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Tell HN: Stripe brought my business to a dead stop

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Re: Tell HN: Stripe brought my business to a dead stop

#41

Post by save_ferris »

andrewstuart wrote: post #11
edwinwee wrote: post #2

I work at Stripe. Could you forward that email to me at edwin@stripe.com and I can investigate what happened? I'm really sorry for the trouble.

This should not be the outcome. It should not be necessary for someone to come to an online forum and complain to get the customer support issue resolved. Stripe customer support organisation should actually resolve customer issues. Tech companies go on and on and on and ON about "culture", but one thing I can tell you truly needs to be built into culture is customer support. For example, everyone knows Google's cult…

> I think tech companies are bad at customer service because the founders have rarely worked front line

Customer service rep turned engineer here. I think this true, but I also think that so many founders just don’t care about customer service. Investors are far more interested in new customer acquisition than retention, so naturally more resources are going toward customer acquisition.

Customer service is an afterthought cost center that barely pays and experiences high churn in 90% of the companies I’ve worked for in my career.

Re: Tell HN: Stripe brought my business to a dead stop

#42

Post by bojanstef »

onetimemanytime wrote: post #29
bojanstef wrote: post #24

Actual life hack: Don't email support. Email legal.

I have heard that is some cases it is worse...they assume you'll sue them so they'll avoid you

Imagine it from their perspective. There's a higher chance of actually getting sued if you just ignore them.

Re: Tell HN: Stripe brought my business to a dead stop

#43

Post by outworlder »

privateSFacct wrote: post #22
andrewstuart wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This should not be the outcome. It should not be necessary for someone to come to an online forum and complain to get the customer support issue resolved. Stripe customer support organisation should actually resolve customer issues. Tech companies go on and on and on and ON about "culture", but one thing I can tell you truly needs to be built into culture is customer support. For example, everyone knows Google's cult…

I've called Amazon around AWS issues and I have to disagree with you. They even seem to step outside of support boundaries when troubleshooting things (which they shouldn't do). I pay for the lowest level of service I think - $100/month. Light user. We also only are getting one side of story. Not to knock on a gym - but I'd be interested in the membership plan rules - some of fitness memberships should be flat out il…

> I've called Amazon around AWS issues and I have to disagree with you

AWS support is stellar. We have workloads on the three major cloud providers, and AWS support is better by an order of magnitude. If anything, this has spoiled us. When things that take minutes to solve (or figure out) on AWS takes days on another cloud provider, no amount of technical wizardry can make up for it. They won't be dragging your feet just because you have a lower level plan, but if you want to call them to solve stuff right now on the phone or have them showing up at your company with specialists in tow, then you have to fork over the required amount. It's well spent, IMHO.

Re: Tell HN: Stripe brought my business to a dead stop

#44

Post by tempsy »

sandstrom wrote: post #40
tempsy wrote: post #19

Hasn't a common criticism of Stripe always been lack of good customer support? IIRC there are dozens of threads similar to this one on here. This seems to be another example of that, not necessarily a new revelation.

We’re using stripe and are overall happy. But their customer support is pretty bad. Lots of canned replies and ping-pong back and forth until you get someone to actually read your question.

It's always fine until you have an actual problem...

The issue with Stripe's ethos is that it wants to stay really lean, which usually means not scaling customer support. If the entire company is 2000, how many full time support staff do they have? How has the headcount grown with # merchants onboarded?

This isn't specific to Stripe, by the way. I think Google has the same culture around support. My Google Pay account has been in a permanently screwed up state for years and have never been able to reach someone to resolve it. They just care about operational efficiency above all else.

On the other hand, I actually think Square has a very mature and responsive support staff. I have gotten what would probably be considered low priority issues resolved in less than an hour through various channels.

Re: Tell HN: Stripe brought my business to a dead stop

#45

Post by ptxds »

This is worrying. We are planning to move to stripe hence I have a few questions. Were you experiencing any other issues before they did these, for example, there is a high number of refunds, fees charged etc..? Typically you are allowed by law to dispute chargebacks.

I learned from previous experience, never have a single payment processor ever. The best rule of thumb pay the higher fee but diversify.

Re: Tell HN: Stripe brought my business to a dead stop

#46

Post by lxglv »

andrewstuart wrote: post #11
edwinwee wrote: post #2

I work at Stripe. Could you forward that email to me at edwin@stripe.com and I can investigate what happened? I'm really sorry for the trouble.

