Why is Google Workspace tech support so bad?

Sorry for the rant, I know “corporate SaaS support isn’t built to actually help people, and their staff isn’t set up to succeed” isn’t super original, I’m just baffled about the obviousness of all.

Working in IT in a mid-sized company that mostly runs on Google Workspace. It seems very clear that due to either size and/or complexity of a Google sheet (some of our Ops people miss Excel too much), we managed to break a document that is fairly important for a business unit. It just doesn’t open anymore, stuck in a loop. Can’t download, create copies, look at history. So far, so normal – we have off-Google backups and so we can move along on the business side. And from the Google side, it seems like looking at internal logs to fix the error or saying “tough luck, here’s an old backup” feels like an easy enough support job.

But for the last 6 weeks I’ve been stuck in Google Workspace support hell. They’ve asked me to record an empty tab until the request times out after 12 minutes so many times (including in a live Meet call), asked for HAR files and then dragged their feet on random nonsense so that the 2 weeks lifetime of their logs expire and they need to ask for a new file, and they’ve decided something must have gone wrong with me granting them access to the file when they cannot access the file themselves (i.e. the error occurs as described). And in between they’ve seem to have escalated this through three levels of support so that maybe now I’m only one level away from an actual Google engineer with the ability to investigate the actual error?

For some regulatory reasons our legal team even put us on the Workspace Enterprise (the most expensive one Google offers) tier some time ago, no impact here.

Why are things like this?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41774287

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