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Sorry for the issues here—could you email me at edwin@stripe.com?
by edwinwee 4y ago
Sorry for the issues here—could you email me at edwin@stripe.com?
- artursapek 4y agoWhy is complaining on HN necessary to get proper customer support?
- xwdv 4y agoBecause otherwise you have no leverage. If you go through proper channels your request for help will sit rotting in a queue until someone decides to pick up the ticket. If you complain loudly and publicly in a popular forum, everyone’s opinion of the company will degrade the longer your cries go visibly unanswered, so it requires immediate attention. Your request gets elevated to critical.
- refulgentis 4y agoI understand this position but after going from support-intensive startup to FAANG, the difference is scale subtly tipping the balance in small ways. There's no equivalent for "overhearing a customer problem" at FAANG scale. It would be dramatically inefficient for software engineers / product managers / those implementing functionality to triage all support tickets. About 0.5% of support tickets are interesting enough to be a case study the way this user has offered. At both large and small scale.
- lotsofpulp 4y ago> at FAANG scale and it would be dramatically inefficient for software engineers / product managers / those implementing functionality to triage all support tickets In other words, human labor would be too costly. It not a FAANG thing either, the government does it just as well as most other big entities that are betting they can let some problems slip through without too much loss.
- refulgentis 4y agoThere, trivially, aren't enough software engineers on the planet to assign one to every incoming support inquiry.
- lotsofpulp 4y agoNot all problems require software engineers. Just having someone to filter the appropriate problem to the appropriate person is sufficient. For example, > but also slashed our corporate card limits with no explanation and refused to restore them despite our bank writing letters supporting our position. Even a response stating “we do not have the capacity to resolve your issue” is acceptable. Getting black holed or wasting hours of customers’ time in phone trees and getting passed around is not acceptable.
- seb1204 4y agoWhile I agree with your comment I'm not sure how I would feel receiving such a message as a paying customer.
- etiennebausson 4y agoWould you feel better being passed around for hours, with the same result? If they can't solve the issue, I would rather know it early and move on.
- djbusby 4y agoNot too costly, just cuts into CxO salary, shareholders value and stuff. The line must go up!
- Victerius 4y agoI think the admiral asked a rhetorical question.
- aaaaaaaaata 4y ago?
- Victerius 4y ago"Top Gun: Maverick" reference.
- chrisseaton 4y agoWhy do people expect everyone to understand their film references?
- Judgmentality 4y agoThat's like asking why people don't explain jokes. You get it or you don't. Not everything is meant for you.
- xwdv 4y agoIt’s a filtering mechanism. If you get it, you’re a cool guy worth talking to. If not, maybe bugger off.
- chrisseaton 4y agoCool people watch mainstream commercial cinema?
- btilly 4y agoI'm happy to tell anyone who thinks this way that THEY should bugger off. A random movie reference can be expected to not caught by anyone more than 10 years different from you in age, or who is from a different culture. You will also miss some mavericks like me who really don't care much about a lot of popular culture. If you value matching on those criteria over, say, knowing about something interesting, then I'm happy to ignore you.
- m_sahaf 4y agoAs someone who worked as front-line support and turned into the authority who's asked to resolve complex cases, this is nonsense. They aren't playing Tetris ignoring the queue. It's more likely the front-line staff are overwhelmed and/or don't know how to cut through the corporate hoops/politics to find and deliver the fix, and/or too shy/embarrassed to admit ignorance and having to pass it to the higher-ups for someone who knows how to fix things. It's more likely going in circles because they want to resolve it within their levels without having to escalate it.
- KennyBlanken 4y agoAs someone who has worked front-line support: large companies like Stripe purposefully don't create paths in the customer support scripts for resolving issues they don't want to. They're not stupid or blind, they listen to the calls and know these issues crop up. They don't care. Having support staff deal with weird/unusual problems is expensive, more expensive than just having those customers put up with it, or go away and become someone else's problem. Don't blame minimum wage earners for barriers intentionally thrown up by management to reduce labor costs.