This should not be the outcome. It should not be necessary for someone to come to an online forum and complain to get the customer support issue resolved. Stripe customer support organisation should actually resolve customer issues. Tech companies go on and on and on and ON about "culture", but one thing I can tell you truly needs to be built into culture is customer support. For example, everyone knows Google's cult…

Actually, posting here from a fresh account allows to reach a quite broad audience with over-generalized warnings for ALL small businesses to take care while dealing with Stripe. The story lacks details, names timing and etc., although most of the commenters immediately believe the OP and start blaming Stripe’s support line and support processes in IT industry in general (problems exist, sure). It may be rather considered as opportunity, that someone from Stripe offers help in such situation with description that looks like blaming and crying that Stripe is EEEVIL instead of searching for advice, how to solve the problem.

Re: Tell HN: Stripe brought my business to a dead stop

#48

Post by vector_spaces »

save_ferris wrote: post #41
andrewstuart wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This should not be the outcome. It should not be necessary for someone to come to an online forum and complain to get the customer support issue resolved. Stripe customer support organisation should actually resolve customer issues. Tech companies go on and on and on and ON about "culture", but one thing I can tell you truly needs to be built into culture is customer support. For example, everyone knows Google's cult…

> I think tech companies are bad at customer service because the founders have rarely worked front line Customer service rep turned engineer here. I think this true, but I also think that so many founders just don’t care about customer service. Investors are far more interested in new customer acquisition than retention, so naturally more resources are going toward customer acquisition. Customer service is an afterth…

Yeah, plus customer service is one of those highly manual and error-prone business processes that are nearly impossible to (properly) automate which are so annoying to Silicon Valley.

In my experience the Silicon Valley approach to it is to optimize your product for the 98% of customers who won't need anything more hands on from you, throw some automation (in the form of documentation, chat bots, and phone menus) at the remaining 2%, and don't worry too much about anyone who falls through the cracks past that.

Which can lead to a great experience most of the time unless you're one of those unlucky leftovers, in which case the ground falls out from beneath you into a labrynthine Kafkaesque hell proportional in brutality to the size of the company and the extent to which you depend on it.

Re: Tell HN: Stripe brought my business to a dead stop

#49

Post by wwweston »

andrewstuart wrote: post #11
edwinwee wrote: post #2

I work at Stripe. Could you forward that email to me at edwin@stripe.com and I can investigate what happened? I'm really sorry for the trouble.

This should not be the outcome. It should not be necessary for someone to come to an online forum and complain to get the customer support issue resolved. Stripe customer support organisation should actually resolve customer issues. Tech companies go on and on and on and ON about "culture", but one thing I can tell you truly needs to be built into culture is customer support. For example, everyone knows Google's cult…

So, on one hand, everything you're writing is true. Posts like this, assuming they accurate reflect what's happened, mean that customer service has failed, and now the customer has to resort to ad hoc channels for addressing an issue. It's not a good look.

OTOH, every system has its limits and failures, and effective monitoring of communication outside official systems is one way that organizations can figure out what's not working about their system.

The real test is if they handle issues with one-off fixes and situation-specific exceptions, or if they figure out how their official channels failed and fix it.

Re: Tell HN: Stripe brought my business to a dead stop

#50

Post by quaquaqua1 »

save_ferris wrote: post #41
andrewstuart wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This should not be the outcome. It should not be necessary for someone to come to an online forum and complain to get the customer support issue resolved. Stripe customer support organisation should actually resolve customer issues. Tech companies go on and on and on and ON about "culture", but one thing I can tell you truly needs to be built into culture is customer support. For example, everyone knows Google's cult…

> I think tech companies are bad at customer service because the founders have rarely worked front line Customer service rep turned engineer here. I think this true, but I also think that so many founders just don’t care about customer service. Investors are far more interested in new customer acquisition than retention, so naturally more resources are going toward customer acquisition. Customer service is an afterth…

I've consulted with a large customer service org at an oil delivery company-- the VP looked me dead in the eye and said "customer service is a free therapy service we provide to our customers when we as a company have decided it is unprofitable to service them in a timely and high quality manner"

I appreciated his honesty. It was a cost center designed to not achieve a favorable outcome for the customer.

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