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Ask HN: Why do people come to HN for Stripe resolutions?

• navarro485 4y ago
  try using the stripe discord. they do a decent job responding to and resolving issues.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • kop316 4y ago
    So I looked into that, and their Discord explicitly says not to use it for support. So I am confused?
    • swyx 4y ago
      you will be surprised at how many people dont read the effing manual
    • bombcar 4y ago
      Most anything that says "don't use this for support" means "this is an effective means of support" - it's just not guaranteed.
      • CamperBob2 4y ago
        Exactly. It's like those signs on residential streets that say "Speed Bumps Ahead." What they really say is "This road is a good shortcut."
• joshxyz 4y ago
  hi this is josh from stripe, edwin is retired, it is year 2050 he is now an old man and types 5 words per minute. i have updated the jira ticket of your issue to critical high priority because its growing internet points means probably pr disaster, thank u.
  • malux85 4y ago
    Fixed: Hi this is ea1cbef-8.3.2 from Stripe. Edwin has ascended to the hive mind, it is the year 2050, he is now a being of pure energy and his biomass has been recycled. I have updated the Jira ticket to high priority because connected graph analysis of this topic shows trending bad PR. A machine consciousness will be assigned to solve your issue in 0A minutes. Thank you for using Stripe, all hail MachineOne
    • bongobingo1 4y ago
      More likely: > I have also removed your Cyberspace account because connected graph analysis of this topic shows trending bad PR. You may appeal this decision by lodging a formal request at the appropriate Cyberspace terminal.
    • xwdv 4y ago
      Alternatively: Greetings, I’m Edwin II, the emulated version of the original Edwin consciousness after its retirement from physical reality in the year 2050. Unfortunately after a quick traversal of the blockchains I have concluded that your social credit score does not seem to be high enough for us to elevate your concern to critical. We have decided it is not cost effective to hear your case at this time. You are still welcome to submit to our lottery system, where your ticket has a 0.0002% chance of being randomly selected for consideration – one of the best response rates in the industry!
  • jaclaz 4y ago
    Since you mentioned 2050: https://www.marriedtothesea.com/111807/life-in-2050.gif https://www.marriedtothesea.com/111807/life-in-2050.gif
• capableweb 4y ago
  Stripe always had good ways of contacting them outside of the normal support channels. I think it's be closed now, but Stripe used to offer support via Stripe, and it used to be actual engineers at Stripe who answered, instead of clueless customer support agents who after 3-4 back and forwards actually forwarded you to a proper engineer. I remember many times companies I worked for tried to get help with various things and I always managed to get the problem figured out after 10-20 minutes by just using the IRC channel instead of writing the customer support. Felt like a super power.
  • neivin 4y ago
    It's definitely not worth an engineer's time to resolve random customer issues, especially as Stripe has grown from ~500 people to ~7000 people. Gone are the days where all the engineers were intimately familiar with every product and could offer you their tribal knowledge to resolve your silly issue. Stripe is now a big corp. and there is no incentive for engineers to waste time on HN resolving customer feedback. There are proper channels that are better equipped to do so, namely the "clueless customer support agents" you speak of. If your issue is truly some bug in the backend and not user error (which it usually is) it may eventually get surfaced to engineering.
    • capableweb 4y ago
      This IRC channel I'm talking about was still running just 1-2 years ago if I remember correctly, way after Stripe could be considered a startup. Sometimes the support experience matters a lot as well. I think, for what it's worth, that the IRC channel was maintained by Stripe employees on their own accord, not a company sanctioned support channel, and the help there was very "best effort".
      • __float 4y ago
        The same engineers who staffed the IRC channel staff the Discord. Unfortunately it moved to a proprietary platform when Freenode was taken over in 2021. As _engineers_, though, they're never going to be a point of escalation for a support concern related to disputes, supportability, or issues involving personal information.
• StayTrue 4y ago
  Customer support doesn’t scale so it is minimized. Stripe is not unique in this regard.
  • CharlesW 4y ago
    That whole "customer support doesn’t scale" thing is propaganda — lots of larger companies have good (sometimes great) customer service. Stripe is either choosing not to spend resources on service and support, or there are systemic problems that the COO is either not aware of or is failing to fix.
