Apparently doesn’t exist. A few years ago I saw a bad bug in Gmail. I searched through the Google sites fruitlessly looking for a way, any way to report it. I eventually found an email address for something else and sent them a message asking the recipient to forward my bug report to the relevant party. I, of course, never heard anything.

A few months ago I was working on a book proposal in Google Docs. I went to Save and got a dialog box that said Unable to Save Due to Network Errors. I freaked out. There was a URL in the dialog box for More Information. When I clicked it I got another Dialog box warning that I was leaving an unsaved document! A frantic Copy and Paste to a Word doc ensued. And I had been using Google Docs because of crashes in Word. Again, no way to report this whatsoever.

Don’t Buy A Nexus Phone From Google

Now Google is selling a $600 smart phone called the Nexus, online. You can activate it with your favorite carrier as long as that carrier is T-Mobile. However if your phone has issues you cannot reach anything resembling standard customer support at Google- no phone number and email queries take 3-4 days to get a reply. The T-mobile folks can’t really help you.

Poor customer service on free things like Docs and Gmail is one thing. It’s called ‘you get what you pay for’. Except that Google’s business model depends on widespread acceptance of free cloud services, particularly for critical things like email or document storage. No customer service for costly hardware products that could provide life or death protections, like a phone, is simply unacceptable.

You Can’t Automate Customer Support

The problem is spelled out in Googled, The End of the World As We Know It by Ken Auletta, the New Yorker media writer (a must read, IMHO, if you’re interested in this stuff). This book, which covers the history of Google, describes how their engineer-driven culture believes that everything can be automated via algorithms in software. Apparently they have not bothered to figure out an algorithm for customer support, a function that has to deal with all the serendipitous behaviors of non-engineering humans. Like ‘what do I do if I dropped my phone into the toilet?’, a common problem that might never occur to most engineer types who are likely to say ‘why would you do that?’.

I think Google has made a misstep here, a big one. If they want the big customers, like enterprise IT departments, to endorse their services and products, they are going to have to provide live customer support and things like Service Level Agreements (SLAs) that guarantee a certain level of reliability. You can’t automate everything.