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> For instance, the crypto exchange FTX with 150 employees rivals Coinbase and its 4115 employees. I bet Coinbase has better customer support. Customer support

> For instance, the crypto exchange FTX with 150 employees rivals Coinbase and its 4115 employees. I bet Coinbase has better customer support. Customer support for a financial institution can be 1000+ people, which inflates numbers but has a huge impact on the customer. Imagine you deposit 10k and your balance isn't showing up. A company with 150 employees is going to try to use the same (potentially broken) automated systems to help you. It can be really comforting to know there is a human on the other end looking at your account and saying, "yeah that doesn't look right, let me fix this for you."

tluyben2 5y ago
> I bet Coinbase has better customer support. Customer support for a financial institution can be 1000+ people, which inflates numbers but has a huge impact on the customer. I have no experience, but whenever I read about coinbase support, people are crying how horrible it is. Reading only now, people are calling it The Worst they ever encountered. Anyone with experience here?
- Seattle3503 5y ago
  If you look at volume Coinbase does something like 2x as much volume as FTX. Volume isn't the end all be all of an exchange, but we would expect larger exchanges with more trading users to have more complaints.
  - spywaregorilla 5y ago
    2x sounds like not a lot?
- trynewideas 5y ago
  I mean, which support? That's the question I always wonder about when I see "good teams are small, bad teams are large", because if you're a Coinbase, you have these groups needing support: - Consumer-level users - Business users - Cloud developers - Ecosystem platform partners - Outsourcing partners - Lawyers, for formal complaints and civil violations - Law enforcement, for criminal violations - Government support, with special clearance and security training requirements Then if you do 24/7 global support, you need to replicate that support expertise across multiple geos trained to triage and hand issues off across TZs and languages. So who _generally_ gets the bad support experience? It's often the small-potatoes consumers, because those complaints have the smallest business value. But who generates the most noise? Small-potatoes consumers, because there are thousands upon thousands of them, and some will start social media accounts, blogs, and groups JUST to complain about the support. But in the end, they're still small potatoes to the people at the top of the success/service or sales orgs, who look at churn numbers and say, "oh, we lost $xM in business in the consumer segment because our service locked them out of their accounts, but we have a single $xxxM customer who thinks our UI needs more polish, and also they heard about NFTs and want to trade them. so we want eng to prioritize those things over fixing the consumer app, and we'll hire x support reps to get the consumer first-response time down, then lay them off in a reorg after a couple of quarters. and now who wants whisky????" So you wind up with a large support team, "good" metrics, a customer base of small users who are mad all the time, enough Tier 2/3s to handle the small enterprise customers' needs, and enough managers to run interference with large enterprise customers to buy time for engineers to show up to calls so the big fish feel heard.

tluyben2 5y ago

> I bet Coinbase has better customer support. Customer support for a financial institution can be 1000+ people, which inflates numbers but has a huge impact on the customer. I have no experience, but whenever I read about coinbase support, people are crying how horrible it is. Reading only now, people are calling it The Worst they ever encountered. Anyone with experience here?

Seattle3503 5y ago
If you look at volume Coinbase does something like 2x as much volume as FTX. Volume isn't the end all be all of an exchange, but we would expect larger exchanges with more trading users to have more complaints.
- spywaregorilla 5y ago
  2x sounds like not a lot?
trynewideas 5y ago
I mean, which support? That's the question I always wonder about when I see "good teams are small, bad teams are large", because if you're a Coinbase, you have these groups needing support: - Consumer-level users - Business users - Cloud developers - Ecosystem platform partners - Outsourcing partners - Lawyers, for formal complaints and civil violations - Law enforcement, for criminal violations - Government support, with special clearance and security training requirements Then if you do 24/7 global support, you need to replicate that support expertise across multiple geos trained to triage and hand issues off across TZs and languages. So who _generally_ gets the bad support experience? It's often the small-potatoes consumers, because those complaints have the smallest business value. But who generates the most noise? Small-potatoes consumers, because there are thousands upon thousands of them, and some will start social media accounts, blogs, and groups JUST to complain about the support. But in the end, they're still small potatoes to the people at the top of the success/service or sales orgs, who look at churn numbers and say, "oh, we lost $xM in business in the consumer segment because our service locked them out of their accounts, but we have a single $xxxM customer who thinks our UI needs more polish, and also they heard about NFTs and want to trade them. so we want eng to prioritize those things over fixing the consumer app, and we'll hire x support reps to get the consumer first-response time down, then lay them off in a reorg after a couple of quarters. and now who wants whisky????" So you wind up with a large support team, "good" metrics, a customer base of small users who are mad all the time, enough Tier 2/3s to handle the small enterprise customers' needs, and enough managers to run interference with large enterprise customers to buy time for engineers to show up to calls so the big fish feel heard.