With all of the recent stories of people being locked out of their Google Accounts with no recourse, it would be great if Google offered one-time customer support for, say, $50 that would work with you to restore access to your accounts.
They may not make money hand-over-fist but I bet there's enough need for the service that it would be self-supporting.
I propose Google Human™, a new service that gets you in contact with a Google support person, where you pay a rate of $5.00/mo to get premium Human™ support services, so you can get back into your account without having to yell over social media in an outrage and 'escalate' your issue to Google employees over Hackernews or Twitter.
Its already happening in Google Apps. Technically Google provides free support and phone support if you pay $50/year but if you signup with a reseller they also provide support and usually have a contact at Google for any issue they can't resolve.
To be fair, both GSuite (business oriented) and Google One (for end users) come with paid support. Not sure to what extent this includes recovering a locked-out account, but it's a thing.
Google needs to realize that their services (such as Gmail) are critical to a lot of people. I understand why they don't want to offer free support for a free product, they would get flooded with useless support requests. However, they need to offer a paid support option. Something like $25 per support request call. This would reduce the calls to only truly urgent and necessary issues.
It's possible to get something similar using Google Apps and a custom domain. But they need to start offering paid support for the free services (@gmail.com) as well.
I understand the struggle of trying to provide free support to billions of users, but more companies should provide a "pay a fee for real customer support" kinda hot line. Whatever price is costs to provide said support, honestly, many would be happy to pay for it.
Google sorta does this through Google One, it's 2-3$ a month and you also get some extra storage space. It's not perfect but you actually get to talk to a real human being.
In general, I don't think you can expect free support for a free product. I do think businesses should let you buy support for any tier of product, both as part of a subscription and on a one-time basis.
It seems there's a simple solution for this, paid customer support. Why doesn't Google have an option where someone can pay $50 (or some other set amount) to get assistance? This would immediately filter it to only legitimate and serious cases.
The number of times I've heard of people only getting support from Google because they know someone on the inside is quite astonishing.
If I were an Google employee looking to make a few extra bucks I'd definitely start offering to help "nudge" account issues for a few extra bucks under the table.
Anyone can get Google support with Google One [0] for as low as 2$ a month (along side 100GB of storage).
The issue is people expect free products they haven't paid a penny for to have live customer support, which doesn't make much sense at the billion user scale.
It would be very difficult to model a financial benefit of offering dedicated support for free products. If you pay for Google One (extra storage), you get access to phone support. I wonder if they would've been able to help in this situation of a locked account.
Google really fails hard in the face of providing support when issues like this occur. The average person has to try various automated account recovery options which, as in the author's case, are readily changeable the moment the account is compromised, rendering them somewhat useless, and then users are out of luck.
It's a situation that is mind-boggling. Users as asked to place a significant chunk of their digital lives in the care of Google, it is unbelievable that they fail this badly. It's useful to note than it's not a situation that business users face. People who pay for G-suite have real support, even ::gasp:: telephone support. Why on earth does google not offer this to consumer users? I would gladly pay for that level of support and security. For that matter if there were some way of converting my personal account over to G-Suite I would do so.
I would even not mind something like one-time payments for support calls, for example pay $50 for a service call to get assistance in a case like this. I just can't fathom the "no support" model at all.
I don't even know if you still use Google One support post account ban I was just pointing out Google is not only capable but they already operate a human support service at extremely low cost.
I've had a few experiences trying to get help from Google on their products. After I can't get help, I just switch to another service which actually has customer support. It would be cool if they could use this as a way to interface with their customers but I think that if they opened up that floodgate, it would significantly increase their overhead.
The context here is providing support to unlock accounts that have been wrongfully closed. The number of support incidents per user per year for this specific problem is likely to be at least one order of magnitude lower than one incident per year. Using your estimates as a base, the cost of this service would be no more than 250 million.
For Google, as a company that has recorded a yearly net profit of over $35 billion, this is chump change. The fact that they could afford to offer some customer service regarding such a critical issue as restoring access to lost accounts, yet choose not to, smacks of corporate entitlement.
The optics wouldn't be great, but Google (and their customers) would really benefit by having a very expensive paid support service available on a per-incident basis.
To me, the issue with Google's products and services is that they're not willing to provide any human customer service to resolve the real issues.
Now, of course, I understand that even Google can't reasonably be expected to provide free 24/7 customer support for the entire Internet. If they had a normal phone number available where anybody could reach a human at any time, every confused person would call them with issues that are completely unrelated to Google's actual products and even Google would be overwhelmed.
The solution is to figure out some payment level for support that dissuades casual abuse of customer service, but is still reasonable for people to use in an emergency to save their business or communication accounts.
I'm convinced that at least some people have lost jobs and companies, had their lives ruined, or even committed suicide over being completely unable to salvage everything they've worked for all of their lives. This should be horrifying to every Google employee.
I would like to see Google create a marketplace for support. They allow people to buy some access to their internal systems, who then sell support service. There would need to be careful vetting and monitoring of the people who buy the access, but if that could be made to work, end users get access to support, and Google wouldn't have to staff it.
Of course, they would have to provide support to the support providers, but that would be a much smaller, more knowledgeable population.
They may not make money hand-over-fist but I bet there's enough need for the service that it would be self-supporting.
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