People have lots of criticism of Amazon, some I even agree with, but working here[0] one of my favorite little cultural things is that customers can and do email Jeff when stupid things happen. And Jeff reads them. Every now and then he'll forward one of them to a senior VP with a simple "?" added to it.[1]
That question mark indicates two things: that you have 24 hours to explain how this terrible customer experience happened, and that not long afterwards you'd better have a plan for how it isn't possible for this kind of problem to happen again. A lot of incredible changes have been made based on those question marks.
Google does not have such a customer-obsessed culture. So bad things like this happen and then nothing seems to change. Next week, it will happen again. Because (in my view) Google is an ideas-first culture, not a customer-first culture. Those ideas have rocketed them to success but I wonder if it can sustain them indefinitely.
[0](All my views are obviously my own and don't reflect speaking on behalf of the company)
Having been through several Jeff escalations on the seller side of things, the reality is very different from the romanticized version in the public mind.
Maybe it worked that way a decade ago when the volume was lower. Now sending a Jeff message just goes to a specialized team that's only slightly more competent than whoever would otherwise handle the issue. Have had several times where no resolution was given at all.
I emailed Jeff about two years ago about a repeated and annoying Kindle App (on Android) bug. Included the details I'd given to support a few attempts before this final straw. He didn't reply (of course) but a few days later a Kindle engineer helped me debug the issue (part Android setting, part Kindle app bug) via phone.
Amazon generally has always treated sellers/vendors like shit, but has always been good with consumers once you escalate it appropriately. I’ve had a lot of weird cross border Amazon problems and mail to Jeff resolved.
Look at their budget. Most of their revenue comes from AWS. So their large AWS clients are their customers. The margins on the retailing e-commerce customers is slim and wasn't profitable on a cashflow basis until recent years. From a financial perspective, they're the people who are going to stock the items and take the risk for products where demand is uncertain. Once more data is collected about their sales, Amazon will use their scale to undercut their e-commerce selling partners. So they are important to their company logistics, just not to the bottom line.
I just want to point out how ridiculous it is to think that AWS > Selling stuff out of a warehouse in terms of revenue.
Amazon does about $30B a year in selling goods, and about $7B a year in AWS.
AWS does deliver higher profit margins and more operating income than the tiny margins on selling and shipping goods, so perhaps that's what you meant to say.
Because I was using quarterly for both numbers, and their net sales of merchandise was over $200B (global) in 2018, meaning their net sales were almost 10X higher on products than AWS. Since it's a 10:1 margin, I continue to claim that it's ridiculous to think that AWS > selling physical products in terms of revenue.
In terms of income, however, it's not, they make a lot more on services than physical goods (as everyone not named Apple does)
that 30B in sales is revenue and not a profit. You combine all stuff sales they do together in all their warehouses and logistics and they don't combine together enough to beat the money that their AWS brings in. That 30B revenue costs almost 30B in expenses as well. You take out revenue in the form of advertising and it's almost nothing or negative depending on the quarter. As impressive as the revenue is, it's nothing if you can't turn a profit as a business. Anybody can buy something at wholesale, ship it to your door , not make any money on it and then take it back if it the company is unsatisfied.
Perhaps true in general, but I had no trouble talking to a real person when I recently had a problem with Google Fi. They didn't even make me hold; they took my number and called me in a few minutes. I missed the call, and they automatically swapped to chat. The problem took a while to resolve, and while it wasn't exactly fun, I feel like they did as good a job as was possible. (Remote debugging is always a pain.)
That's most definitely is true if it's about one of their free services (gmail, youtube, etc), but I'm not sure why people expect free services to have the same quality of support as Amazon Prime where you're paying monthly fees + more for the products.
Become an actual paying Google customer[0] and you'll get a real person. Of course, the issue here is slightly different. The author clearly did get to talk to many real people (being a Fi customer), but they got stuck on some other problem.
It doesn’t matter. I’ve been a paying customer of Google (Apps / Mail / Gsuite) for my company. Good luck finding helpful support if you run into any situation slightly outside of the norm. I’ve had my entire company email domain down and was told by Google support to “wait.”