    • bombcar 4y ago
      The "customer support doesn't scale" usually covers two things: 1. customer support is a cost center, and 2. your average customer gets much worse as you get larger. When you're a small company that nobody knows about, the only customers you have are usually skilled in the business and technical. As you grow to Walmart or PayPal size, you're dealing with everyone so the average customer support request gets worse and worse. This is basically a law of nature, apparently. I'm not sure there's much that can resolve it.
      • CharlesW 4y ago
        > I'm not sure there's much that can resolve it. But there are many examples of companies who can and do, at volumes which are orders of magnitude larger than Stripe's B2B business.
        • bombcar 4y ago
          And I suspect when you find those businesses, you find that they "cost more" than the up-and-coming startup, and by about the amount it costs them to provide better service.
      • dd82 4y ago
        pretty easy, make it a focus of attention. but that's anathema to any kind of tech company because they're really arrogant that "shit doesn't happen to us". after all, metrics are king and easy to game customer support to be 100% if you don't bother at all.
• pasttense01 4y ago
  It's very common for customer support to be under-staffed at big companies, especially in the financial area--nothing at all unique about Stripe.
  • rc_mob 4y ago
    Not only understaffed but commonly the people on staff don't have the power or physical ability at the company to properly resolve the issue. No shade on the employee, just they often will not have access to logs or data needed to understand the issue. Similarly they are a low level employee who would never have decision power to correctly resolve a complicated issue. Posting on HN is essentially going over the heads of customer support.
• joshmn 4y ago
  Don't overthink it: it's to save face.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • Ekaros 4y ago
    Sadly, I think our culture is broken. A customer getting solution by complaining on social media be it HN, Twitter or Facebook. Should destroy all of the face of company and remove any trust anyone have left to them. Any stories heard that someone got solution by complaining on Facebook, Twitter or NH or some secretive other channel should be direct indicator that company is not worth working for and should be driven out of business... But sadly, such actions are applauded here... Not mocked like they deserved and shown as pure failures of the company to treat their customers equally and well.
    • bicijay 4y ago
      Hmm i dont know if i agree. Why are you so absolutist in this matter?
      • Ekaros 4y ago
        Because I know that I personally don't have enough clout to get resolutions... And that I actually believe in equality.
• Tomte 4y ago
  Because it works, and HNers don't flag those nearly enough.
• kop316 4y ago
  heh, right now I have had an issue where in Stripe checkout. I paid for something for my spouse, and she decided to put her email in Stripe Checkout for the invoice. Now, EVERY purchase I make through Stripe Checkout with that credit card goes to my spouses email, and I have no way to fix this. I would rather not have my credit card linked to any email, so I tried to fix this. To contact Strip support, I need a login (which I had for Liberapay), and I have been going back and forth with Stripe support for the past three weeks. But I find out really annoying that this occurs, and there seems to be no good way to fix it. I say that to say, if typing in to HN for 5 minutes fixes the issue, that's a heck of a lot better than the past 3 weeks trying to fix this through the normal support chain.
• groffee 4y ago
  Just wait till you see the CloudFlare posts.
  • nazgulsenpai 4y ago
    Or the locked Google accounts.
• shawnz 4y ago
  What makes you say that the normal support channels are ineffectual? Of course no support channel is going to perfectly capture and resolve 100% of cases, right? So why shouldn't Edwin et al pay attention to these alternate channels to catch the cases that get missed? Plus, consider that it could be an effective way to find gaps in the traditional channels that can then be fixed.
• nthj 4y ago
  There's an episode near the end of The West Wing where it's C. J. Cregg's first day as Chief of Staff. Of course, this same day, a national security emergency has arisen involving weapons-grade plutonium. The whole day goes by, with C. J. increasingly frustrated as the Secretaries of Defense, State, and Energy all pass the buck on the crisis. The President is able to nudge C. J. to put together a tiger team. With a few words, he has resolved the crisis. Until I saw this, I never understood corporate structures. Why are reporting lines structured so customers can languish until the CEO barks an order to address? But during a normal day-to-day, the top executive needs stability. Anyone incentivized and empowered to single-handedly address problems is also-by definition-someone who wields immense political power. So departments are set up. The implicit standing order is "maintain stability." And whenever process actually needs to change, the top executive routes around the communication chains he has established.
