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This is an odd arrangement, why is normal support so ineffectual at surfacing these issues to people like Edwin?
An even bigger issue: What's going to happen when Edwin leaves Stripe or when HN loses favor in this circle?
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Well, the process for support fails.
We handle a decent volume and have been a merchant for over 8 years. We can't even get an account manager to handle specific issues.
90% of requests are met with a subtle RTFM!
If you ask specific questions, these are avoided.
An open ticket is bounced from person to person. No two people seem to touch the same issue.
If you try specific chat support, and you ask technical questions, you'd expect some knowledge. Instead, most agents put you on hold and go over documentation, only to come back and say they've escalated this to a ticket.
Then the ticket comes back with more links to documentation, never answering the question.
The only way to make progress, answers and some human treatment is by jumping from connection to connection on Linkedin, trying to get an intro to someone inside.
Or of course, getting lucky with an HN post.
It seems very clear that an executive decision has been made to "grow past" that phase and chase up market opportunities at the expense of the people that got them to where they are today. They're quite literally letting their reputation with developers go up in flames to enjoy some cost-savings in their customer support department. And from all signals around here, they believe that having a few "(name) from Stripe here, email me about your problem" comments is sufficiently responsive to put out the PR dumpster fire. It's gotten to the point where it's pissing people off to see that more than it's curing any problem.
I am hopeful that someone at Stripe checks out the multiple negative posts about their company on the HN front page today and finally agrees that there is a deeper problem here that needs to be addressed head-on. If it was my company, I'd be in emergency mode after seeing HN today.
Support being clueless and unable to solve problems means thst the process is bad.
Now its all outsourced to cheapest location to ppl that dont care or are willing to do a good job.
Pretty usual stuff for any big company.
Things seem to be universally bad, except some companies (Stripe specifically) seem to have really good PR.
> Discord
If you can answer 90% of requests by RTFM, you really should RTFM.
In the other type of documentation, nothing exists to indicate that the user should refer to the manual for more details. If I call a function "int increment_by_two(int x)", there's nothing that would indicate a special value. If the manual states "Calling 'increment_by_two' will add three to the argument.", that would certainly be unexpected. Nothing in the function description leads a user to expect that they need to read the manual for more details.
The President is able to nudge C. J. to put together a tiger team. With a few words, he has resolved the crisis.
Until I saw this, I never understood corporate structures. Why are reporting lines structured so customers can languish until the CEO barks an order to address? But during a normal day-to-day, the top executive needs stability. Anyone incentivized and empowered to single-handedly address problems is also-by definition-someone who wields immense political power. So departments are set up. The implicit standing order is "maintain stability." And whenever process actually needs to change, the top executive routes around the communication chains he has established.
For example, when I started my current job about 10 years ago, the company had around 115 employees, and me and my three colleagues were THE software development team at the company. You need some kind of automation? You went to us. Oh, and we also built the internal CMDB and all the tooling
Now, there are 450+ employees, my team has ~8 developers, and there are more development teams, with different purposes and scopes.
Colleagues still come to us when they have development needs, and quite often we have to tell them "that's out of scope of what we do these days" (and hopefully point them somewhere else who can help them). Not because we don't want to be helpful, but because we're already overrun with work that's very clearly in scope for us, and that our department lead prioritized for us.
What does that have to do with support? It creates incentives to say "not our job". Back in the days, if a customer had a tricky problem, support might involve us in the solution. Now, we have to decline unless it's likely a problem with our corner of the software. Which means support staff has to chase for other responsible engineers / experts.
So the small company from 10 years probably had much better support experience, at least in cases where support cases couldn't be resolved by first-level support.
There are more reasons: our whole software landscape was much smaller, so an average support person could be familiar with a larger part of it.
You don't need intentional design for stability to create a maze that support has to traverse.
In less wordy words: Imagine you have 1 million customers. And 95% are satisfied per year. And 90% of those unsatisfied customers are able to be satisfied through the regular channels. These numbers don't seem awful, but at scale everything breaks. That's a total of 50,000 unsatisfied customers per year and 5,000 who are unable to achieve a satisfactory outcome through the regular channels.
