Frustrating? Yes. Surprising? No.
Afaik, there isn't even any paid support for individual customers unless you have some sort of business account. I find this a bit unreasonable, but I wouldn't expect any free service that involves a paid employee from any service I don't pay for (with money, not privacy).
They can't be making many dollars per year per user. A single support call answered by a human would take years' worth of income from said user. I'm amazed at how many people do not realize this, and still rely on these "free" services even for their jobs.
To give an example: recently, a popular blogger lost their Instagram account and it was sold to a 3rd party (because they had lots of followers, I suppose). Blogging is their day job and Instagram is a major source of readers for them, so they depend on it for their living. The account was probably stolen by using a reused password from some password dump and they didn't have 2FA enabled.
In the end, the blogger got back their account because they were a part of a traditional media publishing organization which had a business account with Facebook, Inc and were able to escalate it that way. Had they not had this account, it would have been lost.
There are lots and lots of professions where social media presence is required to bring in the customers (e.g. woodworkers these days depend on Instagram!) or even monetization from their account directly.
If you depend on Google, Facebook, Youtube, etc to earn a living, you should consider a business account or at least do your best to secure the account (2FA, no password reuse, etc).
In that they know they're making a choice with consequences and pain. But they see the strategic value of that choice (never running a support org) as outweighing the tactical pain.
Additionally, I'd guess the internal opinion is "If users need support, then something is broken and we should just fix it."
Where I think this falls down, which Microsoft learned 30 years ago, is that:
(a) Unless you're asking, you're not going to surface visibility of broken things. Users will just find a way to deal, while being pissed off. And then some product team finds out there's been a major issue for the last 5 years.
(b) Unless you're actively soliciting feedback from your customers and users, you're at high risk of building the wrong thing. We see this with enterprise GCP frequently. "Oh, you need Y feature? We never thought about that, because {insert internal way that Google does things, but no one else does}."
If the EU ever gets around to forcing Google to support their users regardless of how they are enriching Google the moral of the story will be they saved billions by waiting until litigation. Just like taxes.
I expected at least one response suggesting this. I, and many others would consider email access my absolute most critical asset, it's also extremely difficult to switch providers. It's not like your real estate goes 'nope sorry you can't prove yourself, we can't replace your lost keys without validation, sorry, go buy new stuff and live somewhere else' - I imagine that would be illegal in many countries even if the place was rent free.
I understand that Google support, if it existed, would be inundated with bad tickets. However, I don't imagine having a skeleton set of support staff and a support workflow that requires users to climb mountains to communicate with a human would really impact on googles bottom line. It would have stopped me venting in various places about the issue, and might end up losing potential sales when I/others push our employers to use $not_google because their support sucks.
So why not pay for it?
But then when I actually needed supoort, they couldn't do anything but read forum posts to me. They were not empowered to escalate to actually resolve anything more complicated than "where's the button for X".
Even if you pay, Google still treats their users like shit.
Are you able to name a reputable email provider which isn't >$60/year or self-managed? My 65 year old mother probably wouldn't be interested in either of those two, but would be willing to pay for per-use support lines for the one time in 13 years which rendered her account inaccessible.
And lets not forget my father, who couldn't access his _paid_ Telstra/O365 standard-user work email. When I called the Telstra support line they gave me administrative access to the entire instance, no proof of ID necessary (I literally said I'm not associated with the company and calling on behalf of my father).
To be honest, I'm not sure which is worse now that I think about it.
Called them to get access to our account after a problem, and they gave me admin with no verification at all. Just provided the account name, was asked for new password. Like... WTF?
Tried telling their security people, who then denied it happened, let alone it being a problem.
Our DNS hosting was moved away from Dotster shortly afterwards.
My laptop has a warranty that costs $60 year and I get nothing, nothing!, unless I break it. And don't even get me started on my car insurance!
Let's turn this around. Why is Google offering a free service that doesn't meet reasonable expectations for how that service works?