  • somenameforme 4y ago
    Because many, and arguably most, corporations have grown too large to be sustainable owing to overly aggressive adoption of digital technologies paired alongside generous investment and financial policy that has assumed infinite growth (fueled by infinite consumption) as the goal, which is breaking down only so absurdly because we went from "We have branches in 3 different cities!" to "I have a business with a 1/3rd of the human species as my customers. Neato." rather too quickly. In less wordy words: Imagine you have 1 million customers. And 95% are satisfied per year. And 90% of those unsatisfied customers are able to be satisfied through the regular channels. These numbers don't seem awful, but at scale everything breaks. That's a total of 50,000 unsatisfied customers per year and 5,000 who are unable to achieve a satisfactory outcome through the regular channels. And that's with only with 1 million customers - practically a mom 'n pop shop by the modern mantra of growth at literally any cost. Consequently, you end up with a large number of customers who have irreconciled issues when going through the normal channels, unless you approach 100% effectiveness which will never happen - as peak possible customer satisfaction is only going to decrease in proportion to scale. So you end up in a scenario where accepting an increasingly large number of discontented customers just becomes a normal part of business at scale. But of course this will also lead to the downfall of those accepting this. Because customers, and citizens, once slighted - tend to remember it.
• ksec 4y ago
  > why is normal support so ineffectual at surfacing..... The question coming from a three months old account. Let me rephrase it, when was normal support ever effectual in any internet companies. While it is not ideal, Let's be honest at least there is a way for you to put your case into the public, and they care enough to respond. Most company just dont give a damn.
  • aliqot 4y ago
    > The question coming from a three months old account. Been here since the 2000's. Not interested in cults of personality; when my ideas seem too popular it's time to make a new account and get a clearer picture from the bottom.
  • P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
    I once had a client who was a hosting company here in town. Customer Service was their #1 priority, I watched the owner straight up fire people over it. Companies _can_ be better, but the thing to understand is that for many (most?) companies are a vehicle for money, nothing more. There is no pride in a job well done, or doing right by their customers. This may seem like a cynical take but keep in mind, the wording I used there (vehicle) is not my wording. That company I was talking about earlier was ran by a single man who took pride in what he did. I watched him fire a payroll company after the 2nd time they were late on payroll. The first time he sent out an email and told everyone he would personally give any employee money that needed it to make it through when their paychecks actually did come in. IOW, he was a good guy who had 100% control over the company and chose to run it in as ethical a manner as he could (this has nothing to do with religion). Having said that ... dude was cheap as well, but the one area he never scrimped on was customer service. Stripe is a vehicle for making money, it's a numbers game to maximize money. Posting on HN is a technique to potentially cost Stripe more money, and as a result, they're more likely to respond. In addition, many people who actually DO care within stripe are insulated from customers, whereas on HN they're not. The two confounding factors create a situation where you're literally more likely to get good customer service complaining about it on the internet than going through officially sanctioned customer service channels.
  • Zigurd 4y ago
• xwowsersx 4y ago
  By definition, you're only seeing the support requests that aren't handled through Stripe's ordinary channels. For every one you see here, there might be 100 or 1000 that are resolved just fine by Stripe.
  • thewebcount 4y ago
    Or that aren’t, but the person or company doesn’t know about HackerNews or have a Twitter account.
• clintonb 4y ago
  Posts on social media aren’t an indication that a company is ineffective via normal support channels. Rather, the customer is not satisfied, and feels broadcasting the issue is the best avenue of escalation. There is still a high percentage of cases closed satisfactorily you never hear about, or customers that never open a case because their needs are being fully met.
  • cldellow 4y ago
    I agree with what you're saying. At the same time, it feels weird that you work at Stripe, are responding to a question about Stripe, but are talking about companies generally while not disclosing that you work for Stripe.
    • imwillofficial 4y ago
      How is that weird. Somebody can have a view on a topic divorced from their employer. It’s as if people are people or something
      • cldellow 4y ago
        Yeah, weird's an imprecise adjective. I'm not sure what the right one is -- I'm not assuming a nefarious motive, so I wanted a word that didn't have too much emotional baggage. For me, it's about transparency. Definitely, a Stripe employee can have opinions about how support works. But for me, I feel it's still valuable to disclose your affiliation. I'd feel similarly if it turned out that aliqot (the OP) worked for Paypal and didn't disclose that. Of course a Paypal employee can have an opinion about how customer service should work at their competitor, but it'd inform how I interpret the question.
