by Anita Campbell
November 2, 2008 at 11:15 am
· Filed under Enterprise 2.0, Web Apps
A few weeks ago I wrote about The Downside of Free Apps. I pointed out how it can be difficult to get customer support in a timely fashion sometimes if you are a user of a free app.
It’s not that I am against free stuff. On the contrary, say the word “free” and I’m salivating just like one of Pavlov’s best puppies. In fact, it would have been a lot more expensive to start my business had I not had the use of so many wonderful free online apps.
But now that my small business has gotten legs and is moving past the startup stage, I really have to think long and hard about whether I can continue to run the business when some of my key business tools are free. Maybe, just maybe, that’s being penny wise and pound foolish. Perhaps opting for that upgraded paid account is the least risky and least expensive option, after all. Then if I encounter a problem, at least I’ll have the chance to get real customer service to fix it.
That thought brings me around to a blog post on The Official Google Blog by Matthew Glotzbach, Product Management Director, Google Enterprise. He makes a pretty significant announcement, noting that Google is now guaranteeing 99.9% uptime for all its enterprise Apps (Premier Apps), including GMail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Sites, and Google Talk:
Today, we’re announcing that we will extend the 99.9 percent service level agreement we offer Premier Edition customers on Gmail to Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Sites, and Google Talk. We have been delivering high levels of reliability across all these products, so it makes sense to extend our guarantees to them.More than 1 million businesses have selected Google Apps to run their business, and tens of millions of people use Gmail every day. With this type of adoption, a disruption of any size — even a minor one affecting fewer than 0.003% of Google Apps Premier Edition users, like the one a few weeks ago — attracts a disproportional amount of attention. We’ve made a series of commitments to improve our communications with customers during any outages, and we have an unwavering commitment to make all issues visible and transparent through our open user groups.
Google is one of the 1 million businesses that run on Google Apps, and any service interruption affects our users and our business; our engineers are also some of our most demanding customers. We understand the importance of delivering on the cloud’s promise of greater security, reliability and capability at lower cost. We are hugely thankful to our customers who drive us to become better every day.
This is a significant move by Google. I think it helps.
But you know what the biggest selling point to me is? It’s this line in the Google Apps for Business section on “Getting Help” where it says, “For one-on-one help troubleshooting critical issues, email and telephone support is available from the control panel.”
That’s what businesspeople really want — especially small biz owners and managers who don’t have an in-house tech staff to go to with tech issues. If an outage happens or our account is incorrectly disabled or unusable, we want to be able to call someone at the app provider. We don’t want to have to pay our contract tech help $100/hour to try to troubleshoot the issues and end up with an unexpected bill for $500. And we’re busy and don’t have extra time to go over to discussion boards and compose questions and see if someone who actually knows what they’re talking about will answer you (without insulting you for your supposed stupidity, which sadly happens all too frequently at the Google User Groups).
We want to be able to make it someone else’s priority to fix.
And that is the real reason to go for paid apps, instead of free ones, in your business.
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Sunil K wrote @ November 3rd, 2008 at 7:26 am
Technical help on Google Apps is available starting from $5 per hour hour unlike what you mentioned as $100. I understand there are companies who charge exorbitant – but they are for enterprise level customers; while the small business enterprise can trust companies like us to provide the support they need for Google Apps and related applications.
Sunil
Dhruvsoft
(www.dhruvsoft.com)
Hi Sunil, Wow! thanks for pointing out another benefit of Google Apps: the provider marketplace. After your comment I went over and looked at the provider marketplace for setting up Google Apps. There’s even a special category for small business support. So essentially you can get someone to set up Google Apps for your business, and also provide technical support. That is a good benefit and a superior alternative to relying on free GMail where you are out walking a tightrope without a safety net of any kind.
Anita
Great article! I think that any company that’s relying on a free app to run an important part of its business is making a mistake. Every company has to cover its costs somehow, and if the company that’s providing the app isn’t generating sales revenues, I think it’s appropriate to be nervous about the company’s future as a going concern. I saw a recent article related to the topic and posted a blog entry here: http://community.trackvia.com/posts/d31a8b23c7
Hello,
just a late post…. main reason for us to go to paid version of Google Apps: SLA. Using free sites give you the risk of your account being closed without a reason by Google. So you have no rights, only risks. Therefore every commercial use of Apps should be paid, to work under the SLA of 99.9% availability.
We have tried the paid version of Google Apps and their tech support stinks, it takes days for them to respond, unless one of the services is down for one or more users, you cannot simply call, you must email or file a report through their website.
They want you to run troubleshooting tools, rather than be a good tech support and remotely logging in and running them themselves.
They act more like they are doing you a favor by providing support rather than doing what we have paid them to do!
Ben wrote @ September 1st, 2009 at 3:29 pm
I’m a small business owner, running the free version of Apps (which is down right now, thats how I found this article, it’s been down for 10-15 minutes as far as I can tell)
I’d be willing to use the paid version if they’d give me tel #’s to a tech support dept at Google and I could call in and get immediate support. I pretty much suspected, as Chris Wade mentioned above that their support is not really going to be helpful in time of need. I’m more than happy to go with a 3rd party as mentioned above if I knew of a company that offered a reliable service at an affordable price.
Do you really think for $50/user per year you are “paying” Google and they are going to offer some unbelieveable tech support??? doubt it…
Chris and Ben,
Let me preface the following comment by making 3 preliminary points:
1) I’m not here to defend Google Apps — they’re big enough they can defend themselves.
2) This article was more of an analytical commentary on a reason to use a paid app and why users would pay for an app, and not an endorsement of Google Apps per se.
3) Finally, Google is a billion-dollar company and if their support is poor, they don’t deserve having me defend them anyway.
That said, my company is a Google Apps paid user. We pay $50 PER USER per year, not just $50 a year. We have not had to use the support options, other than standard FAQs and troubleshooting documents (which solved our issues).
If your Apps applications are inaccessible, there is a toll-free number you can call in the control panel. For other issues, you have to use email support. I can’t comment on the quality or timeliness of their email support or phone support, since I’ve never had to use either.
Here’s the way things should work: the marketplace will determine whether Google’s support is sufficient, just like for any company. If businesses are getting crappy support, they won’t renew their Google Apps Premier accounts and will go with a better solution. And that’s the way it should be.
Vote with your feet.
– Anita
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