Thanks Matt, I appreciate it. What's so frustrating for me is that I want Google to be the good guys. I want to be able to recommend any and all Google products to friends and family. I hold Google in high esteem, which made this interaction that much worse because it was so far from what I think Google is capable of.
You could go the Zappos route of actually empower customer service reps. But at the very least, I would expect Google to build better in house CRM tools to feed helpful content to the support reps rather than making them repeat themselves.
From what I've heard from friends at Google, internal tools like this have a notoriously hard time getting engineering resources. I wish they could turn it into a sexy machine learning project and actually get some resources on fixing this issue.
You're totally right, I thought about ordering a second set of phones and then initiating a chargeback if the first set didn't arrive/weren't resent.
If there had been absolutely no support from Google, that's what I would have done. But they claimed to be making progress in helping me. Fool me 32 times, shame on me.
This is exactly what happened - UPS said "We strongly suggest that you contact your shipper to initiate a package investigation. Shippers are encouraged to report lost packages because receivers may not have all the shipment information needed to perform a thorough investigation."
I conveyed that information to Google, and Google strung me along giving me the impression that they were doing something about it, albeit slowly.
I agree, I'm rooting for Google and would just like them to fix their customer support.
I get that they can't profitably provide any kind of support for, say, Google Groups. As we like to say around here, if you don't pay them, then you're the product and you can't expect good service. But once they start moving into markets where you pay them money, the bar is higher. In this case, I'm the customer and their support is by far the worst customer experience of my life. Worse than the time a US Airways stewardess took my carry-on bag off the plane before take-off without telling me.
Haha, I am most assuredly a real person, not a paid actor. My girlfriend got tired of me venting about it and actually being angry, so I turned my anger into humorous flourish.
My goal in this is to get some kind of human being at Google to respond. #googleplayed - what do you think? Could it catch on?