We’ve written before about Google’s approach to public-facing customer service: they have none. They sell upgraded cloud services, number porting through Google Voice, and the occasional Android smartphone. What they don’t particularly seem to want to do is actually deal with any of the icky customers who have purchased these services. Reader Indub is one of many customers with actual problems who can’t get a response out of Google.

Sending customers to a web forum for help can be a good idea if most of your users’ problems tend to be behind the keyboard. Power users can help the n00bs out. That’s not really the case with Google Voice. Paying customers cry out for help in the forum, and no Googlers are there to hear them.

Indub writes:

I currently have requested, paid for and half completed a port of a number out of Google Voice (and ported my old cell number in) 2 weeks ago. The problem is that I cannot receive phone calls from anyone, and I cannot receive texts from anyone but ATT subscribers (i switched to Straight Talk). The problem lies with Google Voice properly releasing my number. My only option is to go to the Google Voice forums for help but I found a lot of other people with the same complaints and nobody at Google is helping. There is no support telephone number and no direct way to contact anybody from Google.

I’m currently on 14 days of no phone calls and no texts and I’m not the only one. It’s a pretty sad state of affairs on the forums for porting and it seems to only be getting worse with literally nobody from Google posting on the forum for almost 3 – 5 days. Below is the link to the forum. With such a large company and so many applications I would expect at least some form of customer service. But it really is not there!

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