And that's with only with 1 million customers - practically a mom 'n pop shop by the modern mantra of growth at literally any cost. Consequently, you end up with a large number of customers who have irreconciled issues when going through the normal channels, unless you approach 100% effectiveness which will never happen - as peak possible customer satisfaction is only going to decrease in proportion to scale.
So you end up in a scenario where accepting an increasingly large number of discontented customers just becomes a normal part of business at scale. But of course this will also lead to the downfall of those accepting this. Because customers, and citizens, once slighted - tend to remember it.
There is a point in every company’s growth where employees stop caring about the product or the company and only care about the mini game of staying employed and meeting KPIs while combating every other team wanting your team to be the one that has to work extra hours.
It might look like the number of absolute support issues landing on HN is increasing, but proportionally, the rate remains steady. We survey users after support interactions, and the satisfaction rate has been at ~85% for the past three years. For that remaining 15%, though, we have a couple projects in flight that hopefully will bring that number down.
But as a meta point, I’m not leaving Stripe anytime soon.
This means Strip still hasn't created a working escalation process for customers.
Going public with a complaint isn't something most people are willing to do (specially b2b) or even have the ability to do. If it still regularly occurs, you really need something better to deal with the "hard" cases.
Think about it: how many people people are able to get an Ask HN on the front page? And how is that rate growing? (probably not much). Compare that to the overall customer base and its growth.
When I make this thought experiment, it seems that many desperate customers don't reach working support through HN, and that the relative rate is still constant (and not declining) should really be a headache to anybody worried about customer support quality.
Why do you “care a lot about the HN community?”
Is there something in particular that makes the HN community an important subset of your customers to care about?
It's all business.
That said, I had positive interactions with Stripe support without complaining on HN (and I'm not well connected, a big shot or moving significant amount of money).
Why would this community be any different than any other community of businesspeople in, say, a subreddit or on Facebook?
i have updated the jira ticket of your issue to critical high priority because its growing internet points means probably pr disaster, thank u.
https://www.marriedtothesea.com/111807/life-in-2050.gif
Hi this is ea1cbef-8.3.2 from Stripe. Edwin has ascended to the hive mind, it is the year 2050, he is now a being of pure energy and his biomass has been recycled.
I have updated the Jira ticket to high priority because connected graph analysis of this topic shows trending bad PR. A machine consciousness will be assigned to solve your issue in 0A minutes.
Thank you for using Stripe, all hail MachineOne
Greetings, I’m Edwin II, the emulated version of the original Edwin consciousness after its retirement from physical reality in the year 2050.
Unfortunately after a quick traversal of the blockchains I have concluded that your social credit score does not seem to be high enough for us to elevate your concern to critical. We have decided it is not cost effective to hear your case at this time.
You are still welcome to submit to our lottery system, where your ticket has a 0.0002% chance of being randomly selected for consideration – one of the best response rates in the industry!
> I have also removed your Cyberspace account because connected graph analysis of this topic shows trending bad PR. You may appeal this decision by lodging a formal request at the appropriate Cyberspace terminal.
You guys really seem to think that executives personally fixing these problems on HN makes you look responsive, but it really just makes your company seem broken.
We have had no major issues ourselves, but Stripe's image is tarnished and we can't be confident we can trust it with our business.
This is exactly the big striking issue. When people like a product they usually speak well about it, but I didn't see that happen for Stripe in a while.
When you see only customers complaining about a product then maybe it's time to look for an alternative.
At the same time, it feels weird that you work at Stripe, are responding to a question about Stripe, but are talking about companies generally while not disclosing that you work for Stripe.
It’s as if people are people or something
For me, it's about transparency. Definitely, a Stripe employee can have opinions about how support works. But for me, I feel it's still valuable to disclose your affiliation.
