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PayPal CEO writes personal response

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Re: PayPal CEO writes personal response

#61

Post by dmbaggett »

From the skepticism here, it's clear Mr. Marcus has his work cut out for him. Even with far fewer people ever reporting to me (directly and indirectly) than him, I sympathize with his inability to get the unvarnished truth from his own people. "We're routinely screwing people out of hard cash" is probably a scary message to relay up.

His email sounded sincere, and he's new to the job. I'd be inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. He must know that the technorati hating his company is bad for business.

Re: PayPal CEO writes personal response

#62

Post by Havoc »

noonespecial wrote: post #38

This isn't special... Yet. What happened here can happen even in the most dysfunctional customer service paradigms. A promblem randomly and luckily escalated from the people who can't do anything about the problem to the people who (generally speaking) won't do anything about the problem. As a lucky break, the person/department who generally won't do anything, decided in their mercy to do something this one time. IMH…

Not necessarily. Between writing that email & it being publish that CEO is now very much committed to this since its his reputation on the line now. He said he'll get it done.

Unfortunately there aren't a whole lot of details in the mail that one can call the CEO out for if it doesn't happen but its a good start and in my opinion more than a PR stunt.

Re: PayPal CEO writes personal response

#63

Post by jaylevitt »

wpietri wrote: post #59
maratd wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ooh! Ooh! Pick me! Pick me! I had 20K removed from my account without an explanation and even hired a lawyer, all of which went absolutely nowhere. This is all a bunch of baloney. If PayPal was really serious about fixing all the pain and misery they caused, they would create a direct line of communication where those on the other end were empowered to resolve all problems ... instead of giving a curt "send us a lett…

How do you think a mechanism like that gets created? Do it in one go and you're talking a department of tens or hundreds of people, most of them newly hired. Turn them loose without careful thought and at the very least you create massive chaos in your organization. But you also probably create substantial losses as fraudsters use the chaos to take a lot of money. I think the only way you can get to the customer serv…

Yep. It's called "drill-down teams" or "tiger teams", and it works.. use your back channels to discover what's wrong with your front channels.

I've seen it work. Hell, I've helped it work. This is a good sign.

Re: PayPal CEO writes personal response

#64

Post by dbecker »

rhizome wrote: post #40
noonespecial wrote: post #38

This isn't special... Yet. What happened here can happen even in the most dysfunctional customer service paradigms. A promblem randomly and luckily escalated from the people who can't do anything about the problem to the people who (generally speaking) won't do anything about the problem. As a lucky break, the person/department who generally won't do anything, decided in their mercy to do something this one time. IMH…

The thing is, this "fix" only came about outside of their entire customer service mechanism (AFAICT). How many more disenfranchised customers are going to get "a direct line" to @davidmarcus? My guess is "none." This is a pure PR maneuver. The proof is in the pudding.

The idea is that Paypal will use this to event to understand how their systematic mistakes, and to fix them. That way, others won't need a direct line to the CEO.

Of course, they should have developed mechanisms to take customer feedback seriously before.

And they should have fixed this long ago.

But there's nothing wrong with learning from your mistakes so as not to repeat them.

Re: PayPal CEO writes personal response

#65

Post by d0m »

Seriously, fuck them. They're starting to act like they care because there are new competitors who've shown how it's supposed to be done. Sorry but not for me, Stripe is my new paypal.

Re: PayPal CEO writes personal response

#66

Post by ig1 »

njloof wrote: post #8

Step one for PayPal would be to always provide a reason when they take action, for all users. Every bad experience I have had with PayPal began with them doing something negative, and never explaining why they did it. I have had methods of payment locked out, I have had funds not released, I have been told I could not make an instant payment, and not once was I given a reason why.

Try asking your regular bank how their fraud detection works, or your insurance company, or the secret service.

Basically if you work in fraud detection (or broadly any kind of crime detection) you keep your techniques secret because otherwise you're helping the criminals avoid you.

Look at the source code for Reddit or Hacker News, notice how in the publicly released codebases they've both chosen specifically not to publish the code to do with vote-rigging detection.

There's a strong argument for secrecy.

Re: PayPal CEO writes personal response

#67

Post by cpayne »

maratd wrote: post #35
mcherm wrote: post #21

Here is what I would do... I would take him up on his offer (personal attention from the CEO? Sure!), but I would ask him whether he'd be willing to pick 3 or 4 other customers who had _NOT_ written an article which had gone viral and offer THEM the same deal. I want this to be true. I want PayPal to believe that this behavior is harmful to their business and to push (at ALL levels of the company) to change how they…

Ooh! Ooh! Pick me! Pick me! I had 20K removed from my account without an explanation and even hired a lawyer, all of which went absolutely nowhere. This is all a bunch of baloney. If PayPal was really serious about fixing all the pain and misery they caused, they would create a direct line of communication where those on the other end were empowered to resolve all problems ... instead of giving a curt "send us a lett…

"You now have my mobile number"

How much more direct communication do you want?

Re: PayPal CEO writes personal response

#68

Post by garethadams »

kmm wrote: post #45
sw007 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Classic case of someone who just can't win whatever he does. People have been crying out for PayPal to change - he notices this, he emails the guy with a first class email but still gets criticised. Criticise him if he doesn't act, don't criticise the guy for being big enough to say 'hey, we have a problem, I want to fix it' - that should be applauded, even if it's come later than people would have liked - at least i…

Oh come on. He can't "win" by solving one person's problems. Will he give his personal email to everyone who has got his account frozen or large chunks of money taken away by PayPal? I doubt it. This is a non-solution, which is almost worse than doing nothing at all, because it's active disingenuity.

Ok, so how do you fix many people's problems without first starting with one?

Re: PayPal CEO writes personal response

#69

Post by maratd »

cpayne wrote: post #67
maratd wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ooh! Ooh! Pick me! Pick me! I had 20K removed from my account without an explanation and even hired a lawyer, all of which went absolutely nowhere. This is all a bunch of baloney. If PayPal was really serious about fixing all the pain and misery they caused, they would create a direct line of communication where those on the other end were empowered to resolve all problems ... instead of giving a curt "send us a lett…

"You now have my mobile number" How much more direct communication do you want?

I don't have his mobile number. What does that do for me and for thousands of others who have been screwed over?

Re: PayPal CEO writes personal response

#70

Post by Karunamon »

wpietri wrote: post #56
njloof wrote: post #8

Step one for PayPal would be to always provide a reason when they take action, for all users. Every bad experience I have had with PayPal began with them doing something negative, and never explaining why they did it. I have had methods of payment locked out, I have had funds not released, I have been told I could not make an instant payment, and not once was I given a reason why.

I agree that they should always try to give you a reason. But that's not as easy as it sounds. Put yourself in the position of somebody who is trying to commit massive fraud. E.g., by purporting to sell a bunch of stuff on-line. Every bit of information you have about how PayPal combats fraud is helpful. Every time PayPal gives somebody a reason, it helps fraudsters avoid that particular wall or trap, letting them pr…

>it helps fraudsters avoid that particular wall or trap, letting them probe the defenses elsewhere.

Couldn't you say make the same argument of proprietary vs open source software?

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