An Uber support experience | Hacker News Reader

An Uber support experience

krisprice.nz

38 pointserentz39 comments

My guess is that the OPs email address soft-bounced 3 times and was added to Uber's suppression list within their sendgrid account (they are a sendgrid customer).

There's probably no way for Uber support to see what's happening in their sendgrid account and this was probably failing silently. Uber's app was attempting to send the password reset email, but your email was on the suppression list and delivery was stopped before it was attempted.

This is probably accurate. We had a similar situation occur frequently on our platform and fortunately Mandrill has awesome built-in support for ensuring your support team never does this to anyone. Read the article here: http://blog.mandrill.com/email-as-a-service-as-a-service.htm...

This is most likely the case. We're using Mandrill and while rare, real emails sometimes bounce and get into the blacklist. Out technical support team has access though, so those issues get resolved within our standard response window (< an hour).

I had this exact same issue, and I was using a gmail address. This occurred multiple times for me.

Why would you go to such lengths to patronize a business like this? Sticking by them in the face of such poor service just reaffirms their customer service practices.

Uber is effectively a monopoly in many markets. And as a secondary benefit the OP produced a blog post that we found interesting.

I would have gone to such lengths as well - beats being berated by taxi drivers for taking short trips.

In SF, Uber drivers are virtually indistinguishable from taxi drivers.

Except for being easy to hail, guaranteed to take card, and have easily accessible online receipts. So easily distinguishable.

I wasn't clearly enough distinguishing the drivers and the service: in their parking and driving. Thought I did have an Uber driver who had their seat slung so far back and low that my girlfriend and I had to sit on the same side of the back seat.

That doesn't make any sense. Uber drivers know where you want to go before they even accept the fare, don't they?

No, they don't. Even if you enter your destination, it isn't shown to them until they swipe to accept your ride.

I agree.

In the east bay the taxi experience is terrible, though.

In the sense that both drive cars, perhaps.

In the sense that they never fucking come, taxis are nothing at all like Uber.

I got semi screwed by uber support once before I even used it.

I signed up for an account a while ago and had the app installed. Never used it. I start getting notifications of me having placed orders and getting picked up in an entirely different continent. I contact uber. They say that there was some fraud across a number of accounts and cancelled the payments.

Then coming back from the airport, I had planned to try uber for the first time and use my $20 coupon to get home. I was unable to place an order because all of my payment methods reported errors and I was told to reenter credit card details, even for Google wallet. Like the author in this article, I tried calling support but was unable to find a number. I ended up having to take a $130 taxi rather than a $40-50 uber home and it took quite a while to contact them (I'm still unsure my account is usable).

Pro tip when dealing with this level of ineptitude is to cold email a few execs (guess their email from linkedin). Normally the problem will filter down to someone with the intelligence to calmly read through the thread and diagnose the issue. Frontline support at many customer facing SV companies are not correctly trained to escalate and technically troubleshoot. Developer support tends to be a lot better.

This is a time-honored technique. Consumerist coined the term "Executive Email Carpet Bomb." http://consumerist.com/2007/05/11/how-to-launch-an-executive...

This tip is the equivalent to "Dial 0 when you reach an IVR." Having been in Support in the past I can tell you there is nothing worse than having someone email some random Exec because you're not getting anywhere with Support. While I'm not trying to defend what happened here, I can certainly empathize. I liken to someone who has worked as a Waiter/Waitress. When they go to a restaurant they'll have more empathy for someone than someone that hasn't done that job. But yeah, they should have noticed what the problem was in a better way and, if things were escalating, either pass it off to someone else or let their Manager know things we getting heated.

If you really want a "pro tip" about Support, ask your Rep to inform their Manager. If things aren't going well you have every right to keep going up the chain of command. If that doesn't work, keep going. Somehow you'll reach the right Exec instead of just guessing.

This is how not to do customer support. I remember when I was trying to get Facebook disconnected from my Spotify account, 3 different support agents asked me if I wanted to have all my old playlists and stuff transferred. After the third person I just gave up and created a new email address to create a new account.

I guess the new web doesn't care about paying customers anymore.

Recently moved from android to iOS and faced the same problem. There's Lyft where I live, so I ended up just deleting Uber.

What do you expect? Uber has no way to authenticate you if email doesn't work.

Is Uber, by any chance, using "constantcontact.com" ("With Constant Contact, you can create effective email marketing...") for transaction emails? That's a terrible mistake, because they're basically a spammer and get blocked or opted-out. Bay Area FasTrak uses them for billing email, which causes some problems. An opt-out for all of Constant Contact will cause email sent through them to fail before it hits your own mail system.

What do you expect? Uber has no way to authenticate you if email doesn't work.

Technically they do - they could send an SMS to the registered number, which as OP points out, is unique.

There's also more than just phone. Could use the full credit card #. They can also send the device a push notification with a security token and have the user reset password with it in lieu of an email based token.

Could use the full credit card #.

I doubt they're storing that.

You're likely right, but they could always get crafty with Braintree APIs: https://developers.braintreepayments.com/ios+ruby/reference/...

They have multiple methods. For instance they can use the SMS, charge the card on file with a token amount or just send a letter.

it would actually be faster to manually send the reset link. this is a case of premature optimization in companies.

They probably have no way to manually generate a reset link.

Allow support staff to get reset links would be a huge security problem. You're basically giving your support staff unchecked access to anyone's account.

Uber is the Comcast of app companies. A profit first, customers second, and employees third service.

Sounds like Uber needs to write more integration tests.

Another takeaway: all that raised capital and Uber can't open a call center in middle America?

Gmail logs?

I would have given up after the second canned response and just switched to Lyft. Why are you so insistent to use a company that treats you that way and is showing very little technical prowess?

From the domain and other posts, OP probably lives in New Zealand, where Lyft doesn't operate.

Sounds like a market ripe for disruption.

I have had similar experiences with Lyft customer support. Customer accounts being in weird states is a corner case that these services simply don't handle well right now. (It takes many eng-years to build out automated and manual review systems for all of these things; Facebook/Google/Microsoft/Twitter have a lot of engineers on it.)

Uber doesn't have the money or engineers to do this? We have a market cap 1/100th the size of Uber and a tiny fraction of their engineers, yet we still have this. It's just a matter of how much you want to invest on customer experience and support.

I'm sure the Uber fanboys/employees will downvote this comment, too. I really wish HN had better "karma" detection for this sort of thing.

They probably have engineers working on this, but it's also growing like crazy. Since they've basically tripled in the past year in every metric, I bet the majority of engineers there have been there for less than a year.

Also making anything has a time cost that you cannot shorten too quickly without consequences. Systems also start breaking down as you start getting larger, and you have to start inventing your own crap. There is a reason why everything is custom at Google/Facebook scale.

It's the same reason why Apple says 'we dont have the engineering resources to do that right now'. It's not money, but time, skilled people, scale, and engineers familiar with your codebase and system. The bigger you get, the more work it is to integrate into a system, and the amount of work required multiplies continuously.

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