Until Google demonstrates that they understand how to handle customer service I will never use this service. Google is horrible when it comes to dealing with customers.
Exactly. We use Prime a lot, and for Google to convince us to switch, Google's gonna have to become a completely different company.
Aside from having a lot of stuff, aside from it all being at great prices, we also know that it's backed by a company with amazing, second-to-none customer service. I've had to call up Amazon just once, for some hard-to-find solderable fuses for a special client project. The first batch I ordered shipped on time but never showed up; the client needed the machine back the day after the fuses were due to arrive. I called up Amazon to see if I could arrange overnight delivery, and not only did they do that, but they didn't charge me anything for the shipping or for the second batch of fuses. They just asked me to ship back the first batch when it finally showed up, which I did, a few days later.
Google meanwhile has a pretty rough reputation when it comes to customer service. Their attitude seems to be that "customer service doesn't scale". I think Amazon pretty handily proves that wrong. I find it difficult to believe that Google is going to be the next Amazon -- they just don't "get" people.
There are a few companies that have my undying loyalty because they've gone out of their way to be great before some competition has forced them to. Amazon is one of those.
I read somewhere that Jeff Bezos considers it a bug in Amazon's customer service system when a customer has to get in contact with them.
My impression of Google is that they feel the same way, but haven't figured out how to gracefully handle the errors those bugs cause, while Amazon has.
I've never needed Google or Amazon's customer service, though, so I'm basing my opinion on what I've heard from others.
> Google is that they feel the same way, but haven't figured out how to gracefully handle the errors those bugs cause, while Amazon has
That's because Amazon sees you as the customer, while Google sees you as some type of a cheap-commodity/product to be sold (via click-throughs) to the real customers, the advertisers.
Google has burned many many people with their complete disregard towards us, including myself...
It's a good point. Extending the analogy out a bit, Amazon has fantastic instrumenting that let's them see failures in their system, debuggers, memory inspectors, object lifetime inspectors etc.
while Google isn't even bothering to print most of their errors to the console. They have very little idea how their customer experience is other than sales numbers and they appear to pretty much ignore the few places they do directly interact with end users in their forums. The GAE pricing nonsense was one of the most insane customer interaction spectacles I've ever seen.
It's funny, about the only time we've ever seen any sort of input/output with Google has been here on HN with the few Google employees that haunt this forum, checking out problems this community is reporting.
Another part is I think they're trying to drive adoption of the Google Wallet/Checkout payment system, which also has a beneficial effect to other parts of their ecosystem such as Youtube, Android/Google TV etc.
