If you've bought anything from Google directly, you might have had a bad customer service experience, especially if you had any issues that you needed resolved. Unfortunately, Google kinda sorta sucks at fixing issues, as we've noted before with a Google Fi nightmare.
But that's not the only instance of people having serious issues after buying from Google directly. 9to5Google has rounded up a ton of problems that people have been having on Reddit, and they've noted that most of the solutions have actually come from Reddit, too, not from Google directly. It's not good when a social media site does a better job than your own customer service.
A big instance, for example, is a customer that needed to do an RMA swap with Google. Google requested the customer ship the phone via FedEx, who then lost the phone. But that person couldn't file a claim for the lost package, since Google created the label; it was technically Google's package, and Google's responsibility to file the claim for the lost device. Google kept redirecting him to talk to FedEx about it, though. Yikes.
For customers like this, a “Google Product Expert” on Reddit that goes by dmziggy created a Reddit Requests system so he could catch all of this issues that fell outside of what Google's customer service could fix. For the most part, he does a good job of getting those issues resolved, too. Which is great!
The problem comes in when you realize that Google/Alphabet, a behemoth of a multi-billion dollar company that sells $1000 phones, can't actually support those phones despite having a paltry market share next to Samsung and Apple. What exactly would be Google's plan if people did want to buy Pixels in droves, and their market share doubled or tripled in a few months? How bad would the system be at that point?
You can read more about some of the terrible experiences on 9to5Google's post about the matter, but keep it in mind when it comes time to decide what the next phone you're going to buy will be. And maybe get it from Amazon or Best Buy, and not Google.
source: 9to5Google