As the other commenter noted, Google does not have a customer-first or even customer-top-10 priority and it shows, again and again.
That said after I started working at the place I work now I've actually experienced two Google engineers come out to us for a meeting to help us troubleshoot issues with Google Cloud.
Didn't help much but I was still really suprised so I feel I should mention it.
I also got some support on mail, IIRC once somewhat great, once clueless or downright actively trying to avoid helping.
And don't get your hopes too high, while we are small (<2000 employees) we are driving driving adoption of cloud for other companies.
I often get these cheerful E-mails from other vendors. When I tell them what's not going alright they set up a series of meetings with clueless people and nothing happens usually. I would expect Google to be the same.
In my experience those meetings have the goal of explaining you how to use the product. If the issue really is that something doesn't work, it's not something sales people can do anything about.
It is possible to get in touch with a real person regarding their free services too. I recently had an issue with the Google Pay app and a pass which would not appear in the app. I contacted support through the support chat feature in the app and was talking to a real person in a minute. They led me through clearing the storage for the app which resolved the issue.
There is only one customer at Google, and it is the people buying ads.
Astonishingly enough, even at moderate ad volumes there's still no customer service. You have to start spending truly astronomical amounts of money before an actual rep will attempt to help you with essentially any problem.
So to Google, "actual customer" means "someone spending six figures per month on advertising on our platform". As far as I am aware, even similar spending on other areas (GCP) doesn't warrant "actual customer" status.
I have lots of criticisms of Google, but let's not spread misinformation. GCP does offer paid support options, depending on your business requirements. If it's critical for your business then you can afford to pay a few extra hundred dollars a month
They have it but it’s significantly worse than aws even at the enterprise tier. I don’t feel like I’m treated like a customer, just someone who should feel blessed to be allowed to use their systems. We’ve come across bugs that broke our entire system that they were paged about weeks prior but “nobody important was affected”
GCP support is not really good. If you need somebody to repeat support notes - they yes. Otherwise, it your business is down they will not help you with reasonable troubleshooting options or anything in that sort. I'm sorry but it is just not good.
Nah, it's absolutely cultural, not about the money paid. Large accounts may make them more responsive quantitatively, but the qualitative lack of care is still there. Google is the opposite of Amazon, cares about its engineers, does not care about its customers. They operate on the model of letting a well engineered product (as determined by Google engineers alone) capture users, and this you can see through and through in the difference between GCP and AWS.
It has worked so far, but as soon as the day their technical quality starts to flag, they are probably as good as dead.
In my experience, their lower, "extra hundred dollars a month" range support plan was a waste of time, patience and money. They didn't seem to have any means to help me.
Sure we pay for their support. In fact, we pay them quite alot of money, but this "support" is horrible frustrating nonsense of dealing with email after email with clueless reps. When we complained about this basically we were told we need a TAM to avoid this.
Or they're just plain incompetent. That's always an option too.
My story: I bought the first google tablet. One of the incentives for ordering early was a credit in the google store. I used it to buy books. It turns out that when you depleted the credit enough and wanted to buy something that cost more than the remaining credit, you couldn't apply the credit and pay the rest with your card.
In my case, I had like $11 left on the credit, wanted a $14 book, and couldn't pay the final $3 with my card. For reals.
Some product manager looked at this complete fucking dumpster fire and said ship it. If you can't get the simple things right, like fully spending down a credit, you're not gonna get much right at all.
I hate to sound like a jerk saying this but it feel like it is arrogance. It seethes in every product, communication, page, document, their approach to every new market. There is no choice, you do it their way.
You're not by far the first to say this. It's the technocratic equivalent of a benevolent dictatorship. The dictator is doing you a favor and you'd better follow for your own good. And maybe they are right for now, but the whole setup was never meant to be an equal relationship between Google engineers at the top and everyone else at their feet.
I understand the gripe about multiple payment options in Amazon.
