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An Uber support experience

krisprice.nz

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Re: An Uber support experience

#21

Post by icebraining »

adrr wrote: post #20
icebraining wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you expect? Uber has no way to authenticate you if email doesn't work. Technically they do - they could send an SMS to the registered number, which as OP points out, is unique.

There's also more than just phone. Could use the full credit card #. They can also send the device a push notification with a security token and have the user reset password with it in lieu of an email based token.

Could use the full credit card #.

I doubt they're storing that.

Re: An Uber support experience

#22

Post by sudonim »

My guess is that the OPs email address soft-bounced 3 times and was added to Uber's suppression list within their sendgrid account (they are a sendgrid customer).

There's probably no way for Uber support to see what's happening in their sendgrid account and this was probably failing silently. Uber's app was attempting to send the password reset email, but your email was on the suppression list and delivery was stopped before it was attempted.

Re: An Uber support experience

#23

Post by scurvy »

cbhl wrote: post #18
scurvy wrote: post #7

I would have given up after the second canned response and just switched to Lyft. Why are you so insistent to use a company that treats you that way and is showing very little technical prowess?

I have had similar experiences with Lyft customer support. Customer accounts being in weird states is a corner case that these services simply don't handle well right now. (It takes many eng-years to build out automated and manual review systems for all of these things; Facebook/Google/Microsoft/Twitter have a lot of engineers on it.)

Uber doesn't have the money or engineers to do this? We have a market cap 1/100th the size of Uber and a tiny fraction of their engineers, yet we still have this. It's just a matter of how much you want to invest on customer experience and support.

I'm sure the Uber fanboys/employees will downvote this comment, too. I really wish HN had better "karma" detection for this sort of thing.

Re: An Uber support experience

#24

Post by apinstein »

sudonim wrote: post #22

My guess is that the OPs email address soft-bounced 3 times and was added to Uber's suppression list within their sendgrid account (they are a sendgrid customer). There's probably no way for Uber support to see what's happening in their sendgrid account and this was probably failing silently. Uber's app was attempting to send the password reset email, but your email was on the suppression list and delivery was stoppe…

This is probably accurate. We had a similar situation occur frequently on our platform and fortunately Mandrill has awesome built-in support for ensuring your support team never does this to anyone. Read the article here: http://blog.mandrill.com/email-as-a-service-as-a-service.htm...

Re: An Uber support experience

#25

Post by rhizome »

icebraining wrote: post #10
chrissnell wrote: post #3

Why would you go to such lengths to patronize a business like this? Sticking by them in the face of such poor service just reaffirms their customer service practices.

I would have gone to such lengths as well - beats being berated by taxi drivers for taking short trips.

In SF, Uber drivers are virtually indistinguishable from taxi drivers.

Re: An Uber support experience

#26

Post by arielm »

sudonim wrote: post #22

My guess is that the OPs email address soft-bounced 3 times and was added to Uber's suppression list within their sendgrid account (they are a sendgrid customer). There's probably no way for Uber support to see what's happening in their sendgrid account and this was probably failing silently. Uber's app was attempting to send the password reset email, but your email was on the suppression list and delivery was stoppe…

This is most likely the case. We're using Mandrill and while rare, real emails sometimes bounce and get into the blacklist. Out technical support team has access though, so those issues get resolved within our standard response window (< an hour).

Re: An Uber support experience

#27

Post by ranman »

Pro tip when dealing with this level of ineptitude is to cold email a few execs (guess their email from linkedin). Normally the problem will filter down to someone with the intelligence to calmly read through the thread and diagnose the issue. Frontline support at many customer facing SV companies are not correctly trained to escalate and technically troubleshoot. Developer support tends to be a lot better.

Re: An Uber support experience

#28

Post by mahyarm »

scurvy wrote: post #23
cbhl wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have had similar experiences with Lyft customer support. Customer accounts being in weird states is a corner case that these services simply don't handle well right now. (It takes many eng-years to build out automated and manual review systems for all of these things; Facebook/Google/Microsoft/Twitter have a lot of engineers on it.)

Uber doesn't have the money or engineers to do this? We have a market cap 1/100th the size of Uber and a tiny fraction of their engineers, yet we still have this. It's just a matter of how much you want to invest on customer experience and support. I'm sure the Uber fanboys/employees will downvote this comment, too. I really wish HN had better "karma" detection for this sort of thing.

They probably have engineers working on this, but it's also growing like crazy. Since they've basically tripled in the past year in every metric, I bet the majority of engineers there have been there for less than a year.

Also making anything has a time cost that you cannot shorten too quickly without consequences. Systems also start breaking down as you start getting larger, and you have to start inventing your own crap. There is a reason why everything is custom at Google/Facebook scale.

It's the same reason why Apple says 'we dont have the engineering resources to do that right now'. It's not money, but time, skilled people, scale, and engineers familiar with your codebase and system. The bigger you get, the more work it is to integrate into a system, and the amount of work required multiplies continuously.

Re: An Uber support experience

#29

Post by tensor »

ishanr wrote: post #8

it would actually be faster to manually send the reset link. this is a case of premature optimization in companies.

Allow support staff to get reset links would be a huge security problem. You're basically giving your support staff unchecked access to anyone's account.
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