Comment by h8trswana8 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by h8trswana8 | Hacker News Reader

Stripe may have a billion dollar valuation, but their support process is still very immature.

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.

(I work at Stripe.) Yeah, you're right: we've had some scaling troubles with support in the past. The root cause is basically what Matt's post points toward: our userbase exploded. Our investment in support didn't even come close to keeping up. Long-term, it's critical that our support is not just adequate but excellent, and as a result fixing it has been one of our top priorities.

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.

I can say that my last few tickets have been faster than normal, definitely not 3 hours though. And currently I have an issue open since Friday

Hm, the case I saw looks like it's been totally solved, but feel free to forward it to me directly -- would like to check into it. (And thanks for all your help on IRC!)

When can I expect to be able to have my completely China based business use stripe? I love that alipay can be integrated seemlessly but I really don't have any reason to pay to convert to USD only to pay again to move my money back to RMB.

I've heard similar issues with startups I work with in SE Asia and East Africa. In a similar vein to the Alipay integration you mention, I was also recently meeting with a handful of startups in Nairobi, and we were discussing how an integration with M-Pesa would be awesome, in particular as Safaricom recently opened up their API.

You don't have phone support? Madness. Charge for it if you want to discourage use - premium rate number, per-incident charge, whatever - but there should be a turnaround of more like 5 minutes for the case of "I can't take any payments!"

My team received similar support recently.

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.

Hey, sorry you had a bad experience. We have a dedicated support team that helps with the majority of questions.

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!

We were informed that it was common and no trouble for you to accept a dataset and handle the import into your system.

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.

> I'm not kidding. They believe it keeps everyone grounded or keeps everyone familiar with the product or some other malarkey.

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.

As a data point, or startup works with a variety of payment processors in Europe (in addition to credit cards and PayPal we accept back transfers, prepaid, POS cash, SMS, phone, etc), and to date I have yet to find a company in this sector that doesn't have slow, atrocious and unreliable support. Even if you carefully craft extremely simple one line emails to help them read and process them faster, you are still going to get the lowest amount of effort possible consistently; let alone discussing something complex. And good luck if something crashes on weekend.

We're UK based and we use PayPoint (we were originally SecPay customers, and SecPay got bought by PayPoint). On the whole I've found their support pretty good, I usually ping them an email which raises a support ticket automatically then follow up by calling them if it's a show stopper issue.

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.

What kind of payment issues do you encounter?

As along as enough customers are happy with the service as-is, their business will continue to do well.

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