I usually end up with a gift card from some promo and it always seems to end up with $3.XX left on it. I want to use it up, but hardly anyone supports multiple card payments. Including Amazon.
What they do support, though, is buying a Amazon gift card of custom value, and making multiple payments with that.
Every time I try to convert a prepaid card to a gift card on Amazon it gets declined because of the temporary $1 test charge they do when added as a payment method. Then I have to wait a few days for it to drop off and try again. If I wait too many days (?), they will run the test charge again and I'm back to where I was on day one.
I'm sure there is a "right" way to do it but I've never been able to make it work as I want on the first try.
That sucks! I use the "EGift" option, but I select the "reload your balance" (https://www.amazon.com/asv/reload/order?_encoding=UTF8&ref_=...) item/link and was able to do it two days ago with a $50 prepaid. No odd authorizations or anything, had the amount on my Amazon balance within 2 or 3 minutes.
> Google is an ideas-first culture, not a customer-first culture
I don't think it's just that. I believe that Google is used to having captive faceless optionless voiceless customers, of it's search and ad platform from whom it derives most of us revenue, that most other kinds of customers don't matter.
They are so used to the principle that their users are not their customers, that they even imagine that people who paid for a product are still not their customers. Perhaps because those products are mostly a vehicle to sell more ads to their real customers.
> This is the difference between Google and Amazon.
As an anecdote I had a good experience with Microsoft too.
Issue: standalone MS Office 2019 didn't show the update button, didn't find something online. Called support thinking, oh no, but it was pleasant:
- after quick waiting period contact with representative
- one or two min. standard talk then support concluded there was an issue indeed
- on hold for one or two minutes
- then problem was fixed via remote app, didn't take long
Left me with a very positive feeling for Microsoft.
When I reported a bug in a backend component of Power BI I was called by Microsoft to collect data about the problem and got updates from support until it was fixed over the next 3 weeks. That was very satisfying because I knew something was being done about it and it wasn't sitting in a bug tracker indefinitely.
The only thing I disliked was that support tried to call my office at 3 am and then was confused I wasn't there even though I had to enter my timezone in the support form.
I once reported a bug in Visual Studio community edition. One or two weeks later, a developer (I think) remote logged in to my PC to troubleshoot what was happening. The next update had a fix for the issue.
I'm currently dealing with a MS support case, and it's one of the most painful support cases I've ever opened. I'm going on (hour long) call #3 in a few minutes, and MS still won't even admit there's a problem.
I used to feel like, and talk about, Amazon as a great customer service-oriented company. There's a few reasons that ended, and I no longer believe it to be the case.
- Prime Exclusive Items was the big one. Amazon arbitrarily selects everyday items that people regularly order like diapers and razors and Blu-ray movies and marks them "Prime Exclusive", meaning you can't order them without a Prime subscription at any price from Amazon. This isn't just Prime exclusive pricing, and it's usually not even being sold cheaper than other retailers. It's literally Amazon just saying "f--- you for not having Prime, shop elsewhere!" And often, I've done just that. This has been going on for years, Amazon has not so much as commented on the practice despite massive forum threads about how arbitrary and punitive it is.
- Annoyingly complicated return mechanics. Around Christmas I bought a thing, and then bought a better version of it, both on Amazon. This was a Blu-ray set, so a small item, and it was shipped and sold by Amazon. I was confident I could return it because I'd seen all the ads about free returns at Kohl's. But it turns out, only select items can be returned at Kohl's, even if they're, you know, small items sold by Amazon like a Blu-ray. I had to pitch a fit to get a return label to drop it off at a UPS store, because the Amazon guy couldn't do a return at the Amazon return desk at Kohl's, when the only reason I was returning it was because I bought an even more expensive version on Amazon. Amazon has half a dozen return options, and it's a toss up which one will be available for the given product ID you want to return and how much it will cost to do so. If I buy from Walmart, I can just take it to a Walmart store and it's done.
I let Prime expire a few months ago and, wow, was it shocking just how bad non-Prime customers are treated. Like you said, random items unavailable, constant nags to buy Prime and dark patterns during checkout trying to trick me into opting back in.
