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.

[0] https://one.google.com

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.

Agree.

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.

They’ll call YOU if you’re paying for their ads platform. ‘Just checking in, making sure everything is going alright.’

Thats sales, not support.

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.

> they set up a series of meetings

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.

That’s correct. The problem is that you have to explain the problem several times but in the end nobody does anything.

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.