Google recently unveiled a long-awaited feature for business and education customers of Google Apps: 24/7 phone support for all issues related to the core services including Gmail, Google Docs and Calendar. It is, potentially, a major upgrade over Google's previous mishmash of limited phone and e-mail support and customer-led online forums. Instead of discouraging customers from calling in anything but a dire emergency, Google now says it welcomes all phone calls from Apps customers.
But if you're a customer, support is only good if it fixes your problem—now. Google's reputation on customer support has never been stellar, so we decided to talk to a few Google Apps business and education customers to find out how good or bad it is in real life. The answers ranged from "We've never had to call support" to "their tech support sucks." In the middle ground, several customers told us Google support is usually good enough for break/fix issues but falls short when it comes to requesting functionality customers believe is missing.
Before the announcement on November 14, phone support was technically available at all times, but only for emergencies in which more than half of a customer's end users couldn't access the system. For any other issues, e-mail was available, but only Monday through Friday, and response time was estimated at up to one business day. In practice, much of the support Google offers is through forums in which customers can get advice from other organizations using Google Apps, and occasionally receive responses from Google staff who monitor the threads. Posting on a forum is no guarantee your problem will be solved today, this week, or even next year. Some threads have been ongoing for well over a year, including this one on Google Calendar reminders not working. Google Apps customers might wonder whether they are a priority for Google—when CEO Larry Page listed his top priorities earlier this year enterprise customers did not make the list, falling somewhere behind advertising and Google+..
If Google Apps runs so smoothly that support isn't necessary, it's not an issue. "While we have only three employees, we've been using Google Apps for a year now and I can honestly tell you that we have not had a single problem which has warranted a support call," Gavin Potts, head of Web development at UK-based Yodelay, a digital marketing consultancy, tells Ars. "Best of all, it has enabled us to become completely Microsoft-independent as a company, something all of us have dreamed of for a long time."
But customers who have needed Google support report getting mixed results. "To be quite clear, their tech support sucks, in my mind," says Aaron Tunnell, VP and co-founder of broadcast equipment vendor Digital Video Group in Virginia.
The business with around 20 users has been a Google Apps customer for about three years. Like the majority of users we spoke with, Tunnell said Google Apps has provided a good experience overall and he doesn't regret becoming a customer. Running IT isn't Tunnell's full-time job even though he provides most of the company's tech support, so he said relying on Google is better than maintaining his own Exchange server.
But those occasional times when things go wrong are frustrating, and getting answers from Google isn't always easy.
Early in Digital Video Group's experience with Google, Tunnell found that users connecting through POP were hitting daily e-mail sending limits of 100 to 150 per day, preventing them from sending more mail. The solution ended up being fairly simple: switching to an Outlook plug-in offered by Google that hadn't been available when the customer first deployed Google Apps. But it took several weeks and numerous e-mails back and forth with Google support to get the right answer. "The initial response from tier 1 people was useless," Tunnell says.
Getting information online can be tough, too. Digital Video Group has had occasional outages preventing users in multiple locations from accessing Apps, but the Google Apps Status Dashboard doesn't always acknowledge that there's a problem, he said.
Another customer we spoke with, a systems administrator for a K-12 public school district in Michigan, relayed his experiences to Ars:
Our experiences with Google from a support perspective have been, on the whole, frustrating. Response times vary from slow to non-existent, to the point where we hope we don't have to get a hold of them. This is compounded by issues that sometimes start, then go away, then come back. We have had occasions where Gmail was just slow for 2-3 days, and then gone back to normal, and we never found the problem, nor did we receive a response from Google support. It is hard to fix a problem when support is unavailable, or by the time they get back to you, the problem disappears. We've also used Google's forums to try and solve our problems, often to find a dozen or more people with the same issue have created a thread spanning months or a year, with no response from Google.
This customer, who preferred not to be named publicly, said he believes Google Apps could be a killer cloud platform but today falls short of hosted Exchange and Outlook Web Access for anyone beyond small businesses of five to 50 people. Budgetary concerns have kept his school district on Apps. "We have also had issues that took Google a long time to resolve," he notes. "For nearly a year, accessing one's contacts in Gmail could cause Internet Explorer to stop responding, and sometimes we needed to delete a user's local profile to resolve the issue. Google finally fixed this, and publicly admitted it was an issue on their end, but in the meantime their suggestion was to use Chrome, a suggestion that would be unacceptable in many enterprises. Chrome is a great personal browser, but I cannot manage it the same way I can Internet Explorer—though I'd love to see them take that on."
Google Apps big in the education world
Google has attracted many customers in education, and offer schools the same service business customers receive, but for free. Adam Nave, a systems administrator for Macalester College in Minnesota, says online support has improved over the past couple of years. In one case, Google helped Nave diagnose a network issue that ended up being on the college's end, rather than Google's. "They were fairly responsive in making sure it wasn't an issue on their end," he said.
Nave tried calling Google on another occasion, but encountered the typical front-line support person who follows a script and then bumps the issue up to a real expert if the standard troubleshooting process doesn't work.
"I have spoken to tech support in an emergency and I did find that frustrating," Nave said. "She was nice but she clearly had a set of information she had to get from me and there wasn't going to be any deviation from it." For the most part, problems don't affect just one customer, so calling or e-mailing support may not speed up the resolution.
"Until recently we've been operating under the philosophy that if you see something wrong with Google Apps, wait two days and if it's not fixed automatically we'll open a ticket," Nave said. "Most of the issues don't appear to be specific to us."
IT admins at California State University-Monterey Bay, which has 11,000 users on Google, have found varying levels of response from Google support. "If there is a problem such as, we accidentally deleted a user prematurely and we need to recover their account, the response time can be within less than an hour usually. They're very good about that," says Isaac Stefanek, who manages the college's Google Apps deployment.
Getting answers on bigger-picture issues is difficult, though. Paul Hall, the college's senior operations analyst, said the Google Apps mobile device manager fails to recognize e-mail accounts added as IMAP. "If [users] don't use ActiveSync to add it, it doesn't show up as a device you've registered, so we can't manage it," Hall says. Managing Android phones also requires an app to be installed on the phone itself, a somewhat annoying requirement to enforce in a bring-your-own-device environment. Hall and Stefanek said they haven't gotten much of a response from Google when they asked for changes to these aspects of the mobile device management system.
"They've always been very responsive about the individual small items," Stefanek said. "With the larger scale items, it seems were just one more vote in the giant pool."
Joe Moran, head of IT at the nonprofit Quality Services for the Autism Community in New York, says for the most part it's easier to check the Apps Status Dashboard than to contact support. "We can fill out a support ticket, and usually google will get back to us in three hours. Or we could post in a forum, but that tends to feel like crowdsourcing for an answer," he says.
Although Moran has tried calling Google, "we're often unsuccessful reaching anybody by phone," he said. "If anybody at the organization asks us what's going on and can we resolve the issue, our general answer is 'Google's working on it.'"
Every few months or so, Moran's organization has suffered outages for one to three hours, and other times when individual e-mails have been delayed 24 to 48 hours. Still, "overall, our employees are really satisfied with Google Apps and it's helped them be more productive," Moran said.
With Google adding 24/7 phone support for all types of problems, Moran thinks "it will definitely help in those instances where we need immediate support. But at this point it's not a deal-breaker for us."
With Google making the case that Apps is an enterprise-worthy alternative to Microsoft software, a more robust support system for existing customers will surely help its cause. 24/7 phone support for all issues is a good step, but solving the day-to-day problems that nag customers relying on Google Apps requires a lot more than just picking up the phone.
Listing image by Photograph by lamont_cranston
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