Google has terrible customer service. Big surprise, right? Yes, I know I’m getting many things for free. I don’t dispute that. My problem is when they are happy to charge me money but not provide any support related to those charges.
I have a few of the old Free Google Apps accounts from years ago. With my recent changes in registrars, I went ahead and transferred all my domains over to Gandi (which has excellent support). This means Google can no longer renew my domains because they are not the registrar. However, that didn’t stop them from trying to bill me $10 for one of my domain renewals, which they cannot technically even provide.
I was not given any way to cancel this order. When I tried to disable domain renewal (which shouldn’t even be an option) I was given an error. As you can sadly imagine, when I tried to contact support, I found out that the required customer PIN is not available for free accounts. In fact, their automated system will hang up on you if you can’t provide one! If you are not an enterprise customer, you have no way to address these billing issues. Mind you they are the ones that charged me money. Even Google Wallet is no help because they blindly push you onto the merchant.
So, I called Chase, my credit card company, and after a couple minutes on hold was greeted by a very helpful, well spoken man who walked me through my options and told me how to easily dispute the charge online. It looks like my only option is to dispute it since Google provides me no way to even contact them about this invalid charge. If Google Wallet is going to be a payment processor, they need customer service like a credit card company or even PayPal for that matter.
Just for curiosity I looked into contacting PayPal, who I also do not pay for their service, and sure enough they very easily give you a customer PIN and phone number to call. Chase, who I also do not pay for their service, was available with little wait time and had a helpful conversation with me.
Make no mistake that Google makes money off me. They are not a charity. I can understand why they don’t help me over the phone when I want to configure a filter for my email. But if they are going to charge me money, they need to give me a way to contact them about it or handle it online. Instead they left me helpless, simply notifying me that they were charging me and giving me no way to respond.