- m_sahaf 4y ago> Don't blame minimum wage earners If that's directed at me, I am not blaming anyone. Chill. I'm saying it's a human thing.
- voidfunc 4y agoPosting on a popular forum seems to short-circuit all that and get actual results probably because it starts making some executive squirm. If I'm running a business and losing money because your service is fubar I really don't give a damn that you're all too busy or too ignorant to solve the problem. I'm going to do what I know works and that's basically blast over HN/Twitter/Reddit that your service sucks and has been broke for X duration.
- m_sahaf 4y agoYou're right that a customer shouldn't care the staff are too busy or too ignorant. You're also right in how complaining online short-circuits all that to actually receive help. I continuously advocate for the presence of path to higher levels and short-circuits! But it isn't always "the employee of company X responded to me on HN because my post made an executive squirm!" Some people just care and willing to lend a hand in cases where they can help.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- justapassenger 4y agoBecause that’s 90% of reason why tech startups are profitable. Not by having better product than competition, but buy gutting customer support, which is super expensive AND doesn’t scale. And it works until it doesn’t.
- icelancer 4y agoDone.
- baobob 4y agoWould OP please consider updating this thread with the outcome of the email exchange. Seems too easy to pop into every complaint thread and act busy. Would love to know if your problem is actually resolved
- icelancer 4y agoYes, I will certainly do so.
- icelancer 4y agoUpdate (can't edit the OP): Edwin reached out to me but their team can't override their faulty algorithm apparently. Other banks/payment providers have no issue giving us 3-5x the limit Stripe slashed us to, but they can't. Root cause is the fact that Stripe fundamentally doesn't understand eCommerce / cyclical LOCs in their algorithms apparently as our business hasn't changed meaningfully regarding effective cash positions. Fairly surprising Stripe doesn't understand how to evaluate financial positions correctly. Oh well.
- thiscatis 4y agoWe did that last time you offered and never heard back.
- icelancer 4y agoWell, I'll respond if and when I hear something. I've gotten a confirmation response email from Edwin at the very least. Update: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32558191#32558635 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32558191#32558635
- edwinwee 4y agoAh, sorry, may have missed it—could you forward and put your HN username in the subject?
- mtlynch 4y agoI've had the same experience with Edwin. When I published an article critical of Stripe that reached the front page of HN,[0] he was very helpful and set up a direct phone call for us to talk. Edwin said many times on the call that if I ever ran into a situation where I seemed to be getting the runaround from Stripe support, I could contact him to get things unstuck. A month later, I ran into an issue where the Stripe API contradicted the API documentation. I contacted support, and support told me that it's intended behavior for the API to violate its own documentation. I emailed Edwin since that seemed like the exact scenario he volunteered to help with, and he didn't respond. I followed up a week later, and he didn't respond. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22936818 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22936818
- hindsightbias 4y agoThis is not a serious way to run a business. Unless ypu’re google.
- shawnz 4y agoLetting customers slip through the cracks of the traditional support channels is a bad indicator obviously, but what's the problem with keeping an eye on social media channels in addition to the traditional channels? Why is that not a "serious way to run a business"?
- onion2k 4y agoWhy is that not a "serious way to run a business"? Rather than trying to solve the problem of "customers having serious problems", listening to HN and replying here says "we only really care about people being critical of our product in public; we don't actually care about the underlying issue people are criticising us about." It's not real support if Joe Random can't access it without knowing the secret formula. Support-by-HN-replies is theatre, even if it works sometimes. I'm not really suggesting Stripe are guilty of this. Stripe support has actually been fine for me in the past.
- dylan604 4y agoBecause it's too easy to be bad at that as well. Just look at the thread where "Edwin" (I use quotes because it may or may not actually be Edwin) says "sorry, hit me up" and then the repsonse is "bitch, we did but you never replied back" (emphasis mine, but it was there if you read between the lines). Now, "Edwin" looks even more pathetic and bot like
- KennyBlanken 4y agoHere's a thought: treat your customers better so you don't have to do damage control when one of your customers finds a big enough audience. For every person who gets an HN post/comment with traction, there's a thousand people with no voice or platform just as fucked over or more.