Google's horrid customer service is well known on HN, but I wanted to give a point of superb customer service to Google on their Cr-48 notebook program.
I received my Cr-48 at the beginning of December and immediately tried to use it on my wireless at home. The system worked, but was slow and miserable to use. I fiddled with several settings on my wireless router but couldn't get it to do anything. I took it to work and tried it on their wireless with a much better result. While there I filed a problem report at the customer support website (http://www.google.com/support/chromeos/bin/request.py?contact_type=device_issue). I received an e-mail confirmation from a bot and was immediately concerned that my problem would get filed among thousands of others and I would never get contacted. I was quite wrong.
The following business day I received a personal e-mail from the Google Ninja assigned to my case. He wanted to know the most convenient method and time for contacting me (Google Talk, phone, e-mail, Skype were all options). Some phone tag resulted, but he ended up diagnosing the problem, doing some bug searches and found I was experiencing the bug reported here: http://code.google.com/p/chromium-os/issues/detail?id=10249.
After this diagnosis he thanked me for my time and informed me that any further issues could go directly to his e-mail instead of through the website.
I realize that this support is specific to a developer testing program, but it was certainly a great experience. It would be wonderful if Google took the time and money to apply this sort of experience to other Google products as well.
Google's horrid customer service is well known on HN, but I wanted to give a point of superb customer service to Google on their Cr-48 notebook program.
I received my Cr-48 at the beginning of December and immediately tried to use it on my wireless at home. The system worked, but was slow and miserable to use. I fiddled with several settings on my wireless router but couldn't get it to do anything. I took it to work and tried it on their wireless with a much better result. While there I filed a problem report at the customer support website (http://www.google.com/support/chromeos/bin/request.py?contact_type=device_issue). I received an e-mail confirmation from a bot and was immediately concerned that my problem would get filed among thousands of others and I would never get contacted. I was quite wrong.
The following business day I received a personal e-mail from the Google Ninja assigned to my case. He wanted to know the most convenient method and time for contacting me (Google Talk, phone, e-mail, Skype were all options). Some phone tag resulted, but he ended up diagnosing the problem, doing some bug searches and found I was experiencing the bug reported here: http://code.google.com/p/chromium-os/issues/detail?id=10249.
After this diagnosis he thanked me for my time and informed me that any further issues could go directly to his e-mail instead of through the website.
I realize that this support is specific to a developer testing program, but it was certainly a great experience. It would be wonderful if Google took the time and money to apply this sort of experience to other Google products as well.