[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Google have lost one of my customers; potent...
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Ask HN: Google have lost one of my customers; potential legal
trouble
I set up my business 12 years ago, and since then it's been just
me, mainly doing freelance software development, but I have always
offered "Gmail for work" which became "Google Apps For Business"
which became "GSuite" which became "Google Workplace". Over the
years, after becoming a reseller of Google's services, I resell
Google Workplace for a slight profit margin, as I've found that my
customers often have a real requirement of what Gmail for work can
offer, so it's always been a good fit. Three months ago, a
customer asked me how to add a user to their organisation, so I
sent them a link to the documentation
(https://support.google.com/a/answer/33310). They continued to
email back, claiming they couldn't do it. After a few back and
forth emails, I logged into my reseller console, which allows me to
administer my customers' domains... but the customer's domain was
not in the list. The customer was getting a generic error when
trying to access admin.google.com - please contact your domain
administrator (me). When I tried to log in, their domain was simply
not in the list of customers. Since then, I've been on countless
live chats, phone calls and email threads with Google support, but
nobody's listening. Every time I get passed to another person, I
have to explain everything from the start again, and I'm pointed to
a Google Forms page to submit my "I can't access my account"
request. Submitting the form doesn't do anything. In fact, the
support feels like I'm being trialled on teaching some kind of
defective AI how to discuss problems with my Google account, or
maybe I'm communicating via Google Translate to a non-English
speaking sweatshop? Anyway, my customer has been waiting to add a
user for 3 months now, and they're getting shirty - possible legal
issues are coming my way because of my incompetance. I honestly
don't know what to do. Google have just pulled the plug on a
customer, and now I'm in hot water with nobody to talk to. Has
anyone got any advice?
Author : g105b
Score : 21 points
Date : 2022-09-30 21:36 UTC (1 hours ago)
| phillipseamore wrote:
| Sounds like good security to me, if you are no longer affiliated
| with the account they shouldn't provide you with any information.
| I've never heard of the Workspace reseller stuff before. Did they
| bill you for the customer account? If so, when did your bill get
| lower? Then you might figure out when something changed. I'd
| guess the client either made someone else admin or was somehow
| compromised.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| > Every time I get passed to another person, I have to explain
| everything from the start again
|
| Just keep the whole thing in a FAQ text/md document and give them
| that instead of spending time explaining it? Then you can respond
| with 'I've explained that, please consult item 5 in the
| document'. If they say 'you need to talk to X' then respond with
| 'sounds like you need talk to them for me, I have no insight into
| your corporate structure.'
|
| As with many other issues of this type, if you are running a
| business then at some point you should delegate the issue to an
| attorney because it will be cheaper than spending more of your
| own time on it, and writing the issue up on paper makes it real
| in a way that open support tickets are not.
| reustle wrote:
| When I run into issues like this, I always get a case number
| after each chat and then pass it to the next person and ask
| them to read up on it to start. May not work with Google,
| though.
| wizwit999 wrote:
| pretty sure G admin has audit logs, have you verified it wasn't
| caused by something else?
| jcz_nz wrote:
| They can't get into admin, that's the whole point...
| anigbrowl wrote:
| What about the logs for OP's reseller console? That is, there
| might be a record of them creating the domain for customer X,
| which they can then submit to Google.
| joshxyz wrote:
| I think what you should be focusing in is their business
| continuity, they are losing money over that, gotta migrate them
| out of google.
| xoz wrote:
| Unrelated but for any Googlers, you can't add a domain to Google
| Workspace if it has the word 'mail' on it. Perhaps makes sense
| for fraud but we were working with a company that does something
| physical mail-related and were unable to use Google workspace.
| hellohowareu wrote:
| Posts like these remind me to stay away from Google for Business.
|
| Google doesn't seem to care about their users-- This is a common
| problem with Google: There's no way to get in contact with a
| human-- unless you create a viral twitter post about the problem.
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(page generated 2022-09-30 23:02 UTC)