Comment by Sohcahtoa82
4 months ago
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.
> but I just don't see how it can possibly scale to over 1 billion users that aren't paying like gmail has.
Why not charge for support?
You bet your ass I would pay a support fee if my Gmail account was having issues.
Yup
$19.95 per incident to talk to someone who could ACTUALLY resolve an issue would be totally worth it, especially for people who suddenly find themselves locked out for no known reason. A fee would also filter out most the silly calls, and if not, and they can resolve a password reset in 2 minutes, it is way worth it for both the caller and Google.
That exists - it’s called Google Workspace.
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> Why not charge for support?
They do. And when you actually pay for support, they answer the phone. At least in my experiences.
The only times they've left me high and dry is when I didn't have any actual paid support contract or subscription for whatever the question was about.
They have a Gmail support contract. You signing up?
I'm sorry - where can I buy support for Gmail? Do you mean Google Workspace?
I did used to have a Google workspace account, for several years, but administering it was a lot more work than just having a Gmail account. It's certainly not something that my mom could do.
I'm talking about something more oriented toward consumers, and ideally pay-per-use.
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What can a human do that the automated processes for account recovery/etc. can't?
I talked to a human Apple support person once and we had quite a long chat but ultimately his conclusion was basically "I can't know anything you don't already know and there's no way to resolve the problem."
Did you escalate to more senior support? They have the ability to pull in engineers when something’s weirdly broken.
It wasn't really a bug. Long before I had any Apple devices, some stranger used my email address as their recovery address. I clicked "OK" for fun. Then I got an iPhone and realized my main email address was blacklisted because it "belonged" to somebody else.
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