One year in #stripe
mattarkin.com
mattarkin.com
You have two choices: 1) go to IRC, where they only answer technical integration questions, or 2) firing an email into the black hole that is support@stripe.com, and crossing your fingers that someone will respond within 2-5 days.
We've been burned several times by how slow they are to fix payment problems. You send an email to support@stripe.com, and then the waiting begins.
For a service that is critical to the day-to-day functioning of a small business, their support process is unacceptable. When a critical payment issue arises, there is no phone number to call and no ticket escalation process to let you know that your issue is being worked on. We finally moved off Stripe because their support process added too much risk to our business.
I know Stripe gets a lot of love from this community. But these SV businesses need to learn that customer experience goes deeper than having a flashy UI and easy-to-read integration docs.
Want to know why their support sucks? Everyone in the company is on rotating support desk duty.
I'm not kidding. They believe it keeps everyone grounded or keeps everyone familiar with the product or some other malarkey.
Once I read into that a bit more their support delays, lost emails, and shoddy advice all made a lot more sense.
Like you say, folks from throughout the company do answer support questions directly too sometimes. The most common case for this is engineers that help out with products they just launched. They have the best answers and can make changes to the product directly in response to feedback; we've found the support quality there is really good.
I'd like to learn more about where we fell short in your case. Could you forward any of the emails to me at michael@stripe.com? And if you have any other thoughts—about this or Stripe as a whole—I'd love to hear them as well!
Upon pulling that dataset and waiting on several multi-day delays we were told that, oh, you don't do that in our case and that most clients just did it themselves over an API. Which we then did internally as a last minute item on a very tight, very big deadline. Just the sort of thing that's fun to do with client credit card data.
Past that I'm not interested in giving out any more info about my company.
EDIT: Wow. Sure am glad that I bothered to type up an honest answer.
This is a good idea and I'd recommend it. Perhaps not as a mandatory forced rotation, but as something that everyone on a team is encouraged to contribute to.
Understanding the customer experience, and their problems and day-to-day frustration, are extremely valuable for informing product development and business priorities generally. That said, if software engineers are doing it and it's not their primary job function, then I'd suggest that only where there's no SLA. Full time support is probably necessary for things that have an SLA (probably only an unpaid forums / IRC type of thing). Meeting a fast SLA while giving high quality responses is difficult, especially under high growth, and requires the attention of dedicated people who can be measured on it.
But yes I've found involvement in the day to day customer experience to be beneficial and enlightening even for roles that don't directly interact with customers routinely. It helps you understand your customers. The best team will be one where everyone has a connection to and understands the customers, their problems, how the business helps them, and where it can improve.
Our support is actually quite fast these days; we completely answer most questions in under 3 hours now. We just launched our chat beta for account questions this week, so you can ask urgent questions without figuring out IRC or hopping over to email, and we're experimenting with things like phone support and help right inside your dashboard.
We're going to keep working on this. Feel free to email me at michael@stripe.com if you've any follow up questions.
Back in the day when they were SecPay, they rolled out 3D secure but it wasn't usable for automated repeat transactions. I explained the problem and they fixed the issue in around two weeks.
But really, someone at Stripe should cut him a check. I've always thought markin was part of the Stripe team. The IRC room is pretty much the closest thing to support that Stripe has (still no public phone number, ticket system?), and he's the lifeblood of it.
This is IRC though, so I guess the average message would take more like ~seconds to compose. Not counting "research" etc.
You sound like my grandparents. "What's hard about your work, you just type on the computer all day!" they say. The easy part is typing. The hard part is knowing which keys to press.
And I understand the mechanics, I just think it was worded in a way where it sounded like he clocked the actual writing of messages, and doing that 1 minute per message would be a lot.
The naive interpretation would be that people using stripe with a python codebase in general need less technical support with the integration.
The Stripe Python library + Stripe's API docs are pretty good, and never really had any issues on that level.