My repeated experience is that Google is good at things like search, where people get what they get and individual humans don't matter to the company. But they're bad at things that require treating people like people.
After being a happy Google hardware customer for years, I just had a purchasing experience that was so bad that I'll never buy from Google again. Their hardware and software won me as a customer; their customer service not only lost me, but was so bad it has made me more wary of doing business at all with any part of Google.
For me, this is in the "do or do not, there is no try" bucket. They don't really want to deal with humans, so they half-ass it. I wish they'd just stay out of those kinds of businesses, as their dominance and indifference to profit can mean crushing competitors and preventing the emergence of a real marketplace.
There is someone on the line and follow-up emails too.
But actually fixing things is a crap-shoot.
I've had an issue with Google One family accounts for a month now.
I can not invite anyone into my family, so far no solution. Instead they keep throwing free storage at various family members because they can not escalate very much.
Even if I'm not using any of the other features, that seems like the cheapest support plan ever.
They say "Google experts"... so who staffed the phones? Are we talking actual customer support who are empowered to run playbooks and cut tickets, or what?
It's not a free service. It's a surveillance company that spies on, profiles, and sells out its users for a profit in exchange for the services it offers. Most surveillance companies with email offerings have support. If Google doesn't, then it's taking something in exchange for nothing on top of doing less than the standard most of its competitors set in this area. It will also probably keep making revenue on the locked account for a little while despite its owner having no access.
Way different ethically or professionally than a situation where the user was getting free email with the other party getting absolutely nothing in return. Something truly free.
Google tends to follow a playbook when it comes to account recovery, and if you can't check one of the boxes to get through, they won't let you back in. This is to stop account takeovers via support (which are known attack vectors people use against other companies, like cell phone providers).
While it's frustrating to lose access to you account, it is the tradeoff Google has made to try to keep your account safe.
And as far as Google employees being able to help, that channel has mainly been closed. Even if you know a Googler and have lost access to your account, the Googler will likely just tell you to follow the account recovery help page[0].
(I'm a googler, opinions are my own)
[0] https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/7682439?hl=en
Other companies solve this problem, Google hasn't and they should do better. Perhaps by involving a real support person.
If you involve a human, you're going to get socially engineered. It's not a question of "if", but "when" - especially if you're a high-value target where user accounts are valuable.
They actually do have basic customer support for free accounts, it just isn't very easy to find. I forget exactly how it works, but I was able to help someone in a similar situation recover their account by following the 'steps to recover your account' listed here:
https://support.google.com/accounts/troubleshooter/2402620#t...
After failing the automated recovery, it came up with an option to request a manual reset, with a free-entry text field asking what was wrong. It sent messages to the account and all of its recovery options with links to cancel the request, then after a few days someone took a look and was able to help.
Even though I have friends at Google, I can't find out what's going on. Apparently that team won't even talk to other Googlers. It's maddening. Now if I need something to really go through (e.g., contacting somebody about a job) I have to send the mail from my gmail account. That feels like rewarding them, but I don't seem to have a choice.
That seems like a great idea in general :)
Personally, having experienced a similar thing but not regained access to the account, I never will.
Actively encouraging the exact opposite frankly.
The second factor email was associated with my account, I could see reset codes come through which were relayed to her but would result in an 'oops, something went wrong'. My guess is a bug due to account age / whatever.
I figured we had enough evidence to obtain a password reset, so I googled for gmail support contact details. There are none.
I then tried repeatedly to contact Google via twitter, all my tweets were ignored - probably because I only have like 20 followers.
In the end, my mother ended up porting her old mobile number to a prepaid sim, as $previouscompany had disconnected the number entirely, and used that as the second factor to reset the account.
Pretty damn frustrating that Google doesn't have any unpaid inbound support _AT ALL_.
Next time I'll consider paying a twitter influencer to impersonate me (or my mother), or paying for adspace, or using a mail service that exposes at least some form of support.