Comment by diminoten | Hacker News Reader

Comment by diminoten | Hacker News Reader

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I had accidentally moved $1,000 from the wrong bank account into Google Wallet, and called customer service to try and figure out what I should do, because there wasn't going to be $1,000 in the account I had selected, but Google Wallet was giving me access to the funds already.

The CS rep that responded was a nice guy, but had no clue what to do. We started spitballing together some possible ideas, and I suggested that we just let it go and Wallet will eventually figure out that the transfer didn't go through, and deduct the money back from my Wallet account. He thought that might be a good idea, but had no further ideas beyond that.

That was Google Wallet, and that was $1,000 floating around. I can't imagine the level of customer service available to anyone who hasn't actually put money directly into the equation.

Do they actually do that thing we all saw in The Internship, where they have random engineers field support calls? Because I felt like I was talking to a random engineer.

I used to work at Google in support. You were not talking to a random engineer - the support people are all dedicated support contractors. Most of the teams are all non-technical and the only thing they know about how the product works is from a two week training where most of the time is spent on learning how to avoid lawsuits.

How do people think google puts software engineers on the phone randomly? That's just an insane idea. I mean, these guys all make what 150k starting with 250k+ salaries not unheard of and you really expect their managers to go, "Oh btw, you're on helpdesk this week. Put on your headset and talk to clueless people for 8 hours today."

It was in The Internship, that's what put the idea in my head, and as far as I know it's in there because they do/did do that, with the idea being you get a better understanding of who you're writing features for if you get your questions from the horse's mouth occasionally.

I once worked at a startup-bought-by-bigco that did almost exactly this. Granted it was level 4, not level 1 support; and it was on a quarterly, not weekly, basis.

support people at Google is there only to fill regulation minimums.

The teams I was a part of most definitely were not just for minimums (Chromebook/Glass). Google has incredible support for their hardware products.

that's honestly awesome to hear.

my experience in the past made me avoid newer Google products because support in the past was non existent. last thing i bought was a nexus one. i for the bad touch screen (registers ghost touches after screen is on for a while) and i could either complain on forums and be ignored or start a return with htc that from the forums histories ended with a device on worse condition and save touch screen bug sent back...

I can promise that this is the one thing they don't do, because then sometimes you'd get a useful answer. Yes, talking to the Image Search guy about Google Wallet would be useless, but he might have some clever guess. At the very least he would display an understanding of why computers do the things they do.

As is, it has to be essentially non-technical people taking the calls. I can't think of why else they would respond to a complaint like "The age on my account won't update as I get older" with "Are you sure you're right about your age?"

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