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Update: Stripe is holding over $400k of mine with no explanation [resolved]

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Re: Update: Stripe is holding over $400k of mine with no explanation [resolved]

#61

Post by prirun »

ghoomketu wrote: post #11

> Thanks to @dang for getting a Stripe employee to respond and he was finally able to resolve the issue for me. I think it's time to add another HN tab called Complaints where we can post complaints for the common culprits like Google, Stripe, Pinboard, etc. It sounds backwards but the amount of people HN has helped over years it must add to millions of dollars to priceless things like getting back your email and pho…

Doesn't seem to me that this would work. Most of the HN audience will not go to the Complaints tab, so the forces of social shaming wouldn't work. The marketing dept only cares about complaints that affect the company's reputation.

Re: Update: Stripe is holding over $400k of mine with no explanation [resolved]

#62

Post by mint2 »

A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote: post #13
DevX101 wrote: post #5

I'm glad your issues were sorted, but I'm uncomfortable with the idea that you need to make a social media post to get a customer service issue resolved. This isn't just stripe. I see this with many other companies on social media. I don't post on Twitter, and I'd rather not put my account details for some service I use in a public forum. It's starting to seem like for too many companies, resolving public complaints…

Sadly, this has been a thing for a while. As a T-Mobile customer, at one point, it eventually took me to put a request via Twitter to get the matter resolved in 20 minutes as opposed to previously spending hours on the phone with tech support ( with no results to show for it ). It is, quite frankly, infuriating; especially for a telecom. edit: I genuinely do not get why it took Twitter referral in my case either ( it…

The reason it take a Twitter referral is that the phone reps usually are “subcontractors” that aren’t allowed to do anything. There’s a good chance they have to meet absurd metrics in order not to get fired.

This linked article explains why in many cases a companies phone support can’t do much and is also mistreated.

https://www.propublica.org/article/meet-the-customer-service...

Re: Update: Stripe is holding over $400k of mine with no explanation [resolved]

#65

Post by blindriver »

It's obvious Stripe doesn't have any alerts or observability to catch situations like this, when customers are in this obviously bad state.

Hopefully they fix this and add the proper metrics so that this can be caught and handled by customer support before it turns into a problem.

Re: Update: Stripe is holding over $400k of mine with no explanation [resolved]

#66

Post by throwawayapples »

intrasight wrote: post #39
throwawayapples wrote: post #10

Are there any real alternatives to Stripe? Obviously Adyen if you're in EU, PayPal/Braintree, etc, but Stripe is really the big kahuna. What about building your own with Authorize.net? Are there any old-school gateways like that left out there that are still independent? (can one do payments in the 10-100$ USD range on the blockchain? What if you don't want to go through an exchange?)

I've been using Authorize.net for years. Can't imaging using some service that can hold my money hostage. While Authorize.net is "old-school", it is flexible and you are in control. Remind me again why people use Stripe?

It's now owned by VISA. :(

Re: Update: Stripe is holding over $400k of mine with no explanation [resolved]

#67

Post by dylan604 »

auggierose wrote: post #40

It seems to me Stripe et al. use social media as a filter: If somebody posts their complaints here in the open, it is much more likely not to be their fault / due to shady stuff, but instead probably Stripe's fault. If instead you contact them through normal channels, then they don't have this filter, and will need to spend much more resources on cases where Stripe got it right in the first place. I don't like it, bu…

Maybe it should be the opposite where Support Tickets make the post public to social media like Venmo does with their transactions.

Re: Update: Stripe is holding over $400k of mine with no explanation [resolved]

#68

Post by prirun »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #43

Lots of posts here along the lines of "it's not good when you need to resort to social media shaming to get customer support", but I'll take the contrarian view, or at least explain why this dynamic exists. The past 20 years has seen an explosion in Internet services, but a fundamental (often unspoken) quality of these services is that they must keep individualized customer support costs very low in order to be profi…

Except in this case, the user was actually talking to customer support, so was already taking up their time. It's one thing to have zero customer support, like Google; I can see that saving money (though it's a shitty practice IMO). But if there is a CS dept and you are talking to reps but they're not solving your problem, wouldn't it be better to actually solve the problem instead of repeatedly spending time not solving it?

Re: Update: Stripe is holding over $400k of mine with no explanation [resolved]

#69

Post by mint2 »

ryandrake wrote: post #57
jcollins1991 wrote: post #20

I'd really love to get more insight into the Dec 30 -> Jan 3 time frame, since that's where everything meaningful happened... From the outside it's hard to tell WHY the lower level employees are completely incapable of driving a resolution, whether they're underpaid and apathetic, or if management has crippled them from making any decisions on their own. It's amazing that they don't have better processes in place aft…

Last time I had to fight a company's customer support over them owing money to me (admittedly a couple of orders of magnitude less than OP), it was a mix of "It's someone else's fault, call them" and "Computer says no". Customer support is friendly, cheerful, and are trained to at least act sad that customer is having trouble. Lots of "I'm sorry that you are having trouble but I can't..." Most companies' customer sup…

You may find this article has an interesting look at how many companies do their phone support. It really explains how the service got to be so awful.

https://www.propublica.org/article/meet-the-customer-service...

Re: Update: Stripe is holding over $400k of mine with no explanation [resolved]

#70

Post by jmacd »

I used to work at one of the big customer service platform vendors. We had some really, really, useful ranking capabilities that would prioritize certain customers based on the data held in a CRM. It was a bit of a pet project of mine. The idea was to calculate weights for customer importance (this can be account size, potential future opportunity size, social media following, tenure, etc) and severity of the problem (in this case, $ amount frozen..) in order to rank the service queue.

It didn't garner nearly the level of interest I thought it should/would. That was over 10 years ago though and the overall integration story probably sounded scarier than it needed to. The pitch was: Deal with big customers with big problems early (and possibly with specialized teams) so that escalations don't dramatically increase costs (they do, and the cost is usually unaccounted for).

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