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>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?
Yes. Does that make it untrue?
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Well put ... PayPal has some housecleaning to do but here is someone that appears to be listening ... listening in a big way. I give PayPal credit for this response. Rather than being cynical, I'm happier giving credit to someone who wants to make things better. Mr. Marcus - some of us appreciate your efforts here.
You are forgetting one thing that was previously stated in the comments: this isn't Paypal responding through their normal support channels. This is a fire-fighting attempt from the CEO of a company that snubbed the people they should live off of, prompted by a bigger than average shitstorm created by their persistent crappy handling of accounts. Think of it this way: suppose Mercedes went around, burning the cars it…
Many CEOs would hand this off to their customer experience personnel (if they have some still) or maybe marketing department.
This was not a manager's or director's reply though. The wording indicates someone (relatively new to this president's post) who appears to see that change is necessary. He understand that his offer may not be accepted (he get's it) and still offers a direct link to himself.
I don't read this as a PR ploy or gimmick.
If a CEO offered someone a new car PLUS their ear, I'd be watching for changes. PayPal didn't burn everyone's car. Enough damage was caused to affect the brand though. If I was one of the affected, I'd be watching for more action.
I feel that the response was appropriate. There is something in the wording that gives me hope. Maybe I'm just being naive.
I'll watch to see how things turn out though.
While I applaud the new CEO wants to make amends, for some like my friend who relied on Paypal to make a living by processing his business payments it's a little too late. Although Paypal is still the industry leader (because they have a stranglehold on online payments) the new CEO knows that offerings like Stripe and whatnot are making Paypal less and less relevant each and every day.
I would love to see Paypal change, the first thing they need to do is fire all of their customer service staff and train new staff with a new set of guidelines, implement a clean-cut way of contacting Paypal if something goes wrong and clean their act up.
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…
They have their work cut out for them indeed, but it's of there own making. They should have been looking at systemic issues when the Minecraft founder couldn't get access to his account for months, when their customer service advised someone to destroy a perfectly good violin due to "fraud", apparently mass payment doesn't exist even when it does [1], numerous reviews in magazines such as PC World [2] and Kernel Mag…
Great email.. one of the most convincing and sincere high level apologies I've read. Perhaps, for once, the future is looking bright for Paypal. I could have done without the "forwarded from my iPad" at the bottom though.
So bloggers with enough pull to get the CEO's attention will no longer have their funds stolen by PayPal. Now how about the rest of us?
I realize you are being cynical, but the e-mail says the CEO wants to make radical changes to fix issues for all customers. I'm a bit skeptical myself, but if we take him for his word this isn't just for a subset of users.
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…
Respectfully disagree. CEOs of multi-billion dollar publicly traded companies do not routinely reach out to disgruntled customers, no matter how public the PR disasters. Twitter has been very effectively leveraged in the past with various underperforming companies, however IIRC all of those cases were delegated to customer service / marketing personnel.
While you are correct that this intervention bore many of the hallmarks of a PR effort, the scope is unusual. While I am happy to be proven wrong, I would certainly be very surprised if anyone could dig up multiple examples of similar behavior on the part of a President/CEO or even any C-suite executive in a company of this size.
TL;DR: Personally looking after an account and handing out a cell phone number is not business as usual. There may be an element of PR, but it is quite proactive by most standards of measure.
Perhaps one of the reasons PayPal is being more service conscious is they finally have competition encroaching on their territory like Stripe + Square. I guess its never too late to stop sucking though.
And bitcoin. No matter how PayPal tries to put the kibosh on selling PayPal for bitcoin, people will still find a way around it.
I no longer use PayPal after their first and only abuse of my account. They had one chance and I found better solutions. That the CEO is sending out emails to high PR value customers is a very telling move.