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Beware: Uber Has No Customer Service and Still Has Bugs

arunhasablog.com

31–40 of 100 posts

Re: Beware: Uber Has No Customer Service and Still Has Bugs

#31
I'm long on Uber and Lyft but their approach to billing is lacking.

Uber really should provide some sort of cost breakdown on your previous rides. (They provide quotes, but not itemized receipts.) But at least you can get a sense for how much they charge on their website.

Lyft, hilariously, doesn't tell you how much they charge! At all! What on Earth is their thinking behind that? Is it miles? Minutes? Am I charged based on my Klout score? It's a total mystery to me.

I hate taking cabs, but at least their pricing is 100% transparent.

Re: Beware: Uber Has No Customer Service and Still Has Bugs

#32

For those who are in NY, you should check out Whisk at whisk.me: it's like Uber, but we have realtime pricing info during the ride, like a taxi! And our prices are cheaper too. Disclosure: I'm a developer at Whisk.

I'd say the question most germane to this post is do you have a phone number for people who need support? or do you at least have an SLA on your email support?

They don't have a phone number and their contact form even has a silly captcha. As such the above post constitutes mindless and unreflected spam.

Re: Beware: Uber Has No Customer Service and Still Has Bugs

#33
Yesterday my friends called an Uber to get home from a bar. The car arrived in a few minutes as scheduled - and the driver put his head out the window to say his last fare was still in the car, he was going to go drop them off and would be back soon. They cancelled it and called another Uber.

Re: Beware: Uber Has No Customer Service and Still Has Bugs

#34
post #10
post #4

> Going forward, I am probably just going to initiate a chargeback. They aren’t giving me many choices. Give them a week to sort it out. Don't immediately chargeback, but call the credit card company and tell them about the irregularity. That way, you give Uber some room to sort it out, you don't have to worry about the charge in the process, and you established the timeline in case things do get hairy.

A week... Why? 24 hrs is plenty... they should have a phone # at minimum. Chargebacks, etc are how to get action.

Chargebacks are a valid tool to use when a business doesn't act in good faith with you and is trying to take your money, but some people use them way too casually for the type of aggressive tool it is. Not getting an email response in 24 hours isn't an unreasonable or unusual situation. Chargebacks can have serious repercussions for small businesses; everything from being forced to pay an additional penalty to some faceless algorithm closing off their payment account and people ultimately losing their jobs because of it.

While responding to an email in less than 24 hours is ideal, many smaller businesses don't have a 24 hour per day customer service center and can't always respond to an email in that time frame. Some businesses say 48 hours - 72 hours on their contact page and I think that's pretty reasonable for anything that's not an emergency.

Re: Beware: Uber Has No Customer Service and Still Has Bugs

#35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say the question most germane to this post is do you have a phone number for people who need support? or do you at least have an SLA on your email support?

They don't have a phone number and their contact form even has a silly captcha. As such the above post constitutes mindless and unreflected spam.

We do currently only do email support, but we respond to each email quickly and in a personable manner. We also have a process to check every single transaction that occurs to make sure that no extreme or inconsistent charges occur. And sorry about the captcha on the website; we are still growing rapidly better fulfill the transportation needs of New York!

Re: Beware: Uber Has No Customer Service and Still Has Bugs

#36
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A week... Why? 24 hrs is plenty... they should have a phone # at minimum. Chargebacks, etc are how to get action.

Chargebacks are a valid tool to use when a business doesn't act in good faith with you and is trying to take your money, but some people use them way too casually for the type of aggressive tool it is. Not getting an email response in 24 hours isn't an unreasonable or unusual situation. Chargebacks can have serious repercussions for small businesses; everything from being forced to pay an additional penalty to some f…

If a company decides to be faceless by not providing a phone number and not communicating on their support practices†, then being penalized by some faceless algorithm sounds like the kind of lesson they need.

† It's not hard to send automatic emails if there are no supporters in the office for a few days or if the queue is too long.

Re: Beware: Uber Has No Customer Service and Still Has Bugs

#37
Another person with the exact opposite experience here: Uber has great customer service here in Seattle. Everything from lost items, bad drivers, bad routes – these happen rarely, but every time I've had a prompt customer service response. And the occasions that warranted a refund were taken care of without even requesting it.

Re: Beware: Uber Has No Customer Service and Still Has Bugs

#38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't have a phone number and their contact form even has a silly captcha. As such the above post constitutes mindless and unreflected spam.

We do currently only do email support, but we respond to each email quickly and in a personable manner. We also have a process to check every single transaction that occurs to make sure that no extreme or inconsistent charges occur. And sorry about the captcha on the website; we are still growing rapidly better fulfill the transportation needs of New York!

Even if you don't do support via phone, you should have a phone number so one can get an actual human being in realtime interaction in case your system gets so fucked up that normal procedures break down.

As far as i'm concerned you're not a company that takes business seriously if i can't call you.

And this is echoed by many people i know, even though we prefer most of our communication to be online.

Re: Beware: Uber Has No Customer Service and Still Has Bugs

#39
Kinda tangential, but I think this social hacking that happens in the search of customer support is really interesting. I've used and seen it used over and over, normally following something like this:

1. There's a problem. Generally it's a pretty big deviation from normal service involving a non-trivial loss, like paying an order of magnitude more for a cab than is necessary.

2. The customer tries to notify the company, normally just to recover the loss.

3. If it's a start up, there probably is limited or isn't any customer service. Larger companies will generally put people through a large, automated, slow, and probably ineffective process with tickets and machine answering systems. The issue isn't resolved either way.

4. Next up is a tweet. Some complaint about the issue @somecompany. A lot of companies large and small have embraced Twitter as a psuedo-support channel.

5. If the subsequent tweets get ignored, some will take to writing a blog post about the situation and lack of support.

6. If the blogger has any connections or visibility, aggregators or media might pick it up and republish it. Brief infamy ensues.

Reminds me of when that woman's AirBnB place got demolished. I'm not sure why Uber doesn't have killer support with $300 million to spend (maybe they do and this is an outlier), but I think the lesson for the start up community. People expect customer service, and customer service needs to be easier and faster than complaining publicly to a large number of people.

Re: Beware: Uber Has No Customer Service and Still Has Bugs

#40
I've only had to use uber support once, and it was for an extreme edge technical error. I received immediate email reply from the SF CM at 2AM. She followed up twice in the following week to keep me updated on the status without me ever having to write back.
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