“Sir, why are you irate?”
This was what Jonathan, a customer service agent in Google Montreal’s Google Apps call center, said to me this morning.
Well Jonathan– allow me to tell you why I am irate with your company right now. One of your corporate values is Do No Evil. In fact, your founder has repeatedly gotten applause for this corporate value. He loves to say it in speeches. No doubt, that motto is probably somewhere in the building you work in.
And yet, in the course of the past 5 weeks I have been repeatedly lied to, deceived, and lead to believe my case had been resolved. I can’t tell you how many times some specialist like you has tried to convince me they would call me back in full knowledge they were just using it as a tactic to get me off the phone. I am irate right now because your company’s system has erroneously billed me $1127. In fact, by your own admission, I owe you $8.33 which I will gladly give to you right now in any form of payment you will accept. But your system won’t allow me to give you the $8.33 I actually owe you because your engineers have built a system which does not allow you to either delete or modify billing… even when your engineers have already admitted that it was a mistake within Google Drive that caused my account to be billed for two 8 terabyte accounts of Drive storage when I asked for 8 GB. Moreover, you have admitted that neither an 8 terabyte nor 8 gigabyte Drive will work on my Apps account…but that’s not really the point.
A week ago, a very lovely man in your Dublin office assured me that an account billing specialist would be calling me within an hour to fix this. He unsuspended our account, apologized in full knowledge that this was your engineers fault and not mine.
7 days passed and no one called me.
And now, for the 2nd time, my account has been suspended because I can’t pay you. Now you are telling me that some person on the other end of your chat window will not authorize unsuspending my account because they didn’t call me back.
So there is something you can do. You can tell that person to authorize the lifting of the suspension.
I am irate right now because you are suspending my account for no reason. I can’t give you the $8.33 I owe you because your system won’t take my money while this dispute is in process. I’m irate because people on 3 continents have lied to me. I’m irate because you just told me there’s nothing that can be done while at the same time saying that the reason my account wasn’t just unsuspended was because a person you are chatting with won’t authorize it.
That’s why I’m irate, Jonathan. Your company is doing evil. While you are simply a cog in a very big corporate wheel you are unwilling to do more than pass me off as some irate customer before you go to get lunch. I’m irate because you won’t do anything. You won’t stand up and say… “Hey, we’re screwing this guy. Isn’t there something I can do right now?”
Do you understand why I am irate right now?
If you know someone at Google who can resolve this case, who will take my $8.33, or who has guts enough to break through the silos and do the right thing, please contact me.
If you would like to help me but don’t know anyone at Google, please share this post on Facebook, Twitter, and especially Google+.
This is not a meme. This is not a joke. This is happening to my small business right now. If you need my case number or my phone number or any of the names/departments/employee numbers of the people I’ve spoken with and referred to in this post, please contact me.
I’m not anti-Google. In fact, we love our Google Apps account. We just need this mess resolved so we can get back to business.
UPDATE: Thanks to all of your tweets, Facebook posts, and Google plussing… it seems we are moving towards a resolution. I’ll let you know for sure.
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