[patio11]

Sorry that happened to you.

As some HNers know I have a long-time hobby of working customer service state machines, and I'm going to take the liberty of writing the most effective resolution path here for the general case, in case you or other HNers ever need to solve this.

Live chat is probably staffed by external agents and they may have the least ability in the various tiers of the CS hierarchy to help with problems, particularly hard problems requiring substantial judgement. Your princess in in another castle. It is quite possible that there is a business decision made to not let live agents speak to you for fear that a scammer will outmaneuver this tier of agent into getting a reinstatement by pretending to be a legitimate customer confused as to why they suddenly had their account deactivated.

There is a team which makes these sort of decisions (even if they also support teams which implement computer systems that make these decisions at scale), and they also unmake these decisions. You generally can route messages to that team by going in through email support, particularly email support for businesses.

If you cannot, there is also a team which handles internal escalations, and your objective is to find a public-facing individual who will file a ticket with them. This always, always, always includes the Legal department and Investor Relations, and may include e.g. their Comms people, social media people, etc etc. For businesses which tend towards the traditional/stody, I generally used to recommend paper letters to Legal/IR/Office of the President/etc, but for businesses which trend towards tech industry (and increasingly in finance), at messaging them on Twitter from an account that looks like very plausibly a human will often achieve the same effect.

Ignore basically everything they say in your message to the person attempting to achieve an internal escalation, and stick with the facts of your business relationship: I've been a user for N years, believe my account was deactivated in error, wish to continue being a user, and would like to reverse this decision. What information do they need to quickly come to this decision? In the alternative, can they please justify it in writing with specificity to you; you've already read the material they sent you but it clearly doesn't apply to your case.

It is generally not instrumentally effective to be angry.

The symptom you are detecting is downstream of a larger set of business decisions which weren't made for malice. Those decisions have a false positive rate. The business made a series of decisions with regards to false positives, customer support costs, escalation pathways, cost to operate them, etc. All of that is irrelevant to you, though; you just want to present like a professional who wants their account back, and in particular, you want to present like a professional who is very organized and motivated. Organized and motivated professionals who are savvy enough to write Investor Relations to get what they want are the start of a lot of stories which have cost e.g. financial firms a lot of money, because they're capable of collecting paper trails and submitting them to e.g. regulators, and they're detected and dealt with early in the process.

Best of luck and skill.

Disclaimer: comment written in personal capacity. I have some amount of knowledge of how this works professionally and some amount of knowledge from spending years ghostwriting letters into the financial industry on behalf of people who, demographically speaking, generally do not resemble the typical HNer with this problem, but who also felt incapable of avoiding the runaround.

[patio11]

An aside for HNers, which I write as someone who had his first job in customer service: please remember, when interacting with customer service agents (and the various ops folks at companies that hire from very similar talent pools), that you (very likely, if you are on HN) are in a ridiculously fortunate position in life relative to the customer service agent, and that they did not write the state machine that made the poor decision about you. They're just following the arrows on that state machine.

You either want to discover the inputs needed to get the state machine to give you the outcome you want, or, you want to get this issue kicked from the CS/etc person you're talking to a fellow well-compensated professional who has substantial discretionary decisionmaking ability. None of this requires getting intemperate with a person who makes very little money and has a frequently soulcrushing job.

[nate_meurer]

Thanks for this addendum, this is important. I'd also emphasize the practical effect that our rudeness/friendliness can have. I experienced this last year when we were trying to get care for my father after he was nearly killed by COVID. The hospital wanted to send him home before he was able to care for himself, and we wanted the hospital to discharge him to rehab instead.

My sister's initial strategy was to go full Karen and treat the patient care coordinator like she was my sister's employee. She adapted to the coordinator's natural reticence with increasing bitchiness, and quickly got her calls screened.

My father on the verge of getting kicked out while still in dire need of care, I called the same coordinator, explained our dilemma in detail, said I don't know what to do, and asked for her help. My magic spell was simply to treat the coordinator as a resourceful and intelligent person who was in a position to help me, and ask her plainly for help. That's it. The coordinator told me she'd see what she could do, and then spent the next two days searching for a solution. When she found a way to get my dad into rehab for a few days, I told her she was my hero.

I try to treat even the most obviously external and powerless customer service reps with the same plain respect as that patient coordinator, and I'm often surprised by how far it gets me.

[serf]

>please remember, when interacting with customer service agents (and the various ops folks at companies that hire from very similar talent pools), that you (very likely, if you are on HN) are in a ridiculously fortunate position in life relative to the customer service agent

I agree with the sentiment that 'you attract more flies with honey than vinegar' with regards to customer service folks, but disagree with the trope that HN-users (or computer-job-people in general) are somehow privileged and in a fortunate place in life simply due to where they hang out online or the categorization of work they do.

I also disagree with the stereotyping of customer service workers as disadvantaged.

simply put : I disagree with uninformed characterizations. I don't know anything about the life of the customer service worker that I need to call, and they don't know anything about mine; to assume anything with what little we both know about each other is a recipe for inaccurate profiling.

"try walking a mile in my shoes" isn't a literal request to learn more about the person you're judging, it's advice that suggests that 'the other' is ultimately unknowable and that presumption is worthless.

judge their job and the quality of that, maybe some accurate generalizations can be made about their job; I can agree that most customer-service work is low quality, grueling, and sometimes abusive.

Don't extrapolate judgements borne from work presumptions into 'total life quality & stature'; a person is more and has more than the work they do.

[Normille]

It's not so much that the customer service people are advantaged/disadvantaged or helpful/unhelpful that, in my opinion, makes it a compete waste of time ringing them. It's the fact that they have no real ability to solve any of your problems which are not down to error on your part.

The turnover of staff in call centres is continual and few people last long in the job. So the person you speak to is doubtless barely trained, knows nothing much about how the company works and, when speaking to you, is working from a script along the lines of _"Customer has problem A -- Suggest solution B"_. So is highly unlikely to be able to do anything to help you, if your problem is not on their script --and they have no authority to make any decisions beyond the most standard basic procedures, anyway.