When You Pay Google For A Service, Don't Expect Any Actual Help
What Justin wanted to do is pretty simple. He wanted to take his Google Voice number and port it to his new Sprint phone. This is a thing that you can do with Google Voice, if you pay. But as early purchasers of the Nexus One and other people who have issues with Google have learned, Google will happily accept your money, but doesn’t like to deal with actual icky customers. Their default customer support option–posting on a forum and hoping someone with power notices–isn’t cutting it for Justin anymore, since he’s having problems with text messages on his ported number.
There’s an ongoing issue that’s played out on the Google Product Forums concerning Google Voice, and lingering issues with incoming SMS after users have paid Google money to unlock and port out their number away to another wireless carrier.
For a while, a Community Manager was addressing this issue one user at a time–apparently having to manually “remove” ported-out numbers from a Google Voice database–but he appears to have stopped intervening on users’ behalf some time ago.
Meanwhile, affected users continue to provide the information he requested from us in the original post, with no acknowledgment from Google.
I worked with over a half-dozen Sprint reps over many weeks to resolve my issue, no thanks to Google.
I recall that Google had some real issues providing adequate support and customer service when they released the Nexus One. Sadly, it appears they’re still not ready to be in the phone business.
We haven’t been able to solve the mystery of how to extract customer service from the impenetrable Googleplex. Sometimes, helpful elves within the company will step up and put our customers in touch with someone who can get them the help they need. That’s about it.
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