Google Customer Service Getting Better?

I used the new Google live video chat

Where's this?

I find their "customer service" to be almost nonexistent.

They generally have 2 methods, 1 is randomly useless or useful but somewhat evil at heart; the other incredibly not even customer help but rather customers helping google.

1) the ubiquitous "feedback" forms on Drive and such, often mislabeled "help" which it isn't at all, are a useless black hole for customers. They use your "feedback" if and as they want to, not to help you: no reply is given by google unless THEY happen to want your help and more info, no support tickets are issued, no URL given to follow up on your support request, nothing whatsoever is done for the customer like a normal company does with their help systems. C'mon, Amazon has a gazillion purchases/year and amazing help I've found; if they can do it, google can too. Rumor has it that all the feedback requests actually go straight down a mega pipe from Mountain View and all the way out to a massive landfill in Nevada. But who knows ;)

2) google help pages direct you to their official help forums to solve problems but they are largely useless if you actually have a problem and are not simply a befuddled newbie. There are no google staff there at all - I swear there must be a rule that google staff are not allowed to post help on those forums - just some old guys with nothing to do who get all orgasmic at the thought of another digital badge for another ungodly number of posts, so they hang out in the basement all day posting official help on behalf pf google until called up for dinner.

Except what they post is either anodyne boilerplate and/or fairly bad advice often cut and pasted into clearly unrelated threads, and if you dare help someone and post a logical critique of their constant fanboy bs along with some unbiased analysis where google isn't assumed to be divine, then the whole pack of embadgioned dweebs starts crying about your "negativity". God, I've seen tougher attitudes in kindergartens.

These so-called official "help" forums constantly demonstrate why professionally managed help with actual employees is needed like at other companies if google wants to provide good customer service. Sadly it's clear they'd rather tinker with algorithms and cheap out on free amateur labor to scrape by on "help". (At least on reddit you get actual google people sometimes. Why google doesn't have project staff monitor and post on their own help forums a little bit each day is bizarre. That would be great, no? And great PR too.)

I like forums but I hate the evil "let's use altruism as a ploy" policy that has developed within the tech industry, and is spreading. When you have a problem with your bank, do they tell you in their official documentation to find some other customers online to share your private matter with and ask if anyone has a similar issue, otherwise tough luck?

Or compare Apple and Google, both of whose products earn the companies billions of dollars. Do you have to wander around Apple stores trying to find fellow customers who have a similar problem? Of course not.

User forums have morphed from independent meeting places into a hunting ground for mega-corporations to lure lonely people via the paltriest incentives, psychologically A/B tested to play on one's desire to help others and suck as many hours of unpaid "slave" labor out of them as possible, so they - e.g., google - can make more billions by avoiding increased wages and benefits, and gaining another edge in bankrupting brick & mortar corporations which DO employ people to help customers.

Does anyone honestly think there are NOT executives at google and elsewhere saying, "Why should we hire support staff when we can suck people into doing that for free? They love it! We'll gamify the badges they get to display online, and maybe even let them tour google once a year with some free sandwiches and a hat to take home."

Sure, some people cunningly help mega-corporations like google for their own self-serving reasons, using their forum prominence to promote their personal "brand" or their Amazon Wish List in lieu of wages. But most people help for misguided reasons and should think seriously about donating their time to those more "needy" than google, rather than think they are doing any good at all being an apologist for, and helping, a mega-billion dollar corporation make more money and accelerating a race to the bottom with fewer jobs and worse service.

And most certainly such people, while rethinking who they're actually helping, need to disabuse themselves completely of the idea that these online services are free, and thus skip the apologist's typical "So what do you expect?" when there's no actual help. The "customer" is not the one paying google directly in cash but you're paying with your privacy which google then resells to advertisers. Google is NOT giving away free services.

/r/google Thread