71–80 of 225 posts
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…
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…
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…
I have no insider knowledge of Stripe but I find it entirely plausible that Stripe will forever have cases like this. Serious fraud could cost Stripe hundreds of thousands, potentially even millions, and so there will always be cases that are out of the ordinary and don’t fit into the already defined processes. If you’re a low level employee, you do not want to take decisive action that costs Stripe a million dollars.
Stripe grows, fraud grows. Fraud is a cat and mouse game: the question should be, is Stripe effectively solving previously encountered problems? Given how much Stripe has grown, and how relatively consistent the number of complaints are, I’d say Stripe is doing a very good job.
I am sure Stripe could do a better job at handling these cases that fall through the cracks, but that’s a separate issue, because it ultimately comes down to having someone to take accountability and ownership of the risk. A month turnaround on this is totally reasonable.
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…
The CFPB for what it's worth has at least somewhat solved the predatory nature of certain banking practices, I've heard plenty of stories of threats to escalate to the CFPB getting real results for customers.
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…
I think that's why support employees aren't given very many controls to override the way the system works...
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?)
Paddle.
More expensive than some, but they become the Merchant of Record and handle sales taxes / VAT / GST / etc. in many countries for you.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
She runs an Etsy store with $1-2 million in annual sales, and her store keeps getting taken down by Etsy's automated copyright infringement system -- which keeps getting triggered by someone submitting fraudulent copyright claims and then immediately asking her to pay $5k/month in exchange for the person to stop submitting the infringement claims (in other words, she's being extorted).
Basically Etsy immediately takes down listings with no human review upon receiving a copyright complaint, which can be used by black hat scammers to extort stores into paying $5k-10k/month in exchange for the black hat to stop submitting fraudulent claims.
It's really astounding that companies build these automated systems that hurt their customers with no humans on standby to resolve these kind of edge cases (false positives).
Nov 28: Cyber Monday my business had a sale that spiked our revenue on that day. I believe this is what kicked off this whole thing. I believe that Stripe has automated systems in place to put accounts into review when something like this happens. I have no problem with that, and understand there are anti money laundering laws that they need to abide by. Nov. 29: I received an email from Stripe that 6 of our accounts…
I wonder if they hit some unspoken of limit whereby they had to provide extra diligence to a bank/creditor to justify the large movement of funds? Or if something about you having 6 seperate accounts had something to do with it. The inability to get a timely resolution likely had something to do with the review team having decreased availibility during the holidays (remember, they probably work hard and have families too, and may have been on vacation or operating at a significantly lower throughput).
I can confirm most places do a horrible job at maintaining customer relationship history, and actually making it readily available to customer service. Furthermore, customer service tends to be just a dispatch point, after an async message is sent, it tends to be the norm that they by default will ask if there's anything else they can do, and if not, on to the next caller/customer.
I've started to push more places toward engaging in synchronous issue resolution for high value issues, as it gets a lot more awkward and has a bigger organizational blast radius when process is so dysfunctional someone external to the organization has to excavate in house communication channels to get an issue resolved.
Far too many places have abandoned customer service/Quality Assurance as high priority operational mandates. The success metric as of late is number of customers who haven't been pissed off enough to leave, thus are still profittable due to willingness to accept our cheapo subpar offering. Not actually happy customers.
If I worked there, y'all woulda been a case study for my group, if it's any comfort.
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…
The alternative is to empower customer support reps to look up the cause of a problem. This would not affect general operations when everything is running smooth, but would solve the case where clueless reps keep asking for the same documents and can't follow through or actually do anything.
What you're describing is how modern tech companies have eliminated support level 1.
But if that was the plan, it should be followed by making all the remaining reps level 2 and giving them the proper tools and training to do their job.