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I used to work at one of the big customer service platform vendors. We had some really, really, useful ranking capabilities that would prioritize certain custom

by jmacd 4y ago

I used to work at one of the big customer service platform vendors. We had some really, really, useful ranking capabilities that would prioritize certain customers based on the data held in a CRM. It was a bit of a pet project of mine. The idea was to calculate weights for customer importance (this can be account size, potential future opportunity size, social media following, tenure, etc) and severity of the problem (in this case, $ amount frozen..) in order to rank the service queue. It didn't garner nearly the level of interest I thought it should/would. That was over 10 years ago though and the overall integration story probably sounded scarier than it needed to. The pitch was: Deal with big customers with big problems early (and possibly with specialized teams) so that escalations don't dramatically increase costs (they do, and the cost is usually unaccounted for).

unsupp0rted 4y ago
A person with low HN Karma and no obvious social media presence can do a lot of damage to Stripe’s reputation on HN. Or at least a dozen such people in succession can (which is exactly what we got here in recent years).
phphphphp 4y ago
That’s quite common functionality nowadays but generally if you’re dealing with valuable enterprise relationships that would benefit from tickets ranking higher, you have points of contact available to the client (whether that’s an account manager or similar) outside of impersonal tickets. I’m sure if you’re a valuable enough stripe client, they’ll have account managers. The problem for Stripe is that we see big numbers ($400k) and they see small numbers ($4k) so our perception of which clients are worth dedicating resources to is unrealistic. Stripe could do a better job here but I’d be shocked if any big valuable clients have an experience like this, because if someone is driving $100k/year of revenue for Stripe, they’ll be able to get someone on the phone who knows their name and business.
- jmacd 4y ago
  I agree on all that. (We had 'Executive Sponsors' and 'Red Accounts' where I was, and they were hugely expensive to manage once they 'went Red'). The issue would be catching things early and managing them cost effectively before they blow up in the public sphere.

by jmacd 4y ago

unsupp0rted 4y ago

A person with low HN Karma and no obvious social media presence can do a lot of damage to Stripe’s reputation on HN. Or at least a dozen such people in succession can (which is exactly what we got here in recent years).

phphphphp 4y ago

That’s quite common functionality nowadays but generally if you’re dealing with valuable enterprise relationships that would benefit from tickets ranking higher, you have points of contact available to the client (whether that’s an account manager or similar) outside of impersonal tickets. I’m sure if you’re a valuable enough stripe client, they’ll have account managers. The problem for Stripe is that we see big numbers ($400k) and they see small numbers ($4k) so our perception of which clients are worth dedicating resources to is unrealistic. Stripe could do a better job here but I’d be shocked if any big valuable clients have an experience like this, because if someone is driving $100k/year of revenue for Stripe, they’ll be able to get someone on the phone who knows their name and business.

jmacd 4y ago
I agree on all that. (We had 'Executive Sponsors' and 'Red Accounts' where I was, and they were hugely expensive to manage once they 'went Red'). The issue would be catching things early and managing them cost effectively before they blow up in the public sphere.