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globile parent
Stripe support is broken. I recall patio11 writing about how Stripe is all about putting in the correct "process".

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.

speakfreely
Stripe got their start by building goodwill in the developer community, optimizing the simple use cases that frustrated developers, and providing great, responsive support as they grew.

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.

sillysaurusx
It seems like it’s just a factor of growth, not an explicit decision. It’s the default outcome.
rvba
If the process was good, the tickets would be handled properly but perhaps with delays - that would be a growing pain. They can solve issues but slowly.

Support being clueless and unable to solve problems means thst the process is bad.

pojzon
Before the tickets were handled by well paid support that understood the product.

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.

version_five
This seems to be the norm among modern tech companies (and maybe others). I think that a good deal of "value" (market cap) has been created over the past 15+ years around preventing customers from getting help, and therefore increasing retention and lowering headcount. There are even large help desk firms that basically specialize in software to prevent people from getting help from a real person. If we took this away and asked companies to actually support their customers, I think we'd quickly see that many businesses would no longer be viable
andyfleming
Even if they are viable, it would eat into profit significantly. It's a trade-off between customer happiness and profit. The reality is that even when a large number of customers are occasionally unhappy, they may still not leave the company/product for various reasons. Companies then choose to accept that custom unhappiness since it does not impact their revenue enough practically. Arguably, they have an obligation to make that choice. It's the "best" thing for the company, at least in the shorter term.
jwr
I think we need more competitors. I use Braintree, and their support response times are about two weeks, and the first response is rarely helpful enough to solve the problem. Well if my customer has a problem paying me, I can't expect them to hang around for two to six weeks while I "talk" to my payment processor.

Things seem to be universally bad, except some companies (Stripe specifically) seem to have really good PR.

jrs235
Maybe they have this poster hanging on all their walls?: https://despair.com/products/apathy
crdrost
Except this is Stripe we're talking about, so it should read “Neglect: Maybe if we starve the customer to death they'll stop bugging us.” They are the “food”, the connection to incoming nutrition in the form of revenue.
iKlsR
FWIW, while limited to a subset of technical issues and not for the majority of "support cases" their developer support on Discord has been excellent as I've used it several times. Someone immediately takes a look at your issue, if they have to leave they handoff to someone else and they are very thorough.

> Discord

taf2
A customer once told me… “no one grew up hoping to one day be a customer service agent.” That is the reality and I’d add no one in an engineering or product roll is excited to work on or help solve the really boring hard problems… so we are left with the reality of either a product and the processes to support it are easy enough to understand and the number of potential gotchas are low enough that the need to have human interaction at scale need not be necessary.
Mandatum
> 90% of requests are met with a subtle RTFM!

If you can answer 90% of requests by RTFM, you really should RTFM.

MereInterest
There's two types of documentation. In one, the semantics of a method allow more than one reasonable implementation. For example, if a "sqrt" function receives a negative number, it would be reasonable for it to return NaN, to throw an exception, to return a maybe monad, etc. The user has a question about the implementation, and goes to the manual to figure it out.

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.

mr_throw_89 (dead)

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