I've had the same experience with Edwin. When I published an article critical of Stripe that reached the front page of HN,[0] he was very helpful and set up a direct phone call for us to talk. Edwin said many times on the call that if I ever ran into a situation where I seemed to be getting the runaround from Stripe support, I could contact him to get things unstuck.
A month later, I ran into an issue where the Stripe API contradicted the API documentation. I contacted support, and support told me that it's intended behavior for the API to violate its own documentation. I emailed Edwin since that seemed like the exact scenario he volunteered to help with, and he didn't respond. I followed up a week later, and he didn't respond.
Letting customers slip through the cracks of the traditional support channels is a bad indicator obviously, but what's the problem with keeping an eye on social media channels in addition to the traditional channels? Why is that not a "serious way to run a business"?
Why is that not a "serious way to run a business"?
Rather than trying to solve the problem of "customers having serious problems", listening to HN and replying here says "we only really care about people being critical of our product in public; we don't actually care about the underlying issue people are criticising us about." It's not real support if Joe Random can't access it without knowing the secret formula.
Support-by-HN-replies is theatre, even if it works sometimes.
I'm not really suggesting Stripe are guilty of this. Stripe support has actually been fine for me in the past.
Because it's too easy to be bad at that as well. Just look at the thread where "Edwin" (I use quotes because it may or may not actually be Edwin) says "sorry, hit me up" and then the repsonse is "bitch, we did but you never replied back" (emphasis mine, but it was there if you read between the lines).
Now, "Edwin" looks even more pathetic and bot like
Because otherwise you have no leverage. If you go through proper channels your request for help will sit rotting in a queue until someone decides to pick up the ticket.
If you complain loudly and publicly in a popular forum, everyone’s opinion of the company will degrade the longer your cries go visibly unanswered, so it requires immediate attention. Your request gets elevated to critical.
As someone who worked as front-line support and turned into the authority who's asked to resolve complex cases, this is nonsense. They aren't playing Tetris ignoring the queue. It's more likely the front-line staff are overwhelmed and/or don't know how to cut through the corporate hoops/politics to find and deliver the fix, and/or too shy/embarrassed to admit ignorance and having to pass it to the higher-ups for someone who knows how to fix things. It's more likely going in circles because they want to resolve it within their levels without having to escalate it.
Which means that the company knowingly and intentionally decided to skimp on support, or have other policies which lead to their staff being overwhelmed.
> don't know how to cut through the corporate hoops/politics to find and deliver the fix
Which means the corporation decided to skimp on their training and or efforts to streamline the issue resolution.
> and/or too shy/embarrassed to admit ignorance and having to pass it to the higher-ups for someone who knows how to fix things
Same as above.
> It's more likely going in circles because they want to resolve it within their levels without having to escalate it.
And why is that? Ah yes, because the company knowingly and intentionally set the incentives as such.
I don’t have a problem with the front line support. They are just humans like you and me. But I will have zero pitty on companies who under allocate resources to their problems and then try to hide behind their overworked support line as some meat shield.
Posting on a popular forum seems to short-circuit all that and get actual results probably because it starts making some executive squirm.
If I'm running a business and losing money because your service is fubar I really don't give a damn that you're all too busy or too ignorant to solve the problem. I'm going to do what I know works and that's basically blast over HN/Twitter/Reddit that your service sucks and has been broke for X duration.
You're right that a customer shouldn't care the staff are too busy or too ignorant. You're also right in how complaining online short-circuits all that to actually receive help. I continuously advocate for the presence of path to higher levels and short-circuits! But it isn't always "the employee of company X responded to me on HN because my post made an executive squirm!" Some people just care and willing to lend a hand in cases where they can help.
> Some people just care and willing to lend a hand in cases where they can help.
Why don't they (whoever at the company is in a position to make a difference) care before there is bad publicity? It's either incompetence or indifference. krisoft left another comment already that explains it quite well. There is little - if any - reason to give Stripe the benefit of the doubt here, and there are a lot of reasons to believe it's intentional.
As someone who has worked front-line support: large companies like Stripe purposefully don't create paths in the customer support scripts for resolving issues they don't want to. They're not stupid or blind, they listen to the calls and know these issues crop up. They don't care. Having support staff deal with weird/unusual problems is expensive, more expensive than just having those customers put up with it, or go away and become someone else's problem.
Don't blame minimum wage earners for barriers intentionally thrown up by management to reduce labor costs.
> at FAANG scale and it would be dramatically inefficient for software engineers / product managers / those implementing functionality to triage all support tickets
In other words, human labor would be too costly. It not a FAANG thing either, the government does it just as well as most other big entities that are betting they can let some problems slip through without too much loss.
Not all problems require software engineers. Just having someone to filter the appropriate problem to the appropriate person is sufficient. For example,
> but also slashed our corporate card limits with no explanation and refused to restore them despite our bank writing letters supporting our position.
Even a response stating “we do not have the capacity to resolve your issue” is acceptable.
Getting black holed or wasting hours of customers’ time in phone trees and getting passed around is not acceptable.
Because that’s 90% of reason why tech startups are profitable. Not by having better product than competition, but buy gutting customer support, which is super expensive AND doesn’t scale.
Would OP please consider updating this thread with the outcome of the email exchange. Seems too easy to pop into every complaint thread and act busy. Would love to know if your problem is actually resolved
Edwin reached out to me but their team can't override their faulty algorithm apparently. Other banks/payment providers have no issue giving us 3-5x the limit Stripe slashed us to, but they can't. Root cause is the fact that Stripe fundamentally doesn't understand eCommerce / cyclical LOCs in their algorithms apparently as our business hasn't changed meaningfully regarding effective cash positions.
Fairly surprising Stripe doesn't understand how to evaluate financial positions correctly. Oh well.
I would but that is likely to come months down the road - I doubt this thread will be remembered by then! Still I'll figure out how to get that info out.