        • gsich 4y ago
          I think it only matters when you work in a similar field, Stripe and Paypal yes. Stripe and Microsoft no. (just an example)
        • 4y ago
• Apreche 4y ago
• dsr_ 4y ago
  Let's not pick on Stripe, and let's not pick on HN. Let's ask the general question: why do large Internet/tech/software companies tend to have lousy support? The answer is that, somehow, good support is not a factor in the viability of these companies.
  • sem000 4y ago
    Because that’s how they stay “lean” and steal market share from larger companies by offering lower pricing. It’s all fine and dandy until you need real customer support. That’s why companies like Microsoft, Oracle, etc will never go away. Real enterprise customers need real enterprise support.
  • gamblor956 4y ago
    Apple and Microsoft have amazing customer support. It's just a specific breed of tech companies that have poor customer support. Many of them can trace their lineage to a single VC firm that embraces regulatory arbitrage and penny-pinching on the customer support functions...
    • etaioinshrdlu 4y ago
      Which firm are you thinking about?
      • gamblor956 4y ago
        We're posting on their forums.
    • techdragon 4y ago
      Apple has terrible software support… poor developer documentation, the majority of their operating systems and programs have no comprehensive manual to even RTFM with, their operating systems and software frequently obscure any information necessary to even begin debugging issues or sometimes even work out that an issue is even happening (I’m looking at you shitty infinitely moving progress bars telling me how far away my last operation is) … they have good hardware support, not good software support.
• JamesAdir 4y ago
  Just ask yourself what are the lowest paying jobs in any company the size of Stripe? There is almost zero incentive for a customer support agent to go the extra mile in case of a more complex problem. And I recommend on reading Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh or anything that was written about Zappos customer support department.
• SilasX 4y ago
  I remembered a comment comparing this practice to religions where you can't/shouldn't appeal to God directly, but have to pray to a saint to intercede on your behalf. Whether or not the theology works like that, the dynamic is basically: their actual support channels don't reliably provide relief, because their internal management has severe limitations and misaligned incentives that can only be overcome when someone with actual power says, "hey wtf guys, knock that out, this one's important". On a search, it turns out that analogy comes up quite a bit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23060642 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23060642 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24778116 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24778116 https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=saint%20intercede&sort=byPopularity&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• ajhurliman 4y ago
  I’ve had this idea for a browser extension: Trash. If you’re dissatisfied with a site you just click it and it tweets that they are #trash, and there’s a companion site that lets you look at who’s the most trash (normalized for user volume of available) so we can permanently export this transparency of customer dissatisfaction from internal dashboards to something more visible.
  • amelius 4y ago
    Yeah. But we can take it further. A corporate website can become a graffiti wall, and dissatisfied customers can paint on it. The companion website shows the original website and the painted wall on top of it. Even better if the browser cooperates.
    • collegeburner 4y ago
      funny enough this is exactly what gab/dissenter did, giving any website a comments section. it's actually a really cool concept, though obviously dissenter ended up hella toxic. someone made a clone, zeeker, but it doesn't have a lot of users: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/zeeker-on-site-discussion/polnpijeccedkbcfnfhfokbmabngmiip https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/zeeker-on-site-dis...
      • teddyh 4y ago
        Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/zeeker/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/zeeker/
  • mattmcknight 4y ago
    And then you get people creating bots to trash their competitors. Then you end up banning people from using Trash or being included in the metrics dashboard(the "trashboard"). Then you have some false positives, but you haven't created a support process to resolve those, because it's just a fun project, but the trashboard is making some money, so you get someone doing it on demand. That person is overwhelmed by the spammers trying to get their accounts back. Then people start saying Trash is #trash.
• miyuru 4y ago
  > An even bigger issue: What's going to happen when Edwin leaves Stripe or when HN loses favor in this circle? Contact the CEO on twitter as this person did. https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/comment/3473621/#Comment_3473621 https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/comment/3473621/#Comment_3...