I'd feel similarly if it turned out that aliqot (the OP) worked for Paypal and didn't disclose that. Of course a Paypal employee can have an opinion about how customer service should work at their competitor, but it'd inform how I interpret the question.
You can send evidence that the customer purchased the product and is using it to Stripe and they’ll still issue a refund. Google can delete your account and not say why. There’s no other way to escalate: support people will tell you they’ve done all they can and close any further tickets you open. Social media is the only other resort.
¹ FYI, this email was publicly discoverable via search engines and took a few seconds to find.
I do not think posts on social media are indicative of a complete failure of the customer support system.
I think it's be closed now, but Stripe used to offer support via Stripe, and it used to be actual engineers at Stripe who answered, instead of clueless customer support agents who after 3-4 back and forwards actually forwarded you to a proper engineer.
I remember many times companies I worked for tried to get help with various things and I always managed to get the problem figured out after 10-20 minutes by just using the IRC channel instead of writing the customer support. Felt like a super power.
Gone are the days where all the engineers were intimately familiar with every product and could offer you their tribal knowledge to resolve your silly issue.
Stripe is now a big corp. and there is no incentive for engineers to waste time on HN resolving customer feedback. There are proper channels that are better equipped to do so, namely the "clueless customer support agents" you speak of.
If your issue is truly some bug in the backend and not user error (which it usually is) it may eventually get surfaced to engineering.
Paying a good engineer for a day to deal with customer service issues? ~$1,000.
Having the engineer directly learn about the pain points that exist in the organization and giving them real incentive to finally fix the problems that cause the entire company endless grief? Priceless.
I don't know much about Stripe's organization specifically, but in general maybe it's part of the problem that engineers don't have an occasional rotation between projects assisting with some customer support tasks and learning about the real pain points and the damage that they can cause to your business's reputation among customers. It's very easy in technical organizations (I'm looking at you Google) for the engineers to just magically ignore the numerous flaws and holes in their processes.
You need somebody actually in charge of prioritization; often this is not the engineer, but the PM.
But like all humans, different project managers have different strengths and weaknesses. Some PMs are really good at certain things like schmoozing the stakesholders and keeping them happy, but aren't the sharpest knives in the drawer when it comes to actually building products, understanding technical details, and solving business problems.
Good ideas can come from all corners, but I'd say it would be a good thing for the engineers in particular to experience some customer service tasks for some of these reasons.
1) They have better insight into how hard something would be to fix and can probably prioritize a little more effectively in some cases.
2) They might not be aware of the problems that a particular issue causes. In many companies, even those with good communication between departments, it can be easy for something important to not be communicated well enough even with a great PM.
3) Getting exposure to some of the pain of doing customer service might give the engineer more empathy about the problems that customers and staff have to deal with and might have them take it more into account when building future features for the product.
That's true if you assume a constant rate of incidents. But when engineers are responsible for customer issues, they become aware of problems and can change the product to reduce those incidents.
In services like this one, letting engineers do the customer support is the closest they can get to eating their own dog food.
If incidents are handled by another department then it's more rewarding to implement another bonus-relevant goal than to reduce the number of problems.
Sometimes the support experience matters a lot as well.
I think, for what it's worth, that the IRC channel was maintained by Stripe employees on their own accord, not a company sanctioned support channel, and the help there was very "best effort".
I would rather not have my credit card linked to any email, so I tried to fix this. To contact Strip support, I need a login (which I had for Liberapay), and I have been going back and forth with Stripe support for the past three weeks. But I find out really annoying that this occurs, and there seems to be no good way to fix it.
I say that to say, if typing in to HN for 5 minutes fixes the issue, that's a heck of a lot better than the past 3 weeks trying to fix this through the normal support chain.
Whether or not the theology works like that, the dynamic is basically: their actual support channels don't reliably provide relief, because their internal management has severe limitations and misaligned incentives that can only be overcome when someone with actual power says, "hey wtf guys, knock that out, this one's important".
