the world.

I got one of the same calls (didn't believe them). Afterwards I phoned Google support and they said the same thing, they will never call you. I had them confirm nothing was wrong with my account, just in case.

So it's very possible to phone Google support, just don't believe anyone who calls you.

> There’s an easier tell. It’s impossible because you can’t to get Google to help you at all about any account issues, ...

Paying Google apps / GSuite users can call a number and it's real humans answering (and they're very helpful).

But indeed I don't think they proactively call you.

Unless their salespeople are calling you

> It’s slightly depressing that there are probably more fake Google support staff than real ones.

I've never thought of it that way but you're right! Dealing with support at most tech companies is a horrible experience and is usually something I research before using a product where a failure in service provision could lead to catastrophic results.

I had a legit call come from Google Maps and I called them a scammer and various other names.

Right? "Google support" calling is an obvious tell.