[jeffiel]

Hi Chris - CEO of Twilio here. I'm sorry for the issue. Fighting bad actors sucks, but we can do better to communicate with good faith builders like yourself. Mind sending me a note with your account at [e-mail], and I'll escalate for you.

[quadrifoliate]

A request from a random HNer – could you also commit to observing what the user's interactions with your customer service have been so far; and improving each of those, instead of nebulously "escalating" (where people will unblock an account because the CEO mandated it from up on high)?

Otherwise, you are contributing to a pattern where HN becomes de facto Tier 1 Customer Service, similar to how Twitter was a few years ago. This is already the case for various Google services [1], but I would hope that we don't want to normalize it for every service.

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[1] A familiar pattern to most of us – Ask HN: Google suspended my account without warning; Googler escalates internally; problem is solved

[ChrisDutrow]

I'm going to have to cop to this. I was desperate and needed a way to get my phone calls up and running. I have many employees that rely on me to feed their families. We employ a lot of refugees with large families and if I don't run my business right, they can't feed their families. This isn't a game.

I posted to HackerNews because I suspected my issue would be seen and taken seriously if I did that. I could tell the ticketing system people were overlooked and only looking at my issue in a very shallow way.

If this had not worked, I would have started using my Stack-overflow account then Reddit. If that didn't work, I found an address of a lady how works for Twilio nearby, I was going to go knock on her door and see if she could put me in touch with someone.

Luckily I was able to get the problem resolved without those additional steps.

I would like to point out that Twilio's ticketing system works well for complex problems that are not time-sensitive. I had an issue a few months back that I think was probably quite complicated involving bureaucracy and multiple carriers and it was resolved in a few days via their ticketing system which was very cool.

[quadrifoliate]

I totally understand your point of view, and you are not at fault at all. Anyone with a small business who's faced with the faceless, understaffed customer service at modern web companies would have done the same thing. I hope your issue gets resolved quickly.

IMO now that Twilio is a public company, they should be investing in better customer service. I am simply encouraging them to solve the actual problem in addition to unblocking you; hence the "also commit to...", not "instead commit to..."

I hope my comment is not used as justification to not solve your problem. That would be the very last thing I want.

[ChrisDutrow]

Oh no, I didn't take it that way. I just thought what you said was very interesting and wanted to provide more information and confirm that you were correct.

[ChrisDutrow]

Hey Jeff,

Thanks for taking the time to respond. The fact that you responded to this message at all resolves my initial concern, which had more to do with if I needed to change providers because of a cultural shift within your company. I understand that you are dealing with a very large and complex system that is changing quickly and will have problems, sometimes serious problems sometimes. Customer communication specifically is a very difficult and complex problem to solve at scale.

I actually spoke with one of the founders of Twilio when I first signed up. Evan maybe? He told me about how he studied cloud computing at MIT. This was a very long time ago.

Gregg was able to get the problem resolved within about 30 minutes once I reached out to him. He also provided me with a few solutions to prevent the problem in the future.

I understand the complicated problem that that led to this mistake and I think it is reasonable to make mistakes like this sometimes, especially if you're providers are threatening to suspend you.

The main problem that I would like you to solve is the lack of phone number. There needs to be a way for people to contact the company if there is an account administration emergency like this. Even chat would have been fine.

That being said, I did call sales and could not reach someone. If this is due to covid omicron and if normally I had called sales and would have been able to plead my case and gotten them to connect me with someone, I think that would have been fine and this truly is an edge case.