One year in #stripe • Hacker News Board

Re: One year in #stripe

#11

Post by wingerlang » Thu, Nov 05, 2015, 4:49 AM UTC

nathancahill wrote: post #6

wingerlang wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if each took on average 1 minute to compose This is IRC though, so I guess the average message would take more like ~seconds to compose. Not counting "research" etc.

Yeah, and want to guess how long you'd have to have someone on staff to hit 430 hours of IRC messaging? A lot longer than 11 weeks, that's for sure. "Research" is what takes time. You sound like my grandparents. "What's hard about your work, you just type on the computer all day!" they say. The easy part is typing. The hard part is knowing which keys to press.

Actually it would take 11 weeks for a staffed member to do that 8 hours a day for 11 work weeks.

And I understand the mechanics, I just think it was worded in a way where it sounded like he clocked the actual writing of messages, and doing that 1 minute per message would be a lot.

Re: One year in #stripe

#12

Post by gspleen » Thu, Nov 05, 2015, 4:50 AM UTC

h8trswana8 wrote: post #3

Stripe may have a billion dollar valuation, but their support process is still very immature. You have two choices: 1) go to IRC, where they only answer technical integration questions, or 2) firing an email into the black hole that is support@stripe.com, and crossing your fingers that someone will respond within 2-5 days. We've been burned several times by how slow they are to fix payment problems. You send an email…

My team received similar support recently.

Want to know why their support sucks? Everyone in the company is on rotating support desk duty.

I'm not kidding. They believe it keeps everyone grounded or keeps everyone familiar with the product or some other malarkey.

Once I read into that a bit more their support delays, lost emails, and shoddy advice all made a lot more sense.

Re: One year in #stripe

#13

Post by matthewarkin » Thu, Nov 05, 2015, 5:00 AM UTC

wingerlang wrote: post #11

nathancahill wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, and want to guess how long you'd have to have someone on staff to hit 430 hours of IRC messaging? A lot longer than 11 weeks, that's for sure. "Research" is what takes time. You sound like my grandparents. "What's hard about your work, you just type on the computer all day!" they say. The easy part is typing. The hard part is knowing which keys to press.

Actually it would take 11 weeks for a staffed member to do that 8 hours a day for 11 work weeks. And I understand the mechanics, I just think it was worded in a way where it sounded like he clocked the actual writing of messages, and doing that 1 minute per message would be a lot.

I estimated 1 minute to roughly include research and reproduction time. The week estimation was then based on a 40 work week

Re: One year in #stripe

#14

Post by michaelschade » Thu, Nov 05, 2015, 5:01 AM UTC

h8trswana8 wrote: post #3

Stripe may have a billion dollar valuation, but their support process is still very immature. You have two choices: 1) go to IRC, where they only answer technical integration questions, or 2) firing an email into the black hole that is support@stripe.com, and crossing your fingers that someone will respond within 2-5 days. We've been burned several times by how slow they are to fix payment problems. You send an email…

(I work at Stripe.) Yeah, you're right: we've had some scaling troubles with support in the past. The root cause is basically what Matt's post points toward: our userbase exploded. Our investment in support didn't even come close to keeping up. Long-term, it's critical that our support is not just adequate but excellent, and as a result fixing it has been one of our top priorities.

Our support is actually quite fast these days; we completely answer most questions in under 3 hours now. We just launched our chat beta for account questions this week, so you can ask urgent questions without figuring out IRC or hopping over to email, and we're experimenting with things like phone support and help right inside your dashboard.

We're going to keep working on this. Feel free to email me at michael@stripe.com if you've any follow up questions.

Re: One year in #stripe

#15

Post by matthewarkin » Thu, Nov 05, 2015, 5:04 AM UTC

michaelschade wrote: post #14

h8trswana8 wrote: post #3

Stripe may have a billion dollar valuation, but their support process is still very immature. You have two choices: 1) go to IRC, where they only answer technical integration questions, or 2) firing an email into the black hole that is support@stripe.com, and crossing your fingers that someone will respond within 2-5 days. We've been burned several times by how slow they are to fix payment problems. You send an email…

(I work at Stripe.) Yeah, you're right: we've had some scaling troubles with support in the past. The root cause is basically what Matt's post points toward: our userbase exploded. Our investment in support didn't even come close to keeping up. Long-term, it's critical that our support is not just adequate but excellent, and as a result fixing it has been one of our top priorities. Our support is actually quite fast…

I can say that my last few tickets have been faster than normal, definitely not 3 hours though. And currently I have an issue open since Friday

Re: One year in #stripe

#16

Post by wingerlang » Thu, Nov 05, 2015, 5:09 AM UTC

matthewarkin wrote: post #13

wingerlang wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually it would take 11 weeks for a staffed member to do that 8 hours a day for 11 work weeks. And I understand the mechanics, I just think it was worded in a way where it sounded like he clocked the actual writing of messages, and doing that 1 minute per message would be a lot.