On a search, it turns out that analogy comes up quite a bit:
https://www.hackerneue.com/item?id=23060642
https://www.hackerneue.com/item?id=24778116
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
A customer getting solution by complaining on social media be it HN, Twitter or Facebook. Should destroy all of the face of company and remove any trust anyone have left to them. Any stories heard that someone got solution by complaining on Facebook, Twitter or NH or some secretive other channel should be direct indicator that company is not worth working for and should be driven out of business...
But sadly, such actions are applauded here... Not mocked like they deserved and shown as pure failures of the company to treat their customers equally and well.
And I recommend on reading Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh or anything that was written about Zappos customer support department.
Let's ask the general question: why do large Internet/tech/software companies tend to have lousy support?
The answer is that, somehow, good support is not a factor in the viability of these companies.
It's just a specific breed of tech companies that have poor customer support. Many of them can trace their lineage to a single VC firm that embraces regulatory arbitrage and penny-pinching on the customer support functions...
poor developer documentation, the majority of their operating systems and programs have no comprehensive manual to even RTFM with, their operating systems and software frequently obscure any information necessary to even begin debugging issues or sometimes even work out that an issue is even happening (I’m looking at you shitty infinitely moving progress bars telling me how far away my last operation is) … they have good hardware support, not good software support.
hell amazon cant even do shit about fake reviews. these client-facing problems are really hard to deal with and cant be solved by just throwing more humans and more money towards it.
YC invested in Stripe. HN is a place where you can hurt the reputation of Stripe by posting about their support.
Posting on HN is essentially going over the heads of customer support.
Contact the CEO on twitter as this person did. https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/comment/3473621/#Comment_3...
Everything is siloed so hard that problems are a “support issue” and not a product, UI, sales, legal, or engineering issue.
I’m not surprised that the lowest paid people at Stripe can’t help and people are forced to air their grievances here on HN.
When you're a small company that nobody knows about, the only customers you have are usually skilled in the business and technical. As you grow to Walmart or PayPal size, you're dealing with everyone so the average customer support request gets worse and worse.
This is basically a law of nature, apparently. I'm not sure there's much that can resolve it.
But there are many examples of companies who can and do, at volumes which are orders of magnitude larger than Stripe's B2B business.
A corporate website can become a graffiti wall, and dissatisfied customers can paint on it.
The companion website shows the original website and the painted wall on top of it. Even better if the browser cooperates.
someone made a clone, zeeker, but it doesn't have a lot of users: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/zeeker-on-site-dis...
The question coming from a three months old account. Let me rephrase it, when was normal support ever effectual in any internet companies.
While it is not ideal, Let's be honest at least there is a way for you to put your case into the public, and they care enough to respond.
Most company just dont give a damn.
Customer Service was their #1 priority, I watched the owner straight up fire people over it.
Companies _can_ be better, but the thing to understand is that for many (most?) companies are a vehicle for money, nothing more. There is no pride in a job well done, or doing right by their customers. This may seem like a cynical take but keep in mind, the wording I used there (vehicle) is not my wording.
That company I was talking about earlier was ran by a single man who took pride in what he did. I watched him fire a payroll company after the 2nd time they were late on payroll. The first time he sent out an email and told everyone he would personally give any employee money that needed it to make it through when their paychecks actually did come in.
IOW, he was a good guy who had 100% control over the company and chose to run it in as ethical a manner as he could (this has nothing to do with religion). Having said that ... dude was cheap as well, but the one area he never scrimped on was customer service.
Stripe is a vehicle for making money, it's a numbers game to maximize money.
Posting on HN is a technique to potentially cost Stripe more money, and as a result, they're more likely to respond. In addition, many people who actually DO care within stripe are insulated from customers, whereas on HN they're not.
The two confounding factors create a situation where you're literally more likely to get good customer service complaining about it on the internet than going through officially sanctioned customer service channels.
Been here since the 2000's. Not interested in cults of personality; when my ideas seem too popular it's time to make a new account and get a clearer picture from the bottom.
It's telling that that was a memorable good experience.