Nexus One – Is Google in over its head?

Posted by Andy on January 12, 2010
Cool Tech

Google’s new phone, the Nexus One was released at CES (I really want to go one year!) and although at first blush the phone seems a rousing success, is Google really prepared to deal with supporting a phone?  Along with the initial sale of the hardware you need to be able to support the people who use the phone and have questions/problems.

Have you ever tried to contact Google?  There are no phone numbers.  No place to call, no human to yell at if your phone stops working or drops a call.  Google’s support model up until this point has been to have forums and email support for its products.  That works very well when you are dealing with software and software services, but phones are different.  User problems are immediate, and people get very mad when they are told sorry, send an email and we’ll get back to you in three days.  That model just won’t work!

According to the NY Times, Google recognizes the problem and says “we have to get better at customer service”.  This from Andy Rubin who is in charge of Android technology for Google.  That sounds great, right?  He goes on to say that instead of taking three days to respond to a customer email, they need to “close that three-day gap to a couple of hours”.  I’m sorry, what?  Are you kidding me?  NO, Mr Rubin, what you need to do is get an 800 number, staff a help desk, and answer people’s questions.   “A couple of hours” is not immediate and just will not do.

And what about enterprise support?  How would I ever think of deploying a device for which I had to wait three days (or a couple of hours) to get support?  It’s laughable.  For a company that gets enterprise computing as well as Google does, I’m really surprised at their complete flat footedness here.

I love most of what Google does – they think about things in unique ways that question the status quo and tend to make real improvements to technologies where I thought improvements were hard to come by and would largely be incremental (think Gmail).  With the Nexus One, I have high hopes that they will eventually pose a real threat to Apples dominance.  That said, Apple REALLY gets customer support and customer loyalty.  If Google has any hope of taping that market, they need to fix their customer service issues.

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