My reason for leaving Prime was that I was buying more stuff from 3rd parties who had free shipping for all than from Amazon or Prime 3rd-party sellers.
Also it started costing me a lot to just click the default buy option and I was having to do CSI-level due diligence on every order if I didn't want to end up with a counterfeit and/or pure scam. Several items I ordered were just straight up fraud that required annoying customer service interactions.
Losing the 5% credit card discount seemed painful until I realized that I buy 30-50% less stuff I don't really need now. Or that buying elsewhere I save much more than 5%. I'm surprised to be saying it, but I've returned to eBay for a lot of purchases and been pleasantly surprised.
Yeah, I will say my spending without Prime is drastically lower than my spending with. I use super saver shipping, so what not having Prime does is force me to wait until I have a few items to place an order, and often, that leads me to decide I really didn't need that item anyways. I used to pick up Prime around Black Friday for deals/Christmas shopping, but they made no minimum shipping free for everyone this past year during the season anyways, meaning there was no point in even doing that.
I did accept the 30 days they just gave me, so I have Prime again for the moment, but will not let it renew/charge. I'm doing some household crud so having one day shipping on cheap crud for a month is probably going to be somewhat helpful as long as I didn't pay for it to begin with.
Meanwhile I’ve worked at places with poor management that treats question marks like that as a one off problem. Teams scramble to fix that instance of the problem then return back to the way things were done before.
This is interesting to me because amazon has a ton of anti-consumer practices right now- most importantly the large amount of incorrectly labeled knock off goods. But by doing this on the odd occasion he virtue signals that he is taking time from his day to solve the common man’s problem, evidently fostering a culture of leader worship.
That is not an active effort from Amazon to screw over customers while the article describes a somewhat active effort (when the escalation guy automatically orders a new phone on behalf of the customer). I hope Amazon fixes the rip off fake items problem before they lose customer trust.
As with things like "what else could Facebook do?" the answer is "make less money but not screw people". Or in the case of Facebook "stop operating", I guess. The problem is that they have been doing the 3rd party seller thing for-friggin'-ever at this point, and plainly do not give a damn about the many problems with it or they'd have either fixed it or stopped. They screw people daily and absolutely don't care. It is the only possible explanation. They've had a ton of time to realize they're doing it and stop. That regulators haven't slapped them down hard is a sign they have no power to enforce basic norms and standards in our markets anymore—this is as obvious an abuse as it gets.
Hope they'll fix it before they lose customer trust? Hasn't it been a decade or more now? They do. Not. Care. As long as the money keeps coming in. They are scum.
This Amazon approach reminds me of how Apple used to do it in the final years of Jobs' executive-ship at the company. He'd send terse replies to people who e-mailed and and for large problems he'd float it to his top lieutenants concerning why the experience sucks so much.
I had a similar experience with them. When the phone started rebooting constantly, they offered to send me a used phone as a replacement. While I balked, I had little choice. As I was on a business trip, I asked if they could overnight it to me, at my own expense.
As a seller at Amazon marketplace my wife goes through at least one situation similar this every month. 4 times of 5 Amazon "by mistake" is suddenly charging her for something (tiny amounts) only to refund it all later.
I thought it was interesting and amusing, but filed it away in my head and forgot about it.
Then, one day, I got an email something to the effect of "fax photocopies of your drivers license and credit card or we, Amazon, will shut down your Amazon account permanently. Do not send emails, only fax, to X number."
At first I naturally thought it was spam. However, I kept getting systematic emails of this sort, with a date attached to them. It seemed weird for spam to be so deliberate, and as phishing attempts go, also sort of weird. There also seemed something strange about the content of the emails that made me think it might be serious.
So I called Amazon customer support (totally independently of anything in the email), and they said "Yes, that's a real email. You need to respond to it or they will shut down your account." I was puzzled by this, because nothing unusual had happened from my end. So, after talking to someone who made it clear they knew nothing about it other than that it was real, I asked to speak to a supervisor.