I estimated 1 minute to roughly include research and reproduction time. The week estimation was then based on a 40 work week

Okay, makes sense, thanks for the input.

Re: One year in #stripe

#17

Post by michaelschade » Thu, Nov 05, 2015, 5:13 AM UTC

matthewarkin wrote: post #15

michaelschade wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(I work at Stripe.) Yeah, you're right: we've had some scaling troubles with support in the past. The root cause is basically what Matt's post points toward: our userbase exploded. Our investment in support didn't even come close to keeping up. Long-term, it's critical that our support is not just adequate but excellent, and as a result fixing it has been one of our top priorities. Our support is actually quite fast…

I can say that my last few tickets have been faster than normal, definitely not 3 hours though. And currently I have an issue open since Friday

Hm, the case I saw looks like it's been totally solved, but feel free to forward it to me directly -- would like to check into it. (And thanks for all your help on IRC!)

Re: One year in #stripe

#18

Post by michaelschade » Thu, Nov 05, 2015, 5:22 AM UTC

gspleen wrote: post #12

h8trswana8 wrote: post #3

Stripe may have a billion dollar valuation, but their support process is still very immature. You have two choices: 1) go to IRC, where they only answer technical integration questions, or 2) firing an email into the black hole that is support@stripe.com, and crossing your fingers that someone will respond within 2-5 days. We've been burned several times by how slow they are to fix payment problems. You send an email…

My team received similar support recently. Want to know why their support sucks? Everyone in the company is on rotating support desk duty. I'm not kidding. They believe it keeps everyone grounded or keeps everyone familiar with the product or some other malarkey. Once I read into that a bit more their support delays, lost emails, and shoddy advice all made a lot more sense.

Hey, sorry you had a bad experience. We have a dedicated support team that helps with the majority of questions.

Like you say, folks from throughout the company do answer support questions directly too sometimes. The most common case for this is engineers that help out with products they just launched. They have the best answers and can make changes to the product directly in response to feedback; we've found the support quality there is really good.

I'd like to learn more about where we fell short in your case. Could you forward any of the emails to me at michael@stripe.com? And if you have any other thoughts—about this or Stripe as a whole—I'd love to hear them as well!

Re: One year in #stripe

#19

Post by gspleen » Thu, Nov 05, 2015, 5:33 AM UTC

michaelschade wrote: post #18

gspleen wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My team received similar support recently. Want to know why their support sucks? Everyone in the company is on rotating support desk duty. I'm not kidding. They believe it keeps everyone grounded or keeps everyone familiar with the product or some other malarkey. Once I read into that a bit more their support delays, lost emails, and shoddy advice all made a lot more sense.

Hey, sorry you had a bad experience. We have a dedicated support team that helps with the majority of questions. Like you say, folks from throughout the company do answer support questions directly too sometimes. The most common case for this is engineers that help out with products they just launched. They have the best answers and can make changes to the product directly in response to feedback; we've found the sup…

We were informed that it was common and no trouble for you to accept a dataset and handle the import into your system.

Upon pulling that dataset and waiting on several multi-day delays we were told that, oh, you don't do that in our case and that most clients just did it themselves over an API. Which we then did internally as a last minute item on a very tight, very big deadline. Just the sort of thing that's fun to do with client credit card data.

Past that I'm not interested in giving out any more info about my company.

EDIT: Wow. Sure am glad that I bothered to type up an honest answer.

Re: One year in #stripe

#20

Post by IIAOPSW » Thu, Nov 05, 2015, 5:42 AM UTC

michaelschade wrote: post #14

h8trswana8 wrote: post #3

Stripe may have a billion dollar valuation, but their support process is still very immature. You have two choices: 1) go to IRC, where they only answer technical integration questions, or 2) firing an email into the black hole that is support@stripe.com, and crossing your fingers that someone will respond within 2-5 days. We've been burned several times by how slow they are to fix payment problems. You send an email…

(I work at Stripe.) Yeah, you're right: we've had some scaling troubles with support in the past. The root cause is basically what Matt's post points toward: our userbase exploded. Our investment in support didn't even come close to keeping up. Long-term, it's critical that our support is not just adequate but excellent, and as a result fixing it has been one of our top priorities. Our support is actually quite fast…

When can I expect to be able to have my completely China based business use stripe? I love that alipay can be integrated seemlessly but I really don't have any reason to pay to convert to USD only to pay again to move my money back to RMB.