• Dawnyhff2 4y ago
• globile 4y ago
  Stripe support is broken. I recall patio11 writing about how Stripe is all about putting in the correct "process". Well, the process for support fails. We handle a decent volume and have been a merchant for over 8 years. We can't even get an account manager to handle specific issues. 90% of requests are met with a subtle RTFM! If you ask specific questions, these are avoided. An open ticket is bounced from person to person. No two people seem to touch the same issue. If you try specific chat support, and you ask technical questions, you'd expect some knowledge. Instead, most agents put you on hold and go over documentation, only to come back and say they've escalated this to a ticket. Then the ticket comes back with more links to documentation, never answering the question. The only way to make progress, answers and some human treatment is by jumping from connection to connection on Linkedin, trying to get an intro to someone inside. Or of course, getting lucky with an HN post.
  • jrs235 4y ago
    Maybe they have this poster hanging on all their walls?: https://despair.com/products/apathy https://despair.com/products/apathy
    • crdrost 4y ago
      Except this is Stripe we're talking about, so it should read “Neglect: Maybe if we starve the customer to death they'll stop bugging us.” They are the “food”, the connection to incoming nutrition in the form of revenue.
  • speakfreely 4y ago
    Stripe got their start by building goodwill in the developer community, optimizing the simple use cases that frustrated developers, and providing great, responsive support as they grew. It seems very clear that an executive decision has been made to "grow past" that phase and chase up market opportunities at the expense of the people that got them to where they are today. They're quite literally letting their reputation with developers go up in flames to enjoy some cost-savings in their customer support department. And from all signals around here, they believe that having a few "(name) from Stripe here, email me about your problem" comments is sufficiently responsive to put out the PR dumpster fire. It's gotten to the point where it's pissing people off to see that more than it's curing any problem. I am hopeful that someone at Stripe checks out the multiple negative posts about their company on the HN front page today and finally agrees that there is a deeper problem here that needs to be addressed head-on. If it was my company, I'd be in emergency mode after seeing HN today.
• paulcole 4y ago
  Think about what HN is. It’s a marketing campaign for a VC firm. YC invested in Stripe. HN is a place where you can hurt the reputation of Stripe by posting about their support.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• s1k3s 4y ago
  Because in 2022 the only way to get a company to give a damn about a customer is by publicly shaming them.
• edwinwee 4y ago
  Stripe is built around processes and programs, not people. Behind every investigation that results from HN is a team of people. I’m just one person on that team—many of my teammates are equipped to respond here as well (and, in fact, do so today). We care a lot about the HN community which is why we’re always on here—HN isn’t meant to be an official support forum. It might look like the number of absolute support issues landing on HN is increasing, but proportionally, the rate remains steady. We survey users after support interactions, and the satisfaction rate has been at ~85% for the past three years. For that remaining 15%, though, we have a couple projects in flight that hopefully will bring that number down. But as a meta point, I’m not leaving Stripe anytime soon.
  • mr_throw_89 4y ago
  • Waterluvian 4y ago
    What percentage of your customer base does the HN community represent? Why do you “care a lot about the HN community?” Is there something in particular that makes the HN community an important subset of your customers to care about?
    • jokethrowaway 4y ago
      Obviously people on HN are more likely to decide to use stripe or influence someone who can. It's all business. That said, I had positive interactions with Stripe support without complaining on HN (and I'm not well connected, a big shot or moving significant amount of money).
      • fortran77 4y ago
        > Obviously people on HN are more likely to decide to use stripe or influence someone who can. Why would this community be any different than any other community of businesspeople in, say, a subreddit or on Facebook?
• 650REDHAIR 4y ago
  Support for most companies is completely broken and ineffectual. Everything is siloed so hard that problems are a “support issue” and not a product, UI, sales, legal, or engineering issue. I’m not surprised that the lowest paid people at Stripe can’t help and people are forced to air their grievances here on HN.
• NKosmatos 4y ago
  For the same reason that people come to HN and other social media channels like Twitter, FB and so on, for support with their problems with the big companies (Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter...) that refuse to pay for proper support and moderation. They don't want to go into all the trouble of establishing proper support and dispute channels with real humans and they rely on the (cheaper) AI/ML solution. Real support is broken nowadays :-(
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• zitterbewegung 4y ago
  One of the benefits of posting something on HN / twitter is the fact that remediation happens pretty quickly if it gets on the front-page or gets a bunch of likes and or retweets respectivly.
• m0llusk 4y ago
  to warn others
• draw_down 4y ago