This supervisor sort of chuckled and said that the email was from the security division, that customer support knows nothing about them, that they cannot access anything about why I was getting the email, and that this division only communicates via fax, including with customer support. So basically I was being threatened to have my Amazon account shut down for a reason Amazon couldn't explain, because they themselves can only communicate with the people who know via fax, and I can only communicate with them via fax.
So I figure, ok, fine. I search out an office supply store (because I can't use work fax for personal business, and don't have a fax machine). I send them photocopies of my drivers license and credit card. I make sure it's completely visible, and include information on the cards in the fax, in text.
A few days later I get an email saying "we received your fax, but the photocopy wasn't legible enough." I was like WTF??? because it could not have been more legible. Also, any info not legible (even though it strains credulity to be considered illegible) was in the fax. So I tried again.
Again I receive a similar email saying "we received another fax but again it's illegible." I called customer support again, and again they threw up their hands and said they can't communicate with that division either.
At this point I gave up because what was I going to do? Amazon's own customer service can't even communicate with this shadowy fax-only communicating security division, I know nothing about why my account is being shut down, there's no recourse or appeal, and when I try to comply, I capriciously am told it's not sufficient.
About a week later my account gets shut down.
About that time I remembered the article, which was eerily similar to my experience. So nothing had changed in those years.
I kept my materials (email printouts, including the faxes); I think I still have them, but am not sure as we moved in the interim.
The whole experience convinced me Amazon simply has zero incentive to care about customer service after an experience like that (which apparently is not the first time this has happened).
Wow! Relying on FAX sounds so ridiculous, especially coming from a company that was supposed to have designed API for every internal operation -even for some that didn't make sense, long before APIs where even a thing.
1. emailing "Jeff" amounts to emailing a central triage team, which doesn't necessarily sound better than emailing, say, a well-organized, decentralized support team where the customer knows more immediately who is capable of addressing their particular problem.
2. everyone who works at Amazon is deeply scared of Jeff. fear is a motivator, but maybe it's not the best motivator.
3. sending someone in an organization a "?" is not actually very helpful. there's very little information there.
4. it sounds like people within Amazon are fighting fires and the guy at the top is the one with the torch. and that seems to work ok. but, that would seem likely to create a haphazard organization and products that are not insanely great. strong, insanely great design is not prioritized.
> This is the difference between Google and Amazon.
No it's not.
I've started to receive Spam & Phishing on the email alias I exclusively use for Amazon shopping. The emails include my full name as written in my Amazon account. I've informed Amazon support about this and asked them when, why and with whom they shared my account details. They replied, saying that they had their "specialists" look at the email I had forwarded, and that it was phishing (it wasn't, it was an "invitation" to join an amazon-review-for-free-product site) and that I should ignore it. I once again reached out to tell them that this wasn't what I asked, and that they apparently had/have a data leak. Guess what: no reply.
Amazon doesn't care either. Now, that might be different in the US, but Germany's Amazon support is terrible. I get that hiring people in Germany is expensive, but it's just annoying when you have to communicate with people that don't have a solid grasp of the language / use some low quality auto translate to handle your case.
People have lots of criticism of Amazon, some I even agree with, but working here[0] one of my favorite little cultural things is that customers can and do email Jeff when stupid things happen. And Jeff reads them. Every now and then he'll forward one of them to a senior VP with a simple "?" added to it.[1]
That question mark indicates two things: that you have 24 hours to explain how this terrible customer experience happened, and that not long afterwards you'd better have a plan for how it isn't possible for this kind of problem to happen again. A lot of incredible changes have been made based on those question marks.
Google does not have such a customer-obsessed culture. So bad things like this happen and then nothing seems to change. Next week, it will happen again. Because (in my view) Google is an ideas-first culture, not a customer-first culture. Those ideas have rocketed them to success but I wonder if it can sustain them indefinitely.
[0](All my views are obviously my own and don't reflect speaking on behalf of the company)
[1]https://www.inc.com/bill-murphy-jr/customer-service